Finding your purpose helps you to live a longer and more meaningful life. Purpose is not handed to you. You choose it. Life purposes cna and do change over time. You get to create and then own your own purpose.

These five strategies can help you unearth, detect, or discover your purpose. In this way you can create a more meaningful, impactful, amazing life.

The number one way is to serve others. Many people mistakenly believe that if you feel lost and unsure of who you are you need to get selfish. To do just what you want. To change the relationships and responsibilities that surround you. Finding your purpose inside of yourself is self obsessed. The way to happily find who you are is to get outside of yourself and serve others. Stanford and Florida State University researchers found that meaningfulness came from giving to others in a connected relationship.

The second thing is to take inventory of your relationship with yourself. Find out your likes, strengths, and who you are. This might take trial and error, most likely it will take time. Some ways people around you find who they are, might not work for you. To start with I recommend the Working Genius test that gives you a high level overview of what you enjoy and are good at. There are tests that can help you pinpoint your strengths. There are also personality tests that give you different ideas about what are your strengths, likes, and who you are. This way you can gain a better idea on who you are and what you are good at.

So number three is to assess your relationships with others. Who you are will reflect on those that you keep company with. Who do you like to be around? What role do you take in the relationship? Do you lead or do they? Are they positive people or whiners? What is the payoff that you receive from being with them? Why do you choose to be around them?

Number four is to look at what you love to do. How do you like to spend your time? What pet projects do you have? What things are you passionate about? Do you love theater, music, video games, or feel a passion for a non profit or injustice? Those types of things will help you to identify your purpose.

The fifth thing to do is to get feedback and we talked about this in episode 177 with strengths. Use people that you can trust and find out what they notice about the things you are good at and love to do. Just like with strengths where you think something is easy and everyone can do it, you may do something that is so ingrained that you don’t realize how important or difficult it is.

Finding your purpose will not be something you do today or even this week. Finding your purpose is a long term endeavor for most of us.

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