STOP Resisting Your Purpose, and START Living It

A problem many of us have is that we are our own greatest obstacle. We have denied our own purpose rather than pursued it.

Most of us have a good sense of what we are supposed to be doing with our lives, but we don’t know that we know. Years of denying our true self, our true feelings, and our own hearts have gotten us to the point where we don’t know what we were meant to do.

Here are some tips to stop resisting yourself so that you can actually make progress on living out your purpose.

STOP listening to what everyone says you should do, and START doing what you know you are meant to do

Most of us miss out on our purpose because we listen too much to what other people think we should be doing. Your family may want you to earn more money or to have a career with a good reputation, but ultimately you are the one living your life. If you do not like your job or life, no one else will have to deal with it every day except for you.

Something to keep in mind is that many industries are unpredictable. An industry that earns very well today may go bankrupt tomorrow. This can happen whether we are fulfilling our purpose or not, of course. However, if I’m going to go bankrupt, personally, I would rather have it happen while I am pursuing my purpose rather than pursuing a career that I had no interest in.

It’s not a pretty sight to study and work hard only to hate your life and job, just to earn a decent paycheck, and then have your whole industry go bankrupt overnight.

While working on my purpose, I know that I will be fiercely determined to keep doing my work. That’s because it isn’t just work, and it isn’t just a way to earn a paycheck. When you work on your purpose, you will be more likely to be among the best at what you do, and even if parts of your industry go bankrupt, you will find the motivation and the reason to keep going, and perhaps you will even thrive under adversity.

STOP working for a paycheck, and START working for a greater purpose

When your paycheck is the best thing about your life’s path or your job, then perhaps you should reconsider your direction. Of course, it’s nice to make money, but I believe we should be working for a deeper reason. Generally, you should want to improve yourself, people around you, or the world in some way through your work.

In my opinion, it’s more rewarding to earn money as a byproduct of living out your life’s purpose, rather than having the money be the central thing that you are focused on.

When you know your purpose, you can focus fully on doing your best at this, and the money will follow. I believe people have a good sense for when someone is doing something that they truly care about and want to help with versus when someone is motivated primarily to earn income.

I am happy to pay people for their work when they are highly motivated and working on their purpose. Rather, when they view me as dollar signs, I am not always happy to pay them, and I may not return for their service again. For me, it is easy to notice when someone is unhappy at their work versus when someone is deeply motivated by a higher purpose. You will notice this too if you pay attention.

But the tricky part is - Can you notice this in yourself? Are you truthful with yourself when you are unhappy with your life’s direction?

Ask yourself: Is your purpose shining through in your life, or are you dragging your feet every day?

By the way, whether you like your job or not, I think you should aim to do your best. Many people don’t want to be where they are in life – this doesn’t give us the right to treat others poorly or do our work half-heartedly.

STOP giving up on yourself, and START believing in yourself

Many of us can end up in jobs we don’t like, don’t believe in, and possibly where we don’t even get paid well. When you give up or don’t believe in yourself, it’s easy to take lower-level jobs that offer no path to a better future.

Unfortunately, it’s also easy to get stuck there for life.

If you don’t believe in yourself, you won’t see the point of meeting your purpose because you will assume that you would fail. Or perhaps you don’t want to fail in front of other people – you are worried about what they will say or think.

When you are feeling stuck and ready to give up on yourself, consider what you have to lose by trying to fulfill your true purpose? Nothing at all. Why not give it a shot?

Ultimately, we must believe in ourselves so that we can fulfill our true purpose. The next best thing is to find someone who believes in you. In time, their belief in you will help you to believe in your own abilities.

Note that a belief in yourself doesn’t mean that you think you are the best. It doesn’t even mean that you are necessarily prepared to meet your purpose. It just means that you know you can learn what you need to, and build the experience you need, to go on the path toward meeting your purpose.

STOP talking about what you will do, and START doing it

Many people get stuck in talking about what they want to do, what their purpose or their dream is, and they never actually do it. I think it’s best that when you know your purpose or your dream, you shouldn’t even talk about it at all. The more you talk, the more you will feel like you are making some progress because you discuss your ideas. However, nothing is actually getting done.

Personally, I spend very little time discussing my ideas. I prefer to use that energy on outlining, organizing, planning, and implementing those ideas.

Someone can argue that in discussing ideas, it helps you figure out which ones are good. That may be true, but it’s hard to judge an idea if it hasn’t been implemented on some level. Consider going for a Minimum Viable Product (MVP), where you create something small to see what people think of it. Instead, if you want to write a novel, write a short story and get some feedback on it. There is no need to discuss your novel idea with everyone – in the worst case, you may get negative feedback and become discouraged.

Some people may be able to talk a lot about their ideas and execute them, but in my experience, those who talk more execute less and sometimes do not execute at all.

