Recently, I was feeling lost and like my days were running together. Twenty-four hour periods were going by, and I was aimless but still busy. I knew I needed a reset and to focus on living with intention. Doing so also meant reminding myself of my purpose. Even though I’ve accepted and voiced my purpose before, when I’m feeling this way, it gets foggy. With the exception of the time in my life when I thought my purpose was to be a yoga therapist (I still love, practice, and teach yoga), the answer has always been the same.
Once I reconnected with my purpose again (to bring joy and entertainment to people through my writing), I wanted to revisit the idea of living around it–with intention. Living with intention means doing things daily that are meaningful to you based on how you are wired. Getting to this place of living intentionally means reflecting on a few specific things about yourself, so I thought I’d share the process.
Find your purpose
I know. This is a pretty grand idea, but let’s try not to make it too complicated. If you don’t know your purpose, you can start by thinking about some things you really, really love doing. For example, I love writing and I love making people laugh. When I think about how much joy I get from those two things, I know that they go hand in hand for me. I’m not a comedian, like Jim Carey, but I love the subtle humor of Nora Ephron. Using humor in my writing makes me feel like my authentic self. I also know that what I write may never be published or produced or gain any big fame, but that doesn’t matter. I still want to write because I truly love it.
Here’s another way you can start to determine your purpose. Sarah Swami created a short quiz about finding your dharma. Dharma in Sanskrit (which we learn about in yoga) means “life mission”. Swami uses 9 archetypes to help guide you toward a sort of umbrella to finding who you are. Once you know that, you can figure out the specifics. For example, my two main results were the artist and the entertainer. Looking at those two archetypes and reading the descriptions together confirmed yet again what I was put on this earth to do.
Image by NoName_13 from Pixabay
Identify your core values
The next step towards living life with intention is to identify your core values. These are ideas that are important to you–such as integrity, learning, or kindness. The core values for a company “are the deeply ingrained principles that guide all of a company’s actions”1. In the same way, our personal values guide our individual actions and behaviors. To get to these values, you have to go beyond the values of God, family, and health. Those are important to most people, don’t get me wrong. Many people do care about their spirituality, their relationships, and their weight and cholesterol. But, you have to go deeper and figure out the ones that are part of your core being. To figure out your core values, you can take a look at a list of them and begin by circling or jotting down the ones that stick out to you. Once you’ve identified 3 to 5 ideals, look up each word in a dictionary or thesaurus and find synonyms for them. Synonyms can help you to really hone in on what the word means. You may even find a word that makes more sense for you.
Benefit
If you’re a person who gets to the end of the day feeling as though you were so busy but also like you didn’t accomplish anything, it’s because you’re ignoring what you value. You might be going through your task list, but that’s just not enough to design a life where every day counts. Acknowledging what’s most important to you keeps you on track for living purposefully. You can use those ideals to categorize your daily activities. The result is that you will actually feel productive in your day–like you lived and didn’t just exist. Core values are a direct reflection of what makes you feel the most like yourself. Once you know them, you can move on to the next step of setting intentions for your days.
Example
Let’s take my value of direction as an example. To me this value means that I have a plan for my writing projects every day. That plan is based on the deadlines for submissions to film festivals, magazines, and literary competitions. I don’t do well being left totally on my own to just live my days willy-nilly and work when inspired, so the calendar has to be my guide. Because I’m a visual person, I bought a vertical wall calendar so that I could plot out all my deadlines and see each day and week and month. Doing this is feeding my core value of direction so that I stay on track and see how much time I actually have to finish a piece. Being aware of this value helps me to live each day with an intention or an aim for how much writing I should complete or which of my works in progress needs to be prioritized.
Conclusion
One way to think about going through this process of reflection is that you are realizing your dream life. Many people talk about the life they’d love to have, but don’t make steps toward achieving it. Is that you? If it is, starting with a bird’s eye view of why you’re here and then getting down to how that plays out Monday-Friday could be the thing you’ve been seeking. It all begins with the acceptance of your true self and then the implementation can begin. First, you must figure out your purpose. Then you have to decide what living that purpose means. Could you explain it to someone or write it in a journal entry? Next, you have to identify your core values. Once you know your purpose and your core values, then you can set an overarching plan for living a life that includes them. So, if one of your values is freedom, what can you do in your day that creates that feeling?
Whenever my own vision for my life gets cloudy, I come back to these steps. It’s not a process that we’re only allowed to go through once in a lifetime. Sometimes we just need a reminder of how special we are and the prompting to act as though that matters—because it does. It matters every day. As Annie Dillard says, “How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”2
