How To Find Your Purpose

Do you know what your purpose is?

Having a clear sense of why you're here and what matters most is like a rocket booster to your leadership and wellbeing. Your purpose helps you navigate stress, stay focused on what is important, and live life with grace and joy.

A clear purpose can provide a consistent throughline for your life. It guides the direction of your decisions. Your purpose is different from your goals or your vision – those are like the North Star you are sailing to. Your purpose, instead, is like the rudder of the boat. It helps you stay on track to your goals, and sometimes, it even helps you choose which goals to pursue in the first place. 

However, no exercise intimidates conscious leaders more than trying to articulate their personal purpose. It sounds weighty. Serious. Difficult. And what happens if you get it wrong?!

However, finding your purpose doesn't require a pilgrimage, a graduate degree, or a week of silent meditation. It can be easy and fun. Really! Here's a simple exercise we use at our Lantern Leadership Retreat to help our participants clarify what matters most.

• Write out this mad lib on a sheet of paper: "My purpose is to [blank] so that [blank]."
• Now, try to fill in the blanks with different words. For example, "My purpose is to give love so that all people feel safe." Or, "My purpose is to learn and grow so that I live into my full potential." Or, "My purpose is to discover new adventures so I always approach life with curiosity."
• Keep trying different variations to see what lands for you. It can help to write the mad lib on a large piece of paper and then use stickie notes to fill in the blanks and easily try different combinations.

Don't overthink it! The intent of the exercise is not to mentally grind your way into your purpose. Your life is not a test. The intent is to give you an easy way to experiment with what feels consistent and true. If you feel stuck, put it down, walk outside, and return to it later. 

Remember, you don't have to carve anything in stone. You can always change your mind. And you may find, as many people do, that your purpose changes as you progress through your life. What's important to you as a twenty-two-year-old starting your career and what's important to you as a fifty-something with grown children are different. That doesn't mean you are flighty or wishy-washy. It means you are growing. 

We've used this exercise hundreds of times, and our experience is that most people can look at their lives and find a consistent theme that has guided them in the past and that feels true to how they want to move forward. When we give people open space to reflect, and coach them to feel rather than think about it, they are amazed at how much they find in themselves. 

Like so many conscious leadership practices, the process is a key part of the product. The process of reflecting on what matters to you and why can help you understand where you are and who you want to become. Welcoming this process of reflection is an important part of growing into conscious leadership. 

Ultimately, we believe you don't need to "find your purpose." Your purpose is seeking you. When you slow down, clear your mind, and open your heart, you create space to let your own light emerge. 

Try it out – and watch yourself shine.