What Factors Define Our Purpose?

We might think that our purpose should be evident and easy to identify, but it will slowly emerge as we put one foot in front of the other, following where our heart, talents, and life seem to be leading us.

These steps build upon each other.

We have to go through one to get to the next.

1. Childhood influences: If we look back at the things that impacted us and our life, we can understand that many times these things hold clues to who we are at our core and why we care about things that we do, which can help us understand our greater purpose in our life.
2. Passions and interests: When we can live in alignment with the things that inspire us, we are more effective because our passion gives us energy that pulls us forward.
3. Talents and skills: Skills tend to be acquired, whereas talents tend to happen naturally. We might want to prefer working with our talents. However, sometimes skills, even the ones we don’t like to do, can be vitally important and necessary to get us where we need to go. We need to evaluate them.
4. Personality: To find out who we really are and evaluate ourselves, we can take personality tests to glean many insights from them.
5. Coincidences: If we look back at our life, we can find things that just kind of happened out of the blue that were unexpected. But those things might have been pivotal moments because they hold clues pointing us toward our purpose.
6. Life-changing experiences: Similarly, while looking back at our life, we can find certain experiences that might have changed us, but these are usually bigger, more powerful experiences. They could have created a shift change, put you on a new path, inspired something in you that wasn’t there before, or changed your view of the world.

By looking at these, whether positive or negative, we can get more clarity about the meaning of our life and direction.