If you’re wondering how to find your purpose, you are in the absolute best spot you could possibly be in.
You can’t get a degree in this stuff, but I’ve done it all. I went through confusion, depression, and feeling lost…
…I went through the lack of clarity, not understanding if there was more to life, feeling crazy thinking I had some unique destiny that was different than what I was currently doing.
I already know how to navigate through those transformative changes that life throws us into, blind, deaf and dumb…because that’s how it feels.
You can’t see where you’re going, you can’t listen to people anymore ‘cus they’re just not speaking the same language you are…you can’t talk to them.
It sucks.
I can show you how to know yourself, how to make your mark on the world, and how to figure out a way to make money doing it.
Let’s begin…
Phase 1: Daydreaming
The first step that everyone goes through when it’s time to find your purpose is the day dreaming phase. For me, it was the golden era of YouTube ads where everyone was selling the get rich with an online business course. Whether they were for real or scamming people, it was just enough to wet my appetite.
Essentially, the day dreaming phase is when you go through your normal daily routine imagining what life could be like if things were different.
- It’s an effortless imagining that might even seem playful
- You don’t attach any responsibility to it
- You might even decide “but that’ll never happen” when you’re finished
Regardless of how it manifests for you, the first inklings of a better life are surfacing in your heart during this phase.
What you might not realize, is that these whimsical imaginings are desires manifesting from your true potential.
Phase 2: Yearning
The second phase you’ll go through when it’s time to find your purpose is the yearning phase. This is basically an increase of the previous phase; the vision used to be fleeting, but now they’re constant.
You’re really dreaming about this stuff at this point. It’s starting to become a constant part of your life and you find yourself mentally preoccupied with it.
Imagining this dream feels good, because it’s a better life, and it’s a life you’re meant to live. Humans are not meant to remain stagnant forever, and when the time comes for change, you almost feel like you’re walking around in clothes too small for you.
The live you’re living is getting the job done, but it’s too small so it’s uncomfortable.
This new life you have in your mind all day is big though. It’s accommodating, and it feels really good. So, naturally, you stay there thinking about it.
Phase 3: Active Searching
In the third phase, you start googling things. You might ask questions about how to do it, how to achieve it. You might order some books on it.
One really common thing about this phase is the idea of a vision board. People often take pictures from the internet of money, or a bigger house, or a partner they find attractive and make that the background of their PC.
You might watch videos where others are doing “it” (whatever your it happens to be), where they’re living out the life you want, and because of how much time you spend immersed in thinking and feeling this new reality, you become attached to it.
Whatever your particular method happens to be, you’ll start compiling information from the internet or other places on how it’s done, where it’s done, who’s doing it etc…
In the case of creating an online business (which is a super popular dream for people) you might finally take that facebook/youtube ad’s offer and download the free thing or pay for the course that teaches you how.
Phase 4: Hot and Cold
When it’s finally time for you to find your purpose, there will always be a period of inconsistency. For whatever reason.
You might lack faith, have limiting beliefs, not have the money to launch, not believe it’s even possible, have children and a job that interferes, or you might believe others when they say its not possible and to just give up.
Your old life and what kept you safe there will tug on you with more intensity than your future will pull you in when you’re beginning. That’s just how it goes.
This type of inconsistency happens every single time a human tries to make a change, especially a huge one.
The key to this phase is practice. Get back up when you fail. Everytime you choose netflix over doing that two hours of daily work on this dream, feel bad about it the next day and let that shame and guilt propel you toward how you know you need to live.
Basically, in order to accomplish anything in life, you need to match the dream you have vibrationally and practically.
So behaving how you’re supposed to is important. But you will experience some discomfort in the beginning. Don’t worry about that. Just plow through it.
Eventually you’ll get used to the new routines and it will become part of your identity. Then the new routine will be as easy as any other routine you have.
Phase 5: Seriously, how do people do this!?
