Dealing with Barriers on the Path to Living Your Purpose
Often people begin on the path to their purpose, and they come across a barrier that holds them back from accomplishing what they want to. Sometimes this barrier presents a huge weight on their shoulders, constantly reminding them that they cannot make much of a difference after all.
This tends to crush our spirits. Sometimes we have studied many, many years and obtained multiple degrees or worked our way up the chain of command to get to the position we had dreamed of finally.
Then, nothing goes the way it is supposed to. Plans do not work as intended. The resources aren’t there. Budget cuts. Downsizing. The right talent is lacking.
We tend to have this ideal vision of our lives, and reality rarely lives up to what we had imagined.
Are there any barriers in your life holding you back from meeting your objectives and living out your purpose?
Barriers can come in many forms. They may be:
Colleagues that are too competitive and which do not help each other, rather than working as a team
The lack of funds, without a clear path to acquiring them
Personal problems such as health issues (in yourself or a loved one)
Too much bureaucracy or paperwork and procedures that must be followed (or not enough of them when they should be in place)
Too many demands on your time and energy, leaving you drained
A lack of clarity in what path to pursue to meet your objectives
A realization that no matter how hard you work, you cannot truly meet your objectives, which becomes discouraging
A boss with a different vision, temperament, or perspective than you and that wants to impose his way on you
A complete lack of motivation, probably due to some other barriers you are facing
A simple way to know if you have found your purpose is to ask yourself:
Is this worth doing even if I fail? Is this worth doing, even if it presents me with immense challenges? Is it worth doing even if I don’t earn quite as much as I would like?
Many of us are worried about failure. I say, “So what?” Failure is not the worst thing. Failure will present you with the opportunity to learn and grow and decide whether what you are doing was truly worth it to you, to begin with.
Ask yourself this about your chosen path:
Ultimately, is it worth doing even if I realize that no matter how hard I work, I will never accomplish my goals in the way I want to?
Some people may come to realize that they cannot meet their goals. If your goal is to save lives, you may come to understand that there is no way for you to help everyone. Some patients will die, and there will not be anything you can do about it. Then you have to ask yourself if it is worth doing even though you can never meet your goals perfectly. More importantly, is it worth doing your best and trying to help everyone that you can, even when you know that sometimes it will not work out in the end?
Also, ask yourself:
Is this a field where I can look forward to the great challenges I will face, rather than expecting it always to be easy?
Hopefully, you will get to a point where you look forward to the challenges you will face. You will want to be challenged because, with those challenges, you will only improve your skills and get better at successfully fulfilling your purpose.
Understand that even if you have found your purpose, this does not make life easy, counter to what many may think. Even after finding purpose, people still struggle to be motivated in the face of obstacles. They still struggle with the need to earn a certain amount of income. They still struggle with being uncertain as to whether they are even on the right path.
The reality is that barriers will always be there. It doesn’t matter whether you work for yourself or someone else, whether you have the support of your colleagues or not, whether you are motivated or not. It doesn’t matter whether you are working on your true purpose or just a job where you can get paid.
There will always be obstacles on your path. The question is: Are they worth dealing with? Do you believe strongly enough in what you are doing for all of this to be worth it?
I will urge you to find a field to work in and find a purpose for yourself where you are excited to work on it despite the barriers that will inevitably come up. Find something so worthwhile to you that any barrier is just a temporary setback.
No barrier should truly hold you back from working on your purpose-driven goals.
When you are working on your purpose, don’t allow the barriers to take your sight off your true objectives. If you have clients – return your focus to helping them meet their goals. If you are doing research, return your focus to doing good science. If you are a student, return your focus to learning what truly matters to you.
You may need to return to the fundamentals to remind yourself what you are after.
Perhaps one day, you get yelled at by your boss in front of your colleagues, and it’s not even for a good reason. This is obviously a difficult situation to deal with, but are you making progress on goals that are deeply important to you? Ultimately, this is what matters. Is your boss yelling just a minor obstacle on the path to living your purpose?
Consider this:
Are you working on your purpose now? Have you already found it?
Are you happy to work on it, no matter the obstacle?
Or are you ready to call it quits? Your heart isn’t in this, and perhaps it never was?
I will not urge you to keep going or to quit. Only you can make these choices for yourself.
But if you have found your purpose – then likely this will be worth hanging onto and pursuing in the face of all the obstacles. If you truly do not like your circumstances, there may be other options - you may be able to fulfill your purpose working for someone else or even working for yourself.
Or, if you are facing too many barriers without truly having your heart in what you are doing, then perhaps this is no longer worth it. If you feel drained and deadened, day by day without any true sense of fulfillment, it may be time to move on and seek your purpose elsewhere.
This is Part 3 of 3 posts on finding purpose. Here are the other two posts:
