PROFESSIONAL CAREER and LIFE PURPOSE: 3 simple steps to ALIGN!

I know a lot of people that don’t like their professional careers, they do it only for money, and they would like to work with something that is more aligned with their life purpose!

What about you? Are you happy with your work? Do feel satisfied with it? I’m curious, so please let me know in the comments…

If you are not, today I want to help you to understand what are the steps that you need to take to find a professional career that’s more aligned with you!

Professional Career and Life Purpose

First of all, let me clarify something, your life purpose is about what you came to do here, in this life, on this planet. People might have many different purposes to achieve in their lives, and they can be pretty much anything!

It might involve the work you do, but your professional career is not necessarily connected to your life purpose! Having said that, we all have natural talents that are aligned with our “authentic selves”, and it would be amazing if all of us could work with them!

Unfortunately, many of these talents got lost because of the social conditioning that we have received to fit in society, and as a result, some of us end up having a hamster wheel kind of life, day after day doing the same things only for the sake of making money and paying bills!

Personally, I believe that the best way to escape the slavery system that we were born into, is to find what we really like to do, and to work with something that gives us a lot of happiness and satisfaction!

So now, I will tell you what you need to do to reconnect with your “authentic self”, and also 3 steps that you need to take to find a career that is more aligned with you.

Steps to Climb the Stairs

You will not find your purpose if you don’t do anything to find it. The action plan is to follow your inner calling at any given moment in your life. To reconnect with your “authentic self” and retrieve your natural talents, is very important to invest your time and energy on things that you really like to do!

Just imagine that your purpose is at the top of a staircase, how can you have an overview from above if you don’t climb one step at a time to get there? If you don’t know your purpose in your professional life, probably is because you haven’t taken the necessary steps yet!

What are these steps then? They are about learning everything that you feel attracted to all the time, and when your interest changes, go to next one! Nothing gets lost, there is always something that stays with you.

Maybe now you cannot see a connection among the things you had interest throughout your life, but I assure you, when you reach the top of the staircase, you will be able to see how each one of them was a necessary step on your journey!

When it happens, most likely you will be ready to understand how you can use all the knowledge that you have accumulated to do so some sort of work in your life.

How to Find your Passion

Each step on the staircase that I mentioned before, represents a different passion in different moments of your life. A passion is something that you love to do, that gives you a lot of joy and satisfaction, that you can spend hours doing it and they would feel like minutes. Some questions to reflect about it:

• What is it that you really love to do?
• What is it that attracts you?
• If you could go to a library and take all the books that you want, which session would you go?
• What would you like to learn more?

They are very simple questions, but if go around asking people, you would be surprised to know that many of them would say that they have no idea. If you haven’t found such an interest yet, what is it that when you see other people doing, you really admire the skills they have? If by watching them, you feel as if a light switches on inside you, there are good chances that you would love to learn that skill.

To find the lost parts of your “authentic self”, you need to get out of the box that you were placed, also known as social conditioning. Start to explore, allow yourself to dream without limits! And once you find what you really like, don’t let any kind of excuses to stop you from developing that skill!

Usually our excuses have a name: time and money! Let me tell you something about them, time is a matter of organizing your priorities, and you don’t need money to access knowledge because you have a lot of things for free on the internet!

Anything that you like, look at the available options, and find a way to learn!

How to Find your Differential

Finding a career that is more aligned with you, is not only about finding your passion, is a combination between what you like to do with what you do well!

After you climb some steps in the staircase, and you have developed some skills, you should be able to identify what you are good at, these questions might help you with that:

• What do you do so well that gives you a differential from other people?
• Is there anything that you have enough knowledge that you could teach?

If nothing comes to your mind, think about what is it that usually people ask for your help. If you can identify a reason that makes people look for you, that’s what you do well!

Your passion is the overview, your differential is your specialty inside this overview. For example, let’s say that your passion is about travelling, what do you do when you travel that makes you different from others that have the same passion?

• Maybe you know how to travel without spending a lot of money
• Or you know how to explore nature and the local culture
•  Or you are really good at planning an itinerary that saves a lot of timeWhen you find your passion and what you do well, then you can move to the third and final step, to find a way to help other people!

How to Help Other People

According to the anthropologist Margaret Mead, the earliest sign of a true civilization is a fossil of a healed broken femur, do you know why? Because it shows that someone must have cared for the injured person, otherwise he or she would not be able to survive!

We are part of something much bigger than ourselves, in this reality, it’s expressed as the society we live! We are like cells in a body, coexisting, co-creating, each one of us doing its own part to contribute to the whole system!

After you find what’s really aligned with you, start to think about how you can use your talents to help other people. Ask yourself:

•  Who can you help?
• How can people benefit from your work?
•  What kind of difference can you make in their lives?

If you still have difficulties to find answers to these questions, I would like you to imagine a scenario where you don’t need any money to live…

• How would you spend your days then?
• What would be your motivation to get out of bed every morning?
• What kind of contribution would you give to society?

See, it’s not so complicated to find a career that is more aligned with you. The formula is quite simple: what you really like to do (your passion) + what you do well (your differential) = how you can help other people!

The problem is to get rid of all the conditioning and limitations that you have received. If you would like to understand better what they are, I have a post about them, click here to read it!