Robyn on Purpose
Discover Your True Purpose
Exploring Your Purpose
You may know that you want more meaning or direction in your life without knowing what that could look like.
Maybe you're just beginning to make choices about your future. Maybe you've had limited opportunities to explore what interests you. Or maybe much of your life has been shaped by circumstances, expectations, or responsibilities that haven't left much room to discover what you would choose for yourself.
Whatever brought you here, your starting point is the same:
You need opportunities to discover more about yourself.
You don't have to know where something will lead before you try it. You need enough curiosity to find out.
Understand What's Driving Your Choices
You may already have an idea of what you want to do with your life. Before you decide that it's the right direction, spend some time thinking about why you want it.
What are you hoping it will give you?
Maybe you're genuinely interested in the work. Maybe you're good at it. Maybe it's what your family expects of you. Maybe you want to be successful. Maybe you want to be noticed, respected, or appreciated. Maybe you want to make a lot of money.
There can be many reasons you're drawn toward a particular path, and more than one can be true at the same time.
Understanding those reasons can help you separate what you actually want to experience from what you hope achieving it will give you.
If Your Goal Is to Be Rich
There is nothing wrong with wanting money or enjoying the choices, experiences, and opportunities it can provide.
But it's worth asking what you expect having more money to change.
Money can make some parts of life easier. It can give you more choices and remove some of the stress that comes from not having enough. It can allow you to travel, pursue interests, have experiences, and enjoy things that might otherwise be out of reach.
But there are limits to what money can provide.
It can give you more ways to enjoy your life. It can't, by itself, give your life meaning or make the way you spend your days fulfilling.
If you're choosing a path because of the life you imagine the money will eventually give you, consider the life you'll have to live while earning it.
Are you going to hate five days of your week so you can enjoy the weekend?
Are you going to spend most of the year waiting for the few weeks you're on vacation?
And even if you reach a point where you can vacation all year, then what?
Travel, beautiful places, great food, relaxation, and having the freedom to do whatever you want can be incredibly enjoyable. But enjoyment and fulfilment aren't the same thing. A life filled entirely with leisure can still leave you wanting something to care about, contribute to, create, learn, build, or participate in.
Balance is part of creating a life that fulfils you.
Your work doesn't have to provide all of your purpose. It may provide income while other parts of your life give you opportunities for connection, creativity, contribution, learning, enjoyment, or meaning.
But consider how all of those pieces fit together.
How much of your life are you willing to spend doing something you don't enjoy in order to have the money to enjoy the rest of it?
What Else Are You Hoping to Get?
Money isn't the only thing that can influence the direction you choose.
Maybe you want to be noticed, respected, admired, or appreciated. A particular career or accomplishment may seem like a way to finally receive those things.
Maybe you're pursuing something because you've always been good at it. Success, praise, and achievement can make a direction seem obvious. But being capable of doing something doesn't necessarily mean you'll enjoy the reality of doing it.
Or maybe you've absorbed an idea of what you're supposed to do. What a good career looks like. What success looks like. What someone with your abilities should pursue. What would make the people around you proud.
None of these automatically makes a direction wrong.
They are reasons to get curious about what is actually driving your choice.
Do you want the experience itself?
Or do you want what you imagine achieving it will make you feel?
Be Careful What You Use as Evidence
It's also worth considering where your picture of a successful or happy life came from.
Social media can show you someone's beautiful home, expensive vacation, exciting career, relationship, accomplishments, or perfectly curated day.
It cannot tell you whether that person is happy.
You're seeing what someone has chosen to show you. You don't know what their life feels like when the camera is off. You don't know what they sacrificed to get there, whether they enjoy their work, how their relationships feel, or whether the life you're admiring actually fulfils them.
Be careful about using someone else's visible life as evidence of what will make your life fulfilling.
If you build your life around what you believe will make you successful, wealthy, or impressive without considering what will actually fulfil you, you may find yourself twenty years from now wondering why you feel restless, bored, or discontented despite having achieved what you set out to achieve.
You may even find yourself back here, looking for the sense of purpose you thought success would provide.
None of this means you shouldn't pursue something because money, recognition, achievement, or other people's expectations are part of what attracts you to it.
Some things you simply have to experience for yourself.
You can think about what will fulfil you. You can question your motivations. You can learn from other people's experiences. But there are some things you won't know until you're actually living them.
You may discover that the path you chose gives you exactly what you hoped it would. You may discover that something you thought would make you happy doesn't. Or you may find that what fulfils you about the experience is completely different from what originally drew you toward it.
That's all useful information.
You don't have to know whether a choice is right for you before you make it.
You're learning about yourself through the choices you make, the experiences you have, and how you feel while you're living them.
And if you discover that something isn't right for you, you've learned something you couldn't have known without experiencing it.
Expose Yourself to More
It's difficult to discover what might give your life purpose if your world doesn't give you very much to respond to.
You may already have interests you want to explore. You may have no idea what interests you yet. You may be working, looking for work, going to school, or wondering what you're supposed to do next.
Wherever you're starting, give yourself opportunities to experience more of life.
The more you participate, the more people, ideas, challenges, possibilities, and parts of yourself you have the opportunity to discover.