STOP getting stuck in the same old patterns, and START creating the life you want and need to happen

If you struggle to find your purpose, it may be because you have allowed yourself to get stuck in a job you do not care for or in a life situation that you do not care for. When we find ourselves in such a place, of course, we can feel drained, bored, or overwhelmed.

Someone who works at a full-time job that they do not care about will probably not feel energized to meet their purpose.

However, when you are stuck in a place you do not want to be, your options are limited. It doesn’t seem realistic to quit your stable job and then hope to land your dream job, not without any planning, anyway.

The main option I have seen work is to stay at your stable job and then pursue your purpose or your dream on the side. For example, how much progress could you make on your purpose by working evenings and weekends? Of course, this can seem overwhelming, but you have to ask yourself – is your purpose worth it?

Even if all you can do is work on your purpose (or develop your skills so that you can work on your purpose) for half an hour per day, it is worth doing. Small, steady progress is still something.

Ask yourself: Do you want to wake up in twenty years at the same job you can’t stand, and not having made any progress on your purpose just because you made up excuses?

STOP worrying about your resume, and START learning what you need to make progress

When I started on the path toward my purpose, I used to worry a lot about my resume. I used to think – if working for myself doesn’t work out, then I will have a gap of unemployment and a lack of skill development in my timeline. I was completely wrong. Through working on my purpose, I had become self-employed. I had become my own boss, and I was doing the tasks that I had decided were best for my business.

The reality is it took time before I felt like I was making real progress. But as the years passed, I realized that I was gaining skills and improving my abilities day by day. Eventually, I realized that I was learning more self-employed than I would have working for a company. This is because my standards were high, and I was working on a variety of projects that required a variety of skill sets. When I didn’t know how to do something, I took the time to learn it and improve at it.

I laugh now at any concerns about the resume. I don’t even have a resume, but I have developed many skills along the way to living my purpose, as I regularly learn new skills and advance my abilities on my purpose journey.

When you live your purpose, you will learn any skills you need to get the job done because you will be doing what truly matters to you. Whether you work for yourself or someone else, you will be driven by a higher need to make your purpose a reality, and you will be more motivated to learn and develop your abilities this way.

STOP listening too much to reason, and START listening to your heart

Ultimately, I think we all have a feeling for what we are truly supposed to be doing. When you dread every day because you can’t stand your life’s path, it should be quite evident that you have denied your life’s purpose and that this is not the best path for you.

As much as reason is a powerful tool for finding solutions, we can also get stuck in reason. I have often seen people reason their way into bad life choices and causing problems in their lives. When considering your life’s purpose, don’t crowd out your heart’s desires with too much reason.

When you listen to your heart, you will be guided along a much better path.

When you deny your heart, you will always wish you were doing something else in the back of your mind. With this, how successful can you truly be? You may feel like a fraud, living a life that you knew was not truly meant for you. You may always be left wondering – Why didn’t I take a chance on what I truly wanted to do?

It’s easy for everyone around you to tell you that you won’t make it, that you aren’t talented or skilled enough, but how can you know unless you do it?

Many people will tell you, “But what if it doesn’t work out?” This is well-meaning, but if you have failure on your mind when you’re beginning on a new path, this is already a bad way to start.

Keep in mind that I am a highly practical person, and I am still telling you to listen to your heart. Listen to your head too. If you need the income to stay afloat, then keep your stable job, or find the best-paying job you can find. But don’t get stuck in that for your whole life. Work on what your heart wants you to do so that eventually, you can dedicate most of your time to your life’s true purpose.

---

This is Part 2 of 3 posts on finding purpose. Here are the other two posts:

My Purpose Journey - A Winding Road

Dealing with Barriers on the Path to Living Your Purpose

Are You Your Thoughts, Feelings, or Actions?

One of the most important questions of our lives that perhaps we do not give enough thought to is:

“Who are you?”

I think so much about everything that, at many points in my life, I would have assumed that I was my thoughts.

For many people, they may feel so much that they may conclude that they are their feelings.

For others, they may feel so compelled to act that they may come to conclude that they are their actions.

For others still, perhaps some quality has become so central to their lives, whether it be their work, their beauty, or their intellect, and they identify with such qualities so much that the quality becomes them. When they think of themselves, they see a particular quality or set of qualities they embody as part of their human spirit.

Growing up, if someone told us over and over how hardworking, or smart, or beautiful we were, perhaps we ended up learning to identify as what we were told we were.

Unfortunately, if we were repeatedly reminded of our faults and how we were not good enough, perhaps this is how we came to identify ourselves. Rather than being something, we came to see ourselves as lacking something we were supposed to be.

The interesting part of being human is that we get to define what or who we are. Whether we relate more to our thoughts, feelings, actions, or some other quality of ourselves, we get to choose to live our lives based on what we find to be important.

