Align Employment with Life Purpose for Success
Successful Career is Meaningful Work that Satisfies Purpose in Life
Feb 19, 2009
A successful career combines a person's work with life purpose, providing inherent meaning and fulfillment in daily work activities. To maximize your chances for career success identify potential careers which provide an opportunity for you to regularly display those qualities uniquely describing your life purpose.
The Keys to Career Success describes steps for consciously planning a career for success. These steps begin with establishing a vision of a successful career, then thoroughly understanding your qualifications, and finally identifying career paths with the potential to provide your success.
Foundations of Career Success takes career planning to the next level, a level often overlooked by employment planners and job seekers alike. Five foundational elements are described, with brief explanations of their importance to a successful career. These five, termed the Five Ps for convenience are Purpose, Passions, Powers, Principles, and Perspectives.
This article describes the crucial role life purpose–the most important of the five Ps–plays in a satisfying and successful career. Research studies (A Primer in Positive Psychology, Oxford Press, 2006) confirm what most workers intuitively understand–work which provides meaning is satisfying work. People with meaningful work in their lives are happier and more productive than those whose work lacks personal meaning. When a person finds meaning in a job, the work becomes more a calling than a job.
Of all the five Ps, finding life purpose may be the most difficult for people. Shedding light on your life purpose is an inside job. Coaches and clergy may be helpful by demonstrating the process for understanding life purpose, but only you can clarify your life purpose.
What is Life Purpose?
Each person is born with a unique reason for being. The operational word is being. Though people occupy themselves with activities, you experience life purpose through your states of being. Life purpose is a quality or set of qualities which, when displayed, bring positive feelings, such as happiness, satisfaction, and joy. These qualities, or states of being, are the root description of your life purpose (Life on Purpose, Elite Books, 2007).
People often describe themselves by what they do. The clearer description of whom a person is requires the qualities or states of being of purpose. This, though, is very personal and intimate, exposing a person's vulnerabilities. It is safer for people to describe themselves by what they do.
Finding life purpose is an inside job, requiring self reflection, self awareness, insight, and a willingness to deeply explore your feelings. The following processes are useful ways to explore and clarify your life purpose:
- Meditation: There are many forms of meditation, some highly structured and ritualized, but meditation at its core is simply quiet time with a quiet, open mind. The absence of external stimuli and refraining from conscious problem solving promote meditative benefits. Meditation promotes hearing your inner voice.
- Reflection: Conscious reflection can uncover the many thoughts, beliefs, and self-limiting ideas that reside in your subconscious.
- Self Awareness: Being aware of your emotions, your thoughts, and the states of your being as you go about daily activities will bring you useful insights.
- Joyful Activities: Reflection and self awareness of the activities which bring you joy are strong clues to life purpose. When well-aligned with life purpose, you will have positive emotions.
- Your Legacy: Reflecting on the legacy you will leave behind should you pass away now can be an eye-opening and possibly disturbing experience. Consciously constructing a description of the legacy you wish to leave behind can help you structure a vision that aligns with life purpose.
- Negative Experiences: Reflecting on negative experiences can help you uncover life purpose by pointing out those states of being generating negative feelings, which indicate a misalignment with purpose.
- Life Purpose Letter: In some ways this process is the most difficult, but potentially most productive means for clarifying life purpose. On a blank sheet of paper or empty page on your word processor, write the following: My purpose in life is ... Finish the sentence with whatever comes to mind. Continue to complete the sentence from a stream of consciousness, without thinking. Just write what comes to mind and continue writing until you feel a strong emotion, perhaps even tears of joy. This may take some time, perhaps twenty minutes or more. But continue writing until you feel the strong emotions.
Career Alignment with Purpose
Armed with a clear understanding of your life purpose, explore career possibilities that provide opportunity for you to display your purpose in your work.
Each article in this series is summarized and cross-linked in The Complete Process for Finding Career Success.
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