The problem with the previous phase is that there’s a large chance that you’ll lack the clarity required to truly isolate and optimize “new life.”
If I had to explain that another way: you might have been dreaming about something but not truly understand why.
Just because a change needs to be made in your life doesn’t necessarily mean that the first thing that comes to mind is right for you. It might be better, but too often people find themselves in circumstances where they put in so much effort to change directions but something is still missing.
So you might be wondering, how do people actually do this? It’s all over the internet. People everywhere are talking about “find your purpose‘ “live your destiny” and “have impact”, but what is the actual process they use to achieve that?
You can follow whatever whims your imagination sends your way, and you might end up where you’re meant to be, but a truly optimized life (a life that is perfectly and uniquely designed for you ONLY) requires much more careful thought than just saying “i need a change in life, It’d be nice if I had more money‘.
Maybe it’s because this is how it played out for me, but when this happened in my life back in 2016, I KNEW I wanted to make money online. I wanted to read books and make info products that helped people…but there are a million ways to do that. So which one was right for me?
See what I’m saying.
Honestly, there are a million ways people find out what they’re truly meant to be doing in life. You can search each one, read all the material and still be confused.
I know I was. The information is out there, but where is the system that you can use, one step after the other, to arrive and the most solid path forward for you individually.
I’m gonna tell you about each of those systems, the most popular, the most used, the most ancient etc…but first I want to let you know that I’ve already put them all together in perfect order so you don’t have to.
When I went through this, I was experiencing the very same confusion you are.
Big dreams, but a lack of clarity.
So much heart and intuition but I just needed some specific details to guide me in the right direction. Our intuition, after all, can be strong but it doesn’t speak English (or whatever language you happen to speak. Hopefully it’s this one or I don’t know what you think you’re reading! 🙂 ).
YOU NEED A SYSTEM, a formula that will take you step by step, one after the other. You need a program you can easily follow that will allow you to know yourself deeply, isolate your perfect niche and your zone of brilliance such that you can serve the world, get paid to do so (if you want) and safely move into the next, more abundant phase of your life.
I created Visionary Confidence (a proven how to find your purpose system) to help you do that.
I literally took the essential aspects of every major life purpose system and combined them in a simple to use formula that will help you find your purpose and finally feel the exhilaration that comes with knowing you’re about to finally live pass all the tests life had for you, and move into a much more fitting and satisfying phase of life!
Now, as promised, I’ll tell you about the most common methods everyone tells you to use when you wanna find your purpose.
The Simon Sinek Approach
Simon Sinek is famous for telling people to “have a strong why”. His TED talk where he draws concentric circles illustrating why people buy into companies illustrates the purpose driven spirit of human beings, even when we’re just buying something.
He made it so famous that toilet paper companies started putting “Our mission‘ tabs on their websites, where you can read about how they just couldn’t stand that anyone in the world have a dirty butt, and their mission is now to put a clean ass in every pot!
Needless to say, it was the most famous buzzword in personal development for years.
What does this mean for you? He has another video for individuals with probably the simplest way to find your purpose that’s ever been invented.
He tells people to go ask one of your friends why your friends. In the first round, they’ll describe what they like about it, but eventually when you keep pressing, they’ll start to describe themselves and tell you what you offer them and how that has helped them grow into a better person during the course of your relationship.
They’ll start describing to you what YOU offer them and how you improve their lives.
You can also reverse this and just mentally pick one of your friends and ask yourself the same question. Why are you and this person friends?
When I did this with a friend of mine, I realized that he’s been my friend since highschool, throughout college, during my tenure at the monastery, afterward and all the way up until now. He was there for me during all the periods of my life where I didn’t know who I was or what I should be doing. I was lost, and he was a friend while I was lost.
It became clear to me then that a huge part of my purpose was to help others who are also lost find who they are and pursue more meaningful lives…but I already knew that so it basically reinforced the idea.
That very purpose of mine is the only reason you’re even reading this right now.
