How to Live on Purpose and Fully Use Your Unique Talents

The hardest part of figuring out your life purpose is knowing where to start. The quest can feel so broad and abstract that we can’t pin it down into any meaningful pathway. Think about it. When we talk about living on purpose or getting life direction, what are we even talking about? Is it a calling and we’re meant to live responsively as Parker Palmer suggests in Let Your Life Speak? Is it vocation and we need to tap into a particular industry or career? Is it self-discovery and a retreat in Sedona would help us find clarity? What are we even looking for and how will we know when we find it?

After years of helping women discover their life plan, I believe I have landed on the most helpful description of what it means to have clarity of purpose. Or as the Japanese say, to know your “ikigai “or reason for being. And rather than a definition, I find knowing your life purpose is more often directional. It’s a place, not a burst of insight.

Your life purpose is found at the intersection of your talents, your heart and your influence. It’s the space where you live from the inside out, rooted in who you are and what you can contribute to the world around you. When you know your purpose you have a strong sense of identity. But you also understand where your talents meet the world’s great needs and you feel inspired to contribute in a focused way to the improvement of life for and alongside others. Finally you understand what influence you have and steward your power well to bring about change in the way that only you can do.

I find this understanding of purpose to be more helpful, though not necessarily any easier to access. We are notoriously blind to our own talents, unable to see ourselves for what we do well without conceit or insecurity. And our passions shift like the wind so it often takes the insight of a trusted guide to redirect us back our consistent self as seasons change. And lastly life favors inertia. It’s hard to get moving and actually take action in our unique areas of influence. It’s easier to stay stuck, complaining about our lack of purpose than to step into this tiny intersection.

But step into it we must if we’re ever to live a life of consequence.

That’s where the real challenge enters the equation. Despite knowing what your life purpose is about, it’s can still be elusive to find it. It’s also hard not to get sidetracked with what the world often presents to us as the tenets of the good life. Particularly here in America, women are raised to find our meaning in external markers of success. Instead of talents, heart and influence forming our lives, we are tempted to believe our purpose lies in men, money and material things. But a life purpose is not something we acquire. It’s something we already have from birth. And these items keep us living from the outside in, dependent on what we can get or acquire to be happy.

I want to help you live from the inside out and take back control of your purpose. You are entitled to a good life, and if you live out of a place of purpose, you maintain your agency to pursue what Mary Oliver calls your one precious life. When I work with clients, I often take them through a clear framework to illuminate every aspect of their purpose. I’d love to take you on a similar journey so you can know how to go after your life purpose.

Join my next FREE online workshop called Live on Purpose: How to Break Through the Mystery of Your Life Purpose. In under an hour I’ll give you a roadmap back to you so you can unlock your potential and live the life you were meant to live.

Make this the moment you decide to be bold and go after the purpose you already have inside you.