How to find your purpose? – isn’t this the most popular question addressed by all life coaches, motivational speakers and personal development gurus around the world since time immemorial? And probably half the reason why coaches are often met with such scepticism by people outside the industry.
After all, do we even have a purpose? On one hand our prevailing cultural beliefs would say no, not really—we are purely the result of a meaningless, deterministic series of causes that have landed us where we are; there’s no forward guiding principle to our lives let alone some cosmically divined role for each of us.
On the other many would say that we do have a purpose—you just haven’t found yours yet. Better you find it, land there and start living your life. What even is life without it? (Oh, and you’d better hire me to help you find it).
As always, the truth lies somewhere in a dialectic. We do have a purpose, but it is not some fixed destination you arrive at, start fulfilling and continue in that way as long as you live. And we are not only the product of meaningless causes, but also of forward guiding principles without which we would be nothing and directed at nothing.
This is exactly why the answer to ‘what is your purpose’ resists a single answer, and why confronting this question itself benefits from a dialectical approach, bridging both theory and practice, reflection and production, fixity and movement. Answering, or rather living, the question of purpose is vital. Without it there is no real movement at all.
So the true answer is not only found in words—although that can help—but in what you are doing. And not merely something you answer, but something you realise. Your purpose is not only a truth, but a dynamic; not an idea you arrive at, but a process and action. Your purpose now is not the same as your purpose tomorrow, or the overarching notion of your purpose. All are true, connected to each other, and share a common thread.
Naturally then any written response to this question will lack something, and alone will never get you there. But that doesn’t mean it can’t be helpful. Like with any pursuit, one way to arrive at a useful guide is to retrace steps that others have taken, or that you yourself took when you landed at a useful answer.
Whenever I have found purpose and meaning in my work, there have been certain recurring themes and psychological milestones involved. I have distilled these into three actionable steps that I share in this post. I continue to utilise these steps for myself as well as with clients, where they continue to uncover useful insights and help move them in the right direction. Feel free to use them in your own self-reflection or in your work as a coach, mentor or manager.
These three steps are really representative of certain principles of finding purpose, but here have been formed as questions aimed at inviting enquiry into and ‘getting at’ the deeper thrust sitting behind each one. This makes them highly actionable by anyone at any stage of adult life, rather than purely abstract. Even though they could be framed in any number of ways or through other questions.
1) Where does your mind go during mindless or undesirable tasks?
This first step is a more practical take on the question ‘what lights you up?’ Or: ‘what is your passion?’ ‘What excites you?’ While it can be useful, there are several problems with this conventional line of questioning that limits its usefulness.
Firstly, it is too vague—there are many things that light each of us up, and the answer can be vastly different depending on your physiology, the time of day, the feeling tone of the moment and countless other factors.
Secondly, it makes the same mistake of trying to lunge for the whole answer right now, again implying there must be some fixed destination that you can arrive at easily and be satisfied with forever. This is really a way of avoiding the necessary dialectic, not engaging with it.
Thirdly, it makes the mistake of assuming that your deeper purpose is found in the ‘thing’ that lights you up, but this is false too. The thing is merely an expression—a singular task or activity in which our deeper purpose is rarely found. Our deeper purpose is never in a singular task or activity, but will be expressed by it. A painter’s purpose is rarely in painting per se; a dancer’s purpose is rarely in dancing; an accountant’s purpose is rarely in accounting. But we’ll revisit this in step 2.
Alternatively, the question ‘where does your mind go,’ is much more practical, actionable and meaningful—a way to get started on the challenge by inciting actual engagement. Asking it during tasks that you find especially meaningless, or which numb you half to death, creates the contrast against which your answers to this question take on a particular significance.
Perhaps you are begrudgingly filling your annual tax return—(you haven’t begun using AI to help you with it)—and this isn’t a task you take great joy in. What would you rather be doing instead? What comes alive in you in those moments? What jumps into your mind? What is it that is taking you more energy not to do than to do?
