Happy New Year!
I hope you all had a wonderful holiday season spending time with those you love. I also hope you were able to get some space from your usual busy routine to relax and that you feel rejuvenated going into the new year. I love the promise that a new year brings and always enjoy coming up with my New Year’s resolutions.
If you’re currently going through this process and are looking for inspiration I’d like to share with you my biggest personal revelation of the past year – finding my true purpose.
Purpose is defined as “the reason for which something exists, is done or is made”. In other words, your true purpose is your reason for being. What it is that you were put on this earth to do. It’s a key element of your personal identity, and in my opinion, the most important element of happiness.
In 2016 I can say that I found complete happiness. I became the best version of myself. And it was all down to finding my true purpose and starting to live it every day.
Like with many of my most important life lessons, I only discovered it in the absence of it. I took a year’s sabbatical starting in August 2015 and mo
ved to Australia with my husband. It was only when I stopped working that I realized I had let my own personal identity get completely lost. Without my job I wasn’t clear on what I stood for or what my role was in the world.
Let me preface my next thought by first saying – our jobs are a very important element of our happiness. As long as man has existed community has existed, and roles within that community. Hunters, gatherers, caretakers, healers. Keepers of wisdom and ritual. This is a very important part of being part of a community. Of feeling that we are connected to something larger than ourselves. Without a formal job I felt completely adrift – as a fellow LinkedIn member so eloquently put it, “like a paper boat in a big ocean”. I realized that while working I’d spent a lot of time complaining about my job and a lot less time recognizing how much peace of mind it gave me to feel like a productive and contributing member of society.
So your job is one part of the happiness equation. It’s important to identify a sense of purpose in your work that you find meaningful and that gets you out of bed in the morning. A lot of companies, like my past employer Mars, see the value in having engaged employees and have crafted inspirational mission statements to articulate their company’s purpose. Perhaps that statement does it for you, if not then find something else that motivates you.
Now here is my second thought – having a purpose beyond your job is, I argue, even more important and the larger part of the happiness equation. If not your job will define you. Your mood and even sense of self worth will swing at the mercy of good days and bad days at the office. And if you find yourself out of work, either voluntarily or involuntarily, you will be as lost as I was. And this is not a good place to be. I realized once I took a step back from my career that I couldn’t remember a time that I had been fully happy in my job. I now know that it was because I didn’t have a strong sense of purpose outside of work. I was putting too much pressure on my job to 100% fulfil the purpose I needed from life. And this was both unfair and unrealistic.
Once I broke the cycle and found my true purpose it was like waking from a dream. I discovered that the world was a brighter, happier and more beautiful place than I had ever realized.
Every individual brings something special to this world. Something they are truly born to do, in a way that only they can. Some of us are lucky enough that this gift is something we can be paid full-time for – my husband is one of these lucky few – but many of us aren’t.
And that’s ok.
We must first find our gift, that’s the biggest challenge. If you get that far you’re already ahead of the game. The next step is simply finding ways to embrace that gift and work it into your life however you can. If eventually you are able to turn your purpose into your full-time job, that’s amazing. But I don’t think it needs to be that way in order for you to be completely happy.
And so I challenge you to make this your one and only resolution of 2017. To discover your true purpose, and if that doesn’t take you all year then to start thinking about how to live it.
I can’t tell you exactly how to find it. It is individual to everyone. And it may not be one specific job, or role, or activity. It may be a combination of things. But you’ll know when you’ve found it. My path was to leave my life behind and move halfway across the world. To strip myself down to nothing and then build myself back up from scratch into the person I’m meant to be. I don’t recommend this approach to everyone, it’s a bit more radical than you need!
But I do think you need space from your life in order to see it clearly. You need to conduct some soul-searching in a beautiful place away from your daily grind. This is an exercise in self-knowledge, so create an environment that makes you feel completely yourself – go to your ‘happy place’. And you’ll need some inspiration and expert advice, so get reading. During my personal journey my guide was The Happiness Project but there are so many great books out there that can help. There are also a lot of online resources; here are some helpful links to get you started:
Find Your True Purpose – Action for Happiness
Five Steps That Reveal Your Life’s Purpose – Psychology Today
7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose – Mark Manson
7 Steps to Finding Your True Purpose – Huffington Post
No matter what you choose as your resolution, I wish you a happy and healthy 2017!
In Search of Bliss 