Craft Your Personal Purpose and Define Your Career Path
Craft Your Personal Purpose and Define Your Career Path
The privilege of a lifetime is to become who you truly are -Carl Jung
Don’t let your ADHD or other challenges keep you back from a life of purpose and a career you love. Start to define your own personal purpose with this guide and create, what you want from your life despite your struggles.
Why Define Your Purpose?
When you act without purpose, you risk being reactive instead of proactive. This means that instead of consciously making the decisions that lead to the life you want, you simply react to what falls into your lap.
You can create a proactive life – one where you consciously determine your likes, dislikes, goals, and plans to reach those goals – by learning about yourself, and applying your self-knowledge to your career decisions.
We are all a combination of our genetic traits, like innate skills and talents, and our personal history and experiences.
Personal history includes our expectations, what we are familiar with, and what seems realistic or unrealistic to us. For example, if you grew up around doctors, you might see it as realistic to become a doctor yourself; but if you had no family members or family friends who were doctors growing up, then becoming a doctor might seem out of reach.
This expectation has nothing to do with your innate potential.
These learned attitudes can hold us back from pursuing careers that are well-suited to our goals. That’s why it is so important to consciously analyze what you enjoy, and what you want out of a career – and then investigate which careers will allow you to best fulfill your purpose.
By defining your personal purpose and learning about yourself, you’ll give yourself goals to strive for and tools to engage with the challenges and curveballs of life head on!
When you live with purpose, you become passionate about living. You are in touch with your drives and passions, and have a purpose you’ve chosen to keep you focused and motivated. To start making the most of your life, the first step is to create this personal purpose.
A Good Place to Start: Investigate Your Inner Narrative
Below, I’ve listed some questions to help you identify your passions. Spend some time with these questions to get into the headspace of paying attention to your own joys and strengths, with a sharp eye out for why these things make you happy. These are only a few of the questions that can help you to see the patterns of what brings you joy, what stresses you out, and what you are really good at.
To get the most out of these questions, please answer them honestly.
- What motivates me in life?
- What have I wanted, but never gotten, in life?
- What energizes me? How?
- What brings me the most joy? Why?
- What are my biggest interests?
- What do I REALLY REALLY want in life?
- Who do I enjoy being around? Why?
Now, how can you turn these loves and desires into a statement of purpose for the next several years of your life?
Is there a passion, skill, or craft that you want to devote your life to perfecting? Is there an area of study that you want to devote your life to advancing? Is building wealth your top priority? Or is there a type of challenge you’d like to devote your life to helping others overcome?
There are countless possible answers, but some could look like this:
- My purpose in life is to help end world hunger.
- My purpose in life is to help people look and feel their best.
- My purpose in life is to empower others through education.
- My purpose in life is to care for the sick.
- My purpose in life is to become an artist whose work moves people.
- My purpose in life is to change laws and policies to create a better world.
- My purpose in life is to build as much wealth as possible for my family in future generations.
Consider which way of contributing might suit you best. For example, are you a people person, or do you prefer to work alone? Do you like to do hands-on work, or do you prefer to study and work out theories?
Consider these possible professions that correspond with the type of life purpose:
- A person could help end world hunger by being a scientist, a politician, or a founder or employee of an organization devoted to hunger relief.
- A person could help others to look and feel their best as a fitness trainer, a cosmetologist, a nutritionist, or a fashion designer.
- A person could empower others through education as a school teacher, a founder or staff member of an adult or extracurricular education program, or a producer of educational media.
Note that even within each of these purposes, many different careers requiring different skills are necessary to fulfill them. Defining your personal purpose helps you choose your life goals, and possible career paths to reach them!
To read more about finding your passion career, purchase my book
Happiness + Passion + Purpose Book A Step By Step Guide On How To Nourish The Patterns Of Your Life Into The Job You Will Love And Land It!
