Discovering Purpose
Your sense of purpose steers how you want your story in work and in life to unfold. When you are clear on your personal purpose, life and work feel a lot clearer and motivation is far easier to tap into.
Knowing your life’s purpose, brought to life by the things you do (your missions) can be one of life’s most powerful tools.
Language is our basis for understanding the world and how it works
There’s two forms of language: our inner language and our outer language. Imagine if you weren’t able to use words, you essentially wouldn’t be able to think, and process the world, perhaps like an animal, you would simply act, without thought. Life would be very different, simply living on and by our instincts.
As human beings, we are the only species proven to have Metacognition, the ability to think about the way we think.
Metacognition = Thinking about how we think
Metacognition is the ability to examine how you process thoughts and feelings. This ability encourages us to understand how we learn best. When we understand how we learn we are able to set ourselves up for success. As if we empower ourselves with the ability to learn, we have the ability to achieve our own potential. As our limitations begin to fall away.
Thinking about how we think enables us to develop self-awareness skills that become important as we progress through life. People who have developed metacognition are able to assess their thought processes and reframe the way they think to adapt to new situations.
What we find interesting is that so often as humans, we don’t use this superpower to improve our lives. Most often we are so busy doing that we don’t take the time to reflect or think about how we think. Many of us don’t even know we have this superpower.
When you don’t take the time to think about the way you think and channel your thoughts, you are essentially living in instinct, or reaction, rather than in a space that is conducive to what you really want out of life or living on purpose.
What is re-activity?
When we simply act, without directed thought, we are allowing our minds and our bodies to be living on auto-pilot, based on our previous understanding of the world and how things work. As you’ll soon learn, this can be productive or every counterproductive to what we truly want out of life or work.
When we are off purpose, we are stuck, living in groundhog day. Our energy is drained, and we often don’t have the motivational force, driving us to make a change that supports us.
Living on purpose means taking charge of the way we live our lives and conduct our work, in ways that support us, not drain us. Living off purpose feels like:
- Days and weeks so busy, you can hardly think about what is important in your life.
- Catching yourself, thinking that there is something more you could be doing in your life.
- Live up to other people’s expectations and wonder where you come in. (consider your parents, partners, siblings, teachers, mentors)
- Feeling pulled in a thousand different directions and not being happy with any of them really.
- Finding it difficult to make decisions ‘yes or no’ around opportunities, projects or work-related jobs as you’re just not sure, you don’t want to miss out on something!
- Exchanging your time for a monetary reward/paycheque
- Feel overwhelmed with busyness or work
- A sense of hopelessness in your life
- Feeling alone, lonely and unloved often
- Wanting to make plans but not really having a clear direction.
These statements were adapted from Edward Gifford’s book, Broken to Whole Again.