Again though, the answer to this question alone is not the whole answer to the realisation of your purpose. It’s just the first step of the work in a useful process.
If your mind decides it would rather be travelling in Uganda, it doesn’t mean your purpose is to travel in Uganda. If thoughts and insights about the human condition come into your mind, it doesn’t mean that your purpose is simply to comment on the human condition, let alone only to yourself. But it does mean there’s something underneath that impulse. Which brings us onto step 2.
2) If you could tell the world anything, what would it be?
Imagine you have one opportunity, one shot, to broadcast a message to eight billion people. Something they will be guaranteed to hear. Whether they take it on board or do anything with it is another matter, but this is your opportunity—the best one you’ll ever have—to influence the entire world and direction of the human species. Not only to influence but to contribute to them. You’d better make sure it’s a helpful message, worded well and with a meaningful implication.
This question is designed to uncover the meaning, value and true contribution behind the first step. The first step should very much inform this step.
So you feel inspired to go travelling in Uganda. That’s fine, but why is that? Surely that is not what you would literally advise the whole world to do. That would be far too facile to yield much value for eight billion people.
What is the contribution you would seek to give via this message? What is the result for the listener or the action they will take? It would require others to choose to act on the message, sure. But you know that, if they did, they would move closer to their own potential, purpose and knowledge of themselves in a precise way in which you yourself have, and solve some kind of problem that you have been able to solve. This isn’t about ‘improving their lives’ in the way you see fit. Who can say what that would involve for them. Neither can you save them from struggle and challenge, or bestow them with meaning. But you can provide guidance for navigating and finding it for themselves.
It helps if you have actually had to solve difficult, chronic problems in your own life. It is often said that our greatest challenges become our purpose or words to that effect. To the extent this is true, it’s because challenges properly overcome necessitate a very real encounter with suffering. Suffering which in turn destroys any naiveté about what being alive necessarily involves, and compels you to take life sincerely. What is the last problem you had that, in confronting it, brought you to this point of relative stability?
We’ve all got our ‘something to say,’ and the hypothetical scenario of sharing yours with everyone has a way of compelling you to look deeper into what truly sits behind it. How can you take your specific inclinations, and deliver them in a way that has universal value?
Symbolic literacy helps hugely here, since symbols are how the mind connects appearances with deeper meaning. The best tool to help with this is the tarot, since it is essentially a comprehensive symbolic library. There is nothing in life—no experience, activity or energy—that cannot be mapped to the tarot somewhere. So whatever the outer expression of your purpose is currently, its deeper meanings can be gleaned with its help. Where do your inclinations map to the tarot? Which cards appear in your Tarot Birth Chart? These will offer clues as to what is really asking to be channelled and satisfied through the outer expressions showing up in your life.
Perhaps your contribution is to show people that travel is not only a luxury, but one of the most powerful shake-ups to your awareness available to you. Perhaps it is that few things help open your eyes as much as travel. Perhaps it is about understanding the limitations of your perspective through engaging with other cultures and systems. Perhaps it is to convey the idea that, without knowledge of alternatives, it is virtually impossible to define how your own views and approaches are falling short. Maybe your message is specific—go travelling for this reason or that—or perhaps it’s more about a need to develop a kind of awareness. In any case, the urge to travel to Uganda is not the point, but a single feature of a deeper purpose trying to find expression.
The twist here is that you already have the ability to broadcast this message. You are already influencing eight billion people and are all doing it all the time, and so is everyone else. Not because ‘we’re all influencers now,’ and you can make sporadic social media posts that get seen by five people, but because your influence necessarily ripples out to everybody in everything that you do.
The good news is that you don’t have to get this message perfect before broadcasting after all—you get chances every day—and taking action towards your purpose forms just as much a role in knowing it as knowing it allows you to take action on it.
Settling for nothing less than perfection—i.e. complete realisation now—is just as much an obstacle to purpose as acting indiscriminately without vision. It leads directly to indecision—because no decision can ever seem perfect—which in turn leads to inaction. This brings us onto step 3.
