Your Purpose: The Key to Joy and Success

By Tim Kelley

Your goals will not lead you to success. That's a provocative statement, and I mean to provoke you! Think about it. Have you noticed that when you set goals and achieve them, the sense of accomplishment is usually short-lived? That the reality of having the house, the car, the job, or the relationship doesn't live up to your imagination of it?

But still we harbor these thoughts of wild success. Nearly everyone has dreamed about winning the lottery. Did you know that lottery winners attempt suicide with greater frequency than the rest of us? That they are usually worse off financially three years after winning the lottery than they were before they won?

Let me say it again: your goals will not lead you to success. Why, you ask? Well, what is success? Is it the money, the expensive toys or clothes, the big house? No! It is the experience you imagine you will have when you acquire those things