Finding Your Life Purpose

It’s been quite a while since I’ve done a Facebook Live. I think I’ve done one before in my life, so, good morning everybody and this is me exploring outside my comfort zone.

But then, since my purpose is to help other people live more meaningful, purposeful lives, more joyful lives with better connection with spirit or the divine or source, whatever name you want to give to that, then me talking about purpose is definitely me being on purpose. So, here we go with the Facebook Live today.

Back in 1997-98, when I was doing my clinical depression thing, I was very much into… I believed the only thing I needed to do to get out of clinical depression was to find my purpose.

I’d had that belief for a while so I set out to find somebody who could help me with this and decided to have a breakthrough session with an NLP Teacher called David Shepherd. David was teaching me NLP anyway.

So I went for my breakthrough session and we spent about three hours together and at the end of the three hours, David asked me “So what’s your purpose?” And it came out… Teaching.

And then I nearly threw up.

Because when I was 16, my dad had taken me to one side and said, Jane, if you ever want to make any kind of money in life, don’t be a teacher and don’t be a nurse. Dad was a teacher, mum was a nurse. And when I was 17, I did a bit of teaching for my dad. He ran the British School in Rio, in Brazil so I was lucky to live there for a year.

And I LOVED it when the kids got the ah-ha’s when I was teaching something and something just landed with them. I LOVED all that. But the bit I struggled with was when needy little eight-year-olds were grabbing my legs and clinging onto my hands and I couldn’t handle that. So when I got that my purpose was teaching, I did nearly throw up.

I spent the next couple of years trying to find another purpose that wasn’t teaching because teaching didn’t suit me. But as I sat down and thought about it more, because I couldn’t find another purpose, every time I went on purpose workshops, what came up? Teaching!

So, as I thought about what I was doing, I realised that I was teaching, but it was my perception of what teaching was. My perception of teaching was you’re in a school, you’ve got kids, the primary kids, the secondary kids and that’s what teaching’s all about.

But actually what I was doing was working as a leadership and executive coach. I was doing leadership training. I was teaching in a massage school. I was teaching stress management. Everything I was doing was some kind of teaching. And when I looked back into my own history, I’d been teaching since not long after I could speak.

At primary school, at kindergarten even, my teacher in the kindergarten had me teaching other little kids who couldn’t read, how to read because I could read. So actually, teaching really is what I should be doing.

Now I’ve refined it over the years because teaching’s pretty vague in general. So it’s become more specific now.

But why is having a purpose so important?

I think there’s a couple of reasons. The first reason is motivation.

When you have a purpose, when you have a sense of something that’s bigger than you are, it gets you out of bed in the morning. It gets you up. It gets you doing stuff that you wouldn’t normally do.

For example, it’s Saturday morning and I’m doing a Facebook Live, not something that in the general scheme of things I would choose to do, but it’s part of my purpose. It’s part of my passion. So purpose helps give you motivation and get you going. It gives you focus and direction and I think most importantly, it gives you a sense of meaning.

So many of my clients, so many of the people that I meet nowadays, they don’t have a sense of meaning. They’ll tell me that something’s missing, that they can’t live their lives on purpose, they can’t find their purpose. But when you have a purpose, it gives you that sense of meaning. It helps fill in those holes of… Something’s missing. I don’t know where I’m going with my life, I don’t know what to do.

Loneliness is a big issue for a lot of people. When you’re living on purpose, it really helps solve the loneliness problem.

So there are a number of reasons why having a purpose, knowing your purpose, is so important. And for me, actually it was a big part of getting me out of depression.

So, how do you do this then?

All very well to talk about it.

One of the ways of finding your purpose is simply to reflect on what you’re passionate about. What are the big things, what are the things that really matter to you in life? What are the things that make you angry, that make you fired up, that excite you? Are any of them likely to be your purpose?

Another thing that you can do is what I had to do, which is go back in time and look at your natural talents when you were a kid. What were you great at when you were a kid? For me, it was teaching.

But often we have these talents, these things that we… they’re so natural to us, we don’t even realise that we’re doing them. We don’t even realise that we’re good at them. And it’s only when somebody else says, Wow, you’re so good at… whatever applies. You’re so good at going out and talking to people.

Apparently, I’m really good at talking to people about nothing. So hopefully that’s not what I’m doing here but apparently I’m really, really good at it. But it’s not something that I ever thought of myself at being good at. But it’s a great talent if you want to work in a hospice on the chaplaincy team, which is what I do. It helps people open up. And actually it’s not a bad talent as a coach for building rapport.

So, what are those natural, innate talents, those things that come to you so easily that you don’t even realise that they are a talent, until somebody else points it out?

Another thing with finding purpose, is there’s something that often stops us. And what stops us is almost like on a very deep unconscious, even spiritual level, we know that once we really know our purpose and engage with our purpose, we’ve got to do something about it.

And that can be scary because sometimes, very often, it means stepping out of our comfort zone. Stepping into an arena where it’s bigger than us. It’s so much more and that can be really uncomfortable.

So what do we do? We deny the fact that we’ve identified our purpose and that’s what I did for a couple of years. That wasn’t going to be my purpose, I didn’t like it, I didn’t want it. And I certainly didn’t want to have to step out of my comfort zone, I was having enough difficulty living in a comfort zone. So we deny it, we pretend it doesn’t exist.

The ancient Hawai’ians believed that when you come into this life, shortly before you come in, your soul has a conversation with a group of higher advisors, if you like, and decides what your purpose in life is going to be, coming into this life.

Some of you will subscribe to this belief, and some of you won’t. I do, it works for me. But it doesn’t matter actually whether you do believe it or whether you don’t believe it. Whichever you believe to be true, soul does do this, soul doesn’t do this, there is no soul. Whatever you believe to be true, you live your life working as if, behaving as if, it were true anyway. So it really doesn’t matter whether you believe what I’m saying is true.

But this idea that somehow when coming into this life there is some kind of notion, some kind of plan, and when we tap into that, life becomes meaningful, it becomes joyful, and it has purpose. It has a sense of what we really should be doing.

Another thing that can stop us, is our beliefs about ourselves. The beliefs that limit us. Such as… I’m not good enough. Nobody like me ever could do such and such. Nobody like me could ever go out and teach Hawai’ian – I’m white, I’m British how could I ever possibly go out and teach the spiritual teachings of the ancient Hawai’ians? Well because I can’t not.

So our beliefs about ourselves and who we are, the way we convince ourselves often can stop us finding our purpose.

I hope this has been interesting, useful for you. A little introduction into purpose.

If you want to get in touch, if you want to talk more, please book in, talk to me, book in a session and see how I can help you more – SecretArtOfHuna.com/diary. And I really look forward to hearing your views, get a discussion going.

What does finding your purpose mean to you? And what are the particular challenges that you find in seeking out your purpose? Oh, and if you’ve already found your purpose and are in touch with your purpose, how does that help you now? What does that do for you in your life?

I look forward to talking to you about it soon.

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