What’s your purpose? I bet some of you are plagued by this question. When you’ve decided it’s time to stop settling at your job and start doing work you love, you can’t help but ask yourself, “What am I supposed to be doing?” But for different reasons, many of you can not come up with the answer to save your life and you’re going crazy! Well, stop it!

Stop trying to find your purpose by looking for it.

Stop trying to figure out what your passion is by thinking about it.

It just doesn’t work this way.

The more you struggle to get to the answer you want, the more you push it away.

Instead, you want to take a back door approach to figuring out your passion. There are three parts:

1. Focus on fun. What do you enjoy in life? What are the things that make you happy to do, think about, be involved in, etc.? If nothing comes to mind right now, think about the past. What have you done in your life that has brought you pure joy? It doesn’t have to have been work or school related or even anything you were getting paid for. When you find yourself enjoying the moment, you can be sure you are tapping into your true essence and expressing it to the world.
   
   
2. Don’t make your next job dependent on finding your purpose. I see lots of clients do this. Because they want to get out of their current job and don’t want to just jump into another job, some clients put a lot of pressure on themselves to find their purpose before making their next move. Most find themselves feeling very stuck and disappointed because they can’t seem to come up with what job would make them happy. Figuring out your purpose is not easy. And putting a time pressure on it only makes it that much more difficult to uncover. If you expect yourself to answer the purpose question first so you can come up with the next best job, you might be waiting a long time. Instead, accept that a career change is a process. It’s ok to take a new job that isn’t exactly perfect but is somehow better than what you had. As you continue to take steps in the right direction–and sometimes the wrong direction–you’ll actually learn more about yourself and uncover the hidden answers about who you really are deep down inside.
   
   
3. Do things that are easy and fun for you to do that allow you to help others. Oprah has said, “The best way to succeed is to discover what you love and find a way to offer it to others.” We often dismiss the value we have to offer to the world thinking things like:
   
   “Oh, well anyone can do that!”
   
   “That was easy. Why would anyone pay me for that?”
   
   “I do that for people all the time. They just know I’m good at it. But it’s not something I can make a career out of!”
   
   The thing is our purpose in life is to do things that we do well, we enjoy, and that can help others. That’s it! Remember, helping others does not only mean doing things altruistic or worthy of the Nobel Peace Prize. Doing something to help make someone else’s life easier, more fun, or better in some way is the path to fulfilling work.

So, start with fun and forget purpose for now. Your one task this week is to remember what is fun for you and start doing it.

Let the answers you seek find you instead.

© 2007 Segaric Coaching Inc.