So if you want to use this method, sit and think about some of your close friends and think deeply about what they offer you. It’s not about feeling like you’re using your friends, but relationships offer us all something we need or like. What do they offer? This can end up showing you what you need from others, what struggles you’ve gone through, what voids in your life they fill and how you can use that pain to serve people.
Very powerful “find your purpose” method.
Find your purpose in Astrology
Classic north and south node stuff. Go to a site that will give you an accurate and free natal chart. When you’re done look at your north and south node. Simplistically, your south node represents where you’ve been and you’re north node represents where you’re going.
North Node:
- Represents your growth in this lifetime.
- Shows the lessons and experiences one needs to embrace to fulfill their destiny.
- Highlights qualities, traits, and activities you need to develop to reach your full potential.
- Often associated with our aspirations and the direction we should move towards in life.
- Shows areas where we may face challenges but also opportunities for growth and fulfillment.
South Node:
- Represents past karma, experiences, and skills brought from previous lifetimes.
- comfort zones, tendencies, and patterns that may stunt growth in this lifetime.
- areas where we may have already mastered skills but need to transcend to evolve.
- Shows whatever habits we have to rely too much on familiar behaviors or resist new experiences.
To find your purpose using this method, balance the energy and meaning of your north and south nodes. Integrate them so they work well with each other.
For example: if your south node is in leo and your north in Aquarius, maybe its time for you to live a lifetime of selflessness rather than being the selfish lord that everyone serves. Maybe you pursue a purpose in technology that free’s others, rather than using it for your own personal gain like you’ve done in previous lifetimes.
My personal recommendation would be to use this method in conjunction with other methods. On its own it seems to fall short for most people that I work with.
Religion and Spirituality
Some people solely follow or integrate some form of religious and spiritual purpose. Including but not limited to:
- Serving and worshiping your deities
- Sannyasa – or traveling and preaching about God and Spiritual practice, or being a renunciate in general
- Being a yoga teacher
- Running an ashram
- Pursuing your own enlightenment
- Being a law of attraction teacher or guide
- Having your own ministry
- Helping others in your faith or tradition live better lives
- Following moral and ethical principles in general
- Seeking enlightenment and salvation
- Practice compassion and altruism
- Follow some divine destiny or calling
- Spread faith and share wisdom
- Be an educator in a specific spiritual discipline
- Grow communities and fellowships
- Show others how to honor spiritual traditions
- Support those who’ve dedicated their lives to spiritual practice, such as monastery’s, convents and monks (I do this one)
Find your purpose by aligning experience, skills and knowledge
Take out a sheet of paper, or use a google doc, word doc etc…and write down in a bullet list form all the knowledge you have in excess.
Do the same with all the experiences you’re skilled with guiding others through.
Do the same with skills you think others would pay for.
Your list might look something like this:
- Creating excel spreadsheets quickly and analyzing massive amounts of data
- Fixing computers
- Building websites
- Handling toxic family members
- Living on a budget
- Fixing motorcycles
- How i figured out to not arrive at work tired all the time
- Being a camp counselor for a decade
- Running the data analysis department for political campaigns.
Make the list as big as you can. Nothing is too small or trivial to put on the list. If you used to groom dogs at Petsmart, put it on there.
Now look at your list and create four more lists: which of these are people willing to pay for, Which of these are desperately needed, Which of these do I enjoy doing the most, Which of these do I feel confident that with practice I could be better than the bottom 99%
Now you have some initial ideas for Who you can serve, doing what, how to make money from it and enjoy yourself.
Bravo!
Know yourself better through personality tests
Regardless of what method(s) you use to find your purpose, a part of that will be knowing yourself on a very deep level. You want to have an intimate connection with your own self so you can be loyal to your wants, needs and values.
The best personality tests will tell you:
- Behavior tendencies
- Strengths and weaknesses
- Natural skills and methods for achieving results
- How you interact with others
- Communication styles
- Blind spots in your psyche and perception
- What type of environments you like
- What type of interactions and people you like or don’t like.