3) How can you turn that message into a project lasting 2-6 months? By the end of which you will have something to share.
Translating your message into a project is a practical way of removing indecision. Establishing a project accepts the tension from the outset, and sets your stall out to work with rather than avoid tension when it appears.
A good project does this in a way that is still nonetheless achievable and gratifying. A project is purposeful in itself; it has a meaning in the form of an actual deliverable you can share once complete, and it changes your relationship to the inevitable tension and struggles as they arise.
A bad project is one that can only be ‘achieved’ through daily self-flagellation and force. This would simply be the ego exerting its will upon the psyche at the expense of its needs as a whole, when the name of the game is to cultivate an interplay between the two.
Again, the project not only doesn’t need to be perfect; it cannot be. The idea is to facilitate the realisation of your purpose; not to capture it all in one ultimate output so that you never have to feel tension again. There is no perfect piece of art. Even the best art can only ever be an expression and a vehicle for realisation, as immeasurably valuable as that can be. Furthermore, each project is a single step on a path of actualising purpose.
The 2-6 month duration seems to be the sweet spot for a project of this kind. Long enough to be ambitious, require real dedication and produce something of considerable value, but short enough to feel motivating and real. You can set longer or shorter timelines if you like. In any case you’ll probably find that a project such as this becomes a sub-project in the much larger project that is the realisation of your purpose.
Having weekly goals works well at this timescale, broken down into daily critical tasks. The beauty of this structure is that it minimises the drag of indecision. That kind of indecision doesn’t serve, but is really an avoidance of tension. Instead, moving forward becomes a case of just getting up and getting to work on the right things every day without having to decide each time what to do. Meanwhile the overall project goal remains just tangible enough to be motivating, but does not need to be obsessed over every day. By focusing on the daily and weekly commitments, the multi-month project, decided from the outset, to an extent takes care of itself. Again, making meaningful progress involves being willing to endure the daily tension and the reality of imperfection.
It is important to be clear on the final output and deliverable from the outset. Not least because this is a motivator. It allows you to park the grand question of ‘what is my purpose’ and instead hang out with ‘what is my purpose for now?’ Despite focusing on the project at hand, whatever you produce in it can’t not be an expression of the deeper purpose, even if it is necessarily partial and imperfect.
So how will you convert your message into a deliverable that you will be glad to share with others? What will you have at the end of several months that makes you glad to say “here, I made this.” What would it look like as a product? An art project, or series? A business? A community? What about an app? (With AI, building apps is more feasible than ever, even for non-technical people, and only getting easier.)
You can do a 90 day video challenge discussing your lessons, publish a course packaging up your most hard-won knowledge, or write a single thought a day and then ask AI to summarise the results. None of it will be perfect and yet all of it will be helpful to you and somebody and move you closer to your purpose.
The 2-6 month timescale can allow you to be quite creative and ambitious with this. Many great creations that shook the world have been produced in less time than this, but that is not the aim. Quality is a by-product of having bravely confronted the tension and let purpose unfold as it needs to.
Closing Thoughts
What I’ve presented here is a practical series of steps for engaging with the question of purpose, presented with specific questions that I have found to produce useful answers. Your answers to these questions will also change over time, and that’s also the point. You can re-use this series repeatedly throughout life, at each juncture or whenever you need.
The question of purpose is never fully complete, because it is not a fixed destination but a dialectical unfolding that takes place through your actions every day. Even the deviations from purpose (especially the deviations) help bring it about if and when you choose to engage in the process: taking responsibility, cultivating empathy and developing true self-knowledge.
Understanding your purpose is an essential part of the individuation journey and falls under Habit 4 of the Seven Habits of Individuation – Contribute Your Unique and Specific value. This habit comprises knowing your unique set of facts, contributing to the needs of the world and generosity. To learn more about the Seven Habits, you can check out the full course in Hestia, part of the Know Yourself Programme, at hestia.makeitconscious.com, or watch the course sampler here.
