My 'Living with Purpose' 365 Instagram Experiment

It’s the end of the Mental Health Foundation’s National Mental Health Week 13 – 19 May 2019. Weeks like this enable us to shine a light and some focus on key issues and provide us with permissions, inspiration and tools to enable us to help ourselves and others on a daily basis to optimise our health. 

"I am a human being note a human doing" - Kurt Vonnegut

Last year, after reading ‘How to lead a quest’ on holiday by Jason Fox, I was determined to choose for myself a word for the year, rather than a resolution. I had started the year feeling the need to re-set and re-evaluate the way I was engaging with and experiencing every day life. Forever living in the future and serving to my commitments, I was not experiencing joy and appreciation and rather ‘getting through’ and screeching to the next holiday with a schedule of ‘achievements’ to show for it when I arrived for my week’s break from my life. The word I chose for 2018 was ‘RESTORE’.

Amongst various other aspects of my life that I focussed on including physical movement, eating well and restorative sleep and rest, I wanted to really examine my purpose. Literally … what is the point? I don’t mind doing anything, rolling up my sleeves and putting my shoulder to the wheel if there is a point to it. In his recently published book ‘The Stress Solution’ Dr Rangan Chaterjee states “I’d even go so far as to say that the single best way of living a calmer, happier life is to do it with a strong sense of purpose”. 

I am aware of my purpose. 

For fulfilment I am energised and engaged by the belief that every single person has the potential to contribute and finding their unique capability, passion and ensuring there are the conditions for individuals and teams to thrive is my genuine interest. In order to do that well I also have to live by those principles (hence ‘Restore’).   

Making the Change 

So in addition to the many other changes I have been testing and experimenting with, I decided to set myself a 365 day Instagram Challenge based on living with purpose (@paula._.leach / #yearofdailyintention). March 26 2019 was a good day to start. I was leaving one job and embarking on a new professional challenge. I made a commitment to myself to post at least one picture per day which was a demonstration to me that I was living my purpose. The plan being that I would create for myself a visual library over the course of a year, which would help me to literally see how living with purpose showed up in my life.   

I have no other objective than this. I am not chasing followers, I am not judging myself and I am certainly no photographer! But what it is doing for me is centering me every day with the question …’what is the point?’ and enabling me to find joy in that purpose by stopping to appreciate it. Instagram works for me not only because I am a visual person, but because neuroscience tells us that visual images are more powerful than words when setting and reinforcing intention. (Tara Stewart’s recently published book ‘The Source’ is filled with scientific evidence of the power of visualisation).   

Check in  

I am just a few weeks into this experiment. I’m enjoying learning to use social media, I am enjoying checking in with myself as to ‘the point’ every day. At the end of a year maybe I will learn something more deep and reflective than this, maybe I may change more practices, maybe I will be relieved it is over and it’s one less thing to have to do every day! I have no idea. But for now, I am thinking about it as building muscles and strength for my mental health just as I may practice yoga or HIIT training to build strength for my physical body.   

We all have mental health. If we are fortunate enough not to be challenged by mental illness, consciously taking care of ourselves enables us to have the best opportunity to thrive and therefore contribute in our world. And the word for 2019? ‘RISE’.