Wondering what your purpose in life is? This guide helps you to identify what you should do with your life!
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
Are you doubting what you should do with your life? I can relate, because I have been there myself!
The endless search for happiness and purpose can cause sleepless nights, especially for highly sensitive people who often seem to seek meaning in everything that they do. Once a highly sensitive person doesn’t find purpose or deep meaning in what they do, they become bored and restless. Therefore, identifying your purpose is of essential value when you are a highly sensitive person.
In this guide, I give tips on how you can identify your purpose. These tips helped me when I was soul searching and still do help me in times when I feel lost. Hopefully, they will help you too! So, let’s dive straight in!
1. Identify Your Core Values
Your core values are the norms and principles you truly stand for. Moreover, it is what intrinsically motivates your to undertake action and think and feel the way you do. As a result, your core values are the first thing that you should identify when you start your search for purpose in life.
By identifying your core values, you identify major pillars in the foundation of your identity. For instance, a house cannot be built without a steady foundation, and so can’t your life purpose. Therefore, start in your ‘foundation’.
How To Identify Your Core Values
Identifying your core values can be done by first writing down what you find important in life. However, sometimes it can be hard to put a finger on what exactly that is. Therefore, why not try to write down sentences about the things that you love? For example:
- Loves to spend time with friends -> Core value: Friendship
- Finds it important to have a prestigious job -> Core value: Ambition/Status
- Wants to read as much as possible -> Core value: Knowledge
You get what I mean?
If you struggle to identify a core value based upon your statements, it is useful to use lists like for example this list to see which core values can be related to the statements.
Try to write down 5-10 core values of yours that you consider the most important and that you feel make you the most happy.
2. Create Your Personal Vision Statement
After finding your core values, you can see which ones you feel you’d like to implement into your life in the future. Based upon these few core values, you develop your vision statement. A vision statement is a 1-2 sentence long statement that shows your ideal, envisioned future. For example, my core values are creativity, enthusiasm and inspiration. These three values form the foundation for my vision statement, which is:
Each day, I wake up with the opportunity to use my creativity and enthusiasm to inspire myself and others.
As you can see, it is short and clear. For me, this is the ideal future. I don’t want to limit myself by making it too specific. That comes in the next step.
How To Create A Strong Vision Statement?
So you might wonder how on earth you create a strong personal vision statement. In fact, it sounds harder than it actually is: take your 3-5 core values and state how you will apply them into your life. It can be in relation to yourself, but you could also relate it to other people. I, for example, love to help others and be of support in some way. As a result, it was a logical step for me to include other people in my vision statement.
3. Analyze Yourself With The Purpose Model Ikigai
Once you have your vision statement clear, you can be more specific in relation to your purpose. Now it is time to analyze yourself and how you can apply your vision statement into your everyday life. By becoming more specific about your vision and creating clear goals, you will be more likely to reach your dream scenario.
How to analyze yourself
When I first started to become more specific about my vision, I found it tough to know exactly where to start. That’s when I googled and found this wonderful and useful model:
‘Ikigai’ is Japanese and means “The reason for which you wake up in the morning”. The Japanese live long and happy lives thanks to applying this model into their daily lives. Retiring is not an option for people who pursue their Ikigai. The ‘Ikigai’-model enables you to fill in 4 categories:
- What you are good at
- The things you love
- What the world needs
- The tasks you can be paid for
By combining the answers of these four into once concept/profession, you will have your ‘Ikigai’, or in other words your purpose. Let me give you an example of how I filled it in:
- What you are good at: I am good at being creative, writing and creating interesting content.
- The things that you love: I love to be online and to work from home.
- What the world needs: I think that the world needs more awareness and acceptance in relation to (high) sensitivity.
- The tasks you can be paid for: I can earn money with my writing and knowledge.
After writing down my answers, I tried to find a way in which I could combine them into one profession. As a result, HiSensitives was born! Therefore, I am sure that you will also come up with an awesome concept or goal based upon the answers to these questions.
4. Trust Your Intuition
After applying these techniques, you might be steps closer to finding your true purpose in life. However, my best tip is to simply tune in and listen to your intuition. Often, it tells you repeatedly what you need. For instance, my intuition told me for years that I wanted to work with and for highly sensitive people, yet I always neglected it. Since I aligned with that voice, I feel so much happier and confident. Therefore, I can highly recommend you to listen to your intuition without letting fear block its voice. Your intuition knows best!
Ready To Live The Life You Always Dreamt Of By Following Your Purpose?
Are you ready to leave behind fear and to let your inner voice tell you what you need in life? I cannot wait to see where you all are heading after reading this blog post!
Let me know in the comments what your inner voice is telling you that you should focus on in life!