- Where you’ll fall short in life if you don’t acquire the skills
In other words, to live your purpose you need to know everything you bring to the table. You want to know what helps you and hinders you in your progress so you can build on strengths and mitigate weaknesses.
Going through life blind as to who you are is a fool’s game. Doesn’t work.
Some of the most popular personality tests right now are:
- The Hexaco Inventory
- Minnesota Multiphasic Personality Inventory (MMPI)
- Big Five Personality Test (Five Factor Model)
- DISC Assessment
- The Dark Triad Test
- StrengthsFinder
- Enneagram
- Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) – widely seen as as a starting point
Personal Vision Statements and Personal Mission Statements
There’s really not a lot to say here. This is popular for people who want a change of purpose in their career. They’ll decide that they will live their life accomplishing several missions based on one grand vision that guides them.
There are personal vision and mission statement generators.
There are formulas for how to write them.
Essentially what you’re doing is deciding what you think the world should look like when you’re done serving and fixing it (vision) and then decide what individual ways that will happen (goals) and all those goals will be missions that you’re on in life.
You might decide that the world would be a better place if children’s education were taken more seriously. Not a bad vision for the world considering children can be taught much more from ages zero to seven than how to stack blocks and “share”.
So you go on a mission to educate elementary and primary school systems on how to optimize the years where children are young, easily programmed and therefore can learn much more than what is currently being provided.
You could even create programs or write books for parents called “How to make your child superhuman by 7 years old” that shows them how to teach their child 5 languages, all the self help info they’ll ever need etc…
In twenty years you’ve created a generation of ubermensch children, and you did so by going on three different missions.
See how that works?
Trusting your intuition (even if people tell you not to)
Some people equate instinct with intuition – they’re wrong. Some people say your intuition can be wrong sometimes – they’re wrong. People say a lot of nonsense crap about the intuitive faculties of human beings and most of them don’t know what they’re talking about.
To be fair to them, most of the people they’re condescending towards don’t know either.
When I say intuition, I’m talking about messages that come from a place not subject to the flaws in normal human perception. They can come directly from God or other divine beings, they can be a compilation of prompts you receive from centers of higher consciousness (if you’re skilled in those areas), and they can also be just inner knowings you were born with and are meant to surface at a particular time.
Regardless of whatever dismissive arguments anyone has against the idea of intuition, it’s very common for humans to feel that they know something so deeply that they’re willing to ignore facts, data, and danger. Whatever causes that is a force to be reckoned with. Oftentimes their right.
You can definitely misinterpret intuitive messages if you’re not properly aligned, but that’s not the same as your intuition being wrong. When you live a life following your intuition against all better judgment, it will lead you on a roller coaster ride where it transforms into an annoying little voice into your best friend.
Mine is never wrong, and if you hone your skill of tuning in and listening, eventually, yours won’t be either.
If you don’t already feel like you have been receiving intuitive messages, this might be a method to accompany other methods rather than being the main one you use.
Pursuing your passions and monetizing them
When I bought my first blogging course back in 2017, the course creators said they were initially jolted out of their own limiting beliefs when they realized that there was a guide making six figures a year blogging about wild edibles.
He was literally just selling info products and blogging about how people could go into their back yard and pick dandelions and ramps. Wild onions this, marigolds are medicinal…You get it.
$100k/year is not a small amount of money. It’s a life changing income for 99% of the world. It was his passion, so he did it, and people pay him for it. Wild.
The course creators basically said “if he can do this, we can do what we’re trying to do.”
Try and monetize your passion if you can. It might not work, or it may be impractical, but at least try. An 8 x 11 sheet of paper full of ideas doesn’t take that much time or effort. Sit down with a notebook and prove to yourself that something is impossible before you just decide it’s not gonna work without even trying.
You owe yourself at least that much.