Explore What Interests You
If you think you might enjoy something, find a way to experience more of what it actually involves. Learn about it. Talk to someone who does it. Take a class. Try it on a small scale. Spend time in that environment.
You may discover that you love it. You may discover that you only like one part of it. You may discover that the reality is nothing like you imagined.
You can't always know until you experience it.
Let Work Give You More Than a Paycheque
A job doesn't have to be your dream job to add something valuable to your life. It doesn't have to be where you're headed. It can simply be somewhere you are for a while.
Work gives you opportunities to develop skills, take responsibility, solve problems, work with different personalities, deal with challenges, contribute, and discover what you're capable of.
You may learn that you love working with people. Or that you need time alone. That you enjoy leading, teaching, organizing, creating, building, selling, helping, improving, or figuring things out. You may discover that you need variety, independence, structure, challenge, movement, or a sense of accomplishment.
And work introduces you to people.
A coworker may become one of your closest friends. You may meet a mentor. Someone may introduce you to an interest you've never considered or tell you about an opportunity you didn't know existed. You may meet people whose lives are completely different from yours and discover possibilities you hadn't imagined.
A job that has very little to do with where you eventually end up can still become an important part of how you got there.
Create Experiences When Opportunities Aren't Coming to You
There are times when finding a job can be difficult. Not having one doesn't mean you have to put your life on hold while you wait for someone to hire you.
Volunteer. Help someone with their yard. Clean or organize for someone who needs it. Walk dogs or care for animals. Help an older person with errands or technology. Tutor someone. Help with an event. Paint a room. Help someone move. Take photographs. Create something for a community organization. Help someone with a project simply because you're willing to learn.
You may not get paid. You may not want to do it forever. That doesn't mean the experience has no value.
You're developing skills. You're learning how you work. You're becoming more capable. You're meeting people. You're becoming someone people know they can rely on. You're hearing about things you wouldn't have heard about sitting at home.
And sometimes one experience leads to another.
Try Things You Know Very Little About
You can't know whether something interests you if you don't know it exists.
Go somewhere different. Attend something you normally wouldn't. Learn about a subject outside your usual interests. Talk to someone whose life looks nothing like yours. Try something simply because you've never done it before.
You don't need every new experience to become important.
Sometimes its value is simply that your world is a little bigger afterwards.
Make Room for Participation
There is nothing wrong with playing video games, watching shows, scrolling, relaxing, or doing things simply because you enjoy them.
But pay attention to how much of your life you're spending there.
If most of your time is spent doing the same things in the same environment, you're limiting the number of new experiences, people, challenges, and possibilities you encounter.
You don't need to be productive every minute. You don't need to turn every experience into an opportunity.
You do need to participate in your life enough to have one.
The more you participate in life, the more life you encounter.
And with that can come friendships, interests, skills, confidence, opportunities, experiences you never expected to have, and a growing understanding of what you want more of.
You don't need to know where an experience is going to lead before you allow it to take you somewhere.
What Would You Do If You Could
For a moment, imagine you have all the resources you need. You have the time, money, support, knowledge, skills, and connections to do something about the things you care about.
Who would you want to help?
What would you want to make easier for someone?
What problems would you want to solve?
What would you fix if you knew you could?
How do you wish the world were different?
What do you see happening around you that makes you wish someone would do something about it?
Are there people, animals, places, communities, or causes you feel particularly drawn to supporting?
What would you like people to have more access to?
What do you wish people understood better?
What would you like to protect, preserve, improve, or change?
What would you create if you knew people would benefit from it?
Whose life would you like to make a little better?
What kind of difference would feel meaningful to you, even if nobody knew you were responsible for it?
You don't need an answer to every question.
Pay attention to the ones that make you stop. The ones you immediately have an answer for. The ones that bring up an idea you hadn't considered before.
There may be clues in what you want to contribute to, change, create, protect, or make possible for someone else.
Spend Some Time With What Came Up
Pay attention to the questions that were easy to answer. The ones that brought something to mind right away. The ones you keep thinking about after you've moved on.
Then start using your imagination.
What could your life look like if you were able to your time doing something you genuinely cared about?
For a moment, set aside what seems practical. Don't worry about whether you have the time, money, experience, qualifications, connections, or confidence to make it happen. You aren't making a plan. You're allowing yourself to imagine what you might want before deciding what is possible.
Imagine a future in which you feel engaged in your life and fulfilled by the way you're participating in it.
What are you doing?
Who are you spending your time with?
Who or what are you contributing to?
What are you creating, improving, solving, teaching, protecting, supporting, or making possible?
What are you learning or becoming better at?
Which parts of yourself are you getting to use?
What makes you look forward to your days?
What makes you feel good about how you've spent your time?
You don't need to know whether your life will eventually take the exact form you've imagined.
You're giving yourself a direction to look toward.
Continue Exploring
As you gain more experience, you may begin noticing patterns in what engages you, what gives you a sense of meaning, and what you want more of in your life.
When you have more experiences to look back on, you can begin exploring them for clues about what gives your life meaning and purpose.
If you're struggling to motivate yourself or finding it difficult to put effort into what you're doing, explore the connection between effort, engagement, and meaning.
Explore what restores you, engages you, and adds something meaningful to the way you experience your everyday life.