Often, we like to simplify things to make sense of them. It’s easier to see myself as my thoughts. But the reality is that my feelings and actions help me to arrive at my thoughts. Most people tend to know what they feel or believe, and then they use thoughts to rationalize or explain this. If I feel angry and I don’t know why, I will find a way to explain it, probably based on whatever actions just took place.

Feelings flow into thoughts. Of course, thoughts can flow into feelings too. If I am obsessively thinking about something, I may have a strong feeling about whatever I was thinking. And it seems that if we feel strongly enough, we will be compelled to take action. And again, our thoughts or our reasoning will help convince us further whether we should take action or whether it is unsafe to do so.

Often, our feelings compel us to action, and our thoughts reason us out of having to take any action. If you feel more, you may take more action. If you think more, you may take less action.

Feeling too much with not enough thinking can lead you to take actions you regret or to take actions in ways that were not properly thought out and perhaps would lead to undesired consequences. Thinking too much with not enough feeling can result in not taking enough action. You may miss many opportunities, having thought them through too deeply and focused on all the things that could go wrong, thinking yourself away from taking action. The other danger with thinking too much with not enough feeling is that we can find it difficult to relate to other people. Usually, people find it more interesting to surround themselves with impassioned people, as they tend to be more relatable and entertaining to be around. Thought or reasoning without any feeling can feel dry, empty, and purposeless.

If your feelings and thoughts are in balance, then you may find the way to take the proper actions when needed and to avoid taking unnecessary actions or actions that will lead to undesirable consequences. Reaching this point can take self-reflection, practice, and of course seeking balance in one’s thoughts, feelings, and actions.

A key issue to keep in mind is that it is quite easy to get stuck. Thoughts can get to a point where they loop around. I suffered depression in the past (e.g., many, many years ago), and at some point, there were just negative thoughts looping in my mind repeatedly. After sinking deep into these thought loops and having hundreds of negative thoughts in a row, it isn't easy to form a positive thought or positive action in your life. And so thoughts can build a sort of momentum, and when they get going in a certain direction with enough power, going against them can be like trying to stop a speeding train.

A path to get out of these loops is to realize that our thoughts have gone out of control and force ourselves to take positive actions (e.g., exercise or socializing with friends and family) even if we don’t feel like it. If you feel stuck in your life and unable to make progress, I recommend seeking professional help.

We can also get stuck in our feelings. Have you ever felt bad for someone? Perhaps a friend just lost his job. Then you spend your time worrying, thinking about his family and how they may struggle to pay the bills. You may worry about how they will pay for that new car they just got. You don’t want to call your friend and bother him, as you know he is probably worried and busy. And also, a part of you doesn’t want to call because if he asks for help, you fear that you are not in the position to offer any. You would be happy to listen to his problems, but ultimately you cannot do much of anything to fix it. When we find ourselves in these situations, it’s quite easy to get stuck in our feelings. It can drag down our whole day if we get stuck there.

A path to get unstuck from our negative feelings is finding a small positive thought or action we can do to help and then actually do it. For example, this could be notifying our friend of any job openings you know about, or offering to listen if he wants to talk, or meditation or prayer. Such actions can help us relieve the negative energy inside us and transform it into positive action.

We can even get stuck in our actions. Imagine two men who struggle to move a heavy sofa from one room to another. So they ask a couple of friends to help them. The sofa is currently positioned in the hallway between two rooms. The men get to their positions, two on one side of the sofa and two on the other side, and they proceed to push the sofa. They struggle and struggle, but the sofa doesn’t move. They check to see if something is blocking the sofa from moving, and there is nothing there. It should be able to move freely. The furniture is heavy, but not so heavy to where four men would not be able to move it.

What is the problem here? The men were not clear on their direction. They were all pushing the sofa forward, meaning they were canceling out their forces and working against each other. If two men are on each side of the sofa, one side should be pushing and the other side pulling. If everyone is pushing, as is what happened here, then we have a problem.

When we get stuck in our actions, we can stubbornly push forward, even when we shouldn’t be pushing at all. Sometimes, we should think more deeply before we act, or we should consider how we feel. Our feelings or intuitions may reveal that this is not the proper course of action, but our desire for progress may keep us moving forward nonetheless. Sometimes, the best course of action is to do nothing – to wait and see what happens. Not every situation demands action, and most situations will not benefit if we push forward without thinking through the implications of our actions.

Everyone gets stuck in action occasionally. But if we often push forward and cause undesirable problems in our lives, we should think more deeply about our true goals. We should come to understand that action without any reflection can cause catastrophic problems and waste time, meaning we will have to perform more and more actions in a loop that becomes frustratingly difficult to dig our way out of. This can result in burnout, as we do more and more but accomplish less and less. To perform meaningful or useful actions, we will need to engage in thought.

This can take practice, but see if you can learn to use your thoughts, feelings, and actions to help you move forward in life, rather than getting stuck in them. Try to balance these different parts of yourself and see what happens.