Honoring your values and your elders
Brian Tracy, in his work The Power of Clarity talks about understanding our purpose by understanding what would make our parents proud.
If you don’t have a good relationship with your parents, than whoever you consider to be your wise elders that guide you through life can take your parents place for now.
If you don’t feel like you have anybody you look up to, then go watch some Marvel movies, read some fantasy books or comics and find a super hero you admire. Then ask yourself why you admire that person and what they would be proud to see you accomplish if they were real.
I always wanted to be Batman. Smart, rich, awesome toys and helps people? 🙂 I’m batman. Ironman works to.
What problem is your job to fix?
Tai Lopez once told a story about being lost as a kid, not having a father (I know the feeling) and noticing that the answers were nowhere to be found. His focus on mentors was not as commonplace back then. Nobody was giving the secrets of how to live a good life on YouTube and if you didn’t know someone who knew, you just didn’t know.
He decided that he was destined to fill that gap and make sure nobody else had to live through life wondering who had the answers and where they were.
What are you struggling to find in life? Once you find it, you can show others the way.
Ikigai
Chances are you’ve heard of the “Japanese formula for living a wonderful life‘. First, I have a post about ikigai that you can read. Second, it’s a much more peaceful and aligned find your purpose method. No wasted energy. Nothing that doesnt belong.
The method is the intersection of your passions, what you do to make money, what mission you’re on and your top most skills.
The Japanese want you to find something the world needs and provide it, with a skill that you’re top 1% at, in such a way that you make a living from doing so and be passionate about this combination.
If I had to give you an example…maybe you’re a skilled writer, and the world needs ideas for how to live better, you decide to blog on the internet about those ideas and when you do, you really enjoy it and lose track of time.
I basically just described myself. Either way, it works.
When these four elements overlap, they form the ikigai – the sweet spot where passion, mission, vocation, and profession converge.
Eulerian destiny
This is one of the more practical methods to help you find your purpose because it takes into account your past and present programming.
When you use the eulerian destiny method you’re examining four factors: what you’ve been doing with your life for the past 10 years, what things were prominent in your life as a child, what strangers say about you constantly and what you can talk about with ease and passion.
(1) What you grew up around: my dad was really good with technology, so as a child I was around it constantly. As an adult, I notice that I move through more easily than the average person.
(2) you can talk about forever: a passion of yours definitely should be considered. So called purpose experts are always saying stupid crap like “fuck your passion” (just edgy marketing they want to look different) but the reality is there’s no reason not to take a moment and ask yourself whether or not you would enjoy living a life serving others with something you’re really into. If you can monetize it, even better.
(3) What do strangers say about you? What do they say about you a lot. Nobody perceives anything with 100% accuracy, but what others say about you is much more telling than what you think about yourself, especially in a position (like the one you’re in right now) where you probably don’t have any self clarity as to who you truly are.
(4) What have you been doing for the last decade? Those are skills and experiences you bring to the table. You’ve acquired skills, techniques, methods and accumulated ten years of data. It’s wise to use it when defining your next move. In other words, just because a change needs to be made, doesn’t mean you need to start over.
Draw four circles (two venn diagrams one on top of the other so they intersect) and write down what you can for these four topics in each circle. Then see where they intersect or how you could combine elements that work.
Make a concrete plan! Proven formula & Meaningful Goals
Now that you’ve selected which method you’ll use to find your purpose it’s time for you to set the goals to achieve it.
If you’re like me when I found all this out, even though the methods above are described in detail, understanding which one is best for you is nearly impossible to figure out on your own.
Which one is best for your particular purpose? Some might have jumped out at you, but once you’ve decided how do you go about using it?
It’s all just a jumbled mess of confusion.
This is why I created Visionary Confidence, my flagship program on how to find your purpose and achieve it. It’s everything you need to make important life changes without all the confusion and brain pain that comes along with not knowing what your first steps forward should be.
Check it out below if you’re interested, and good luck 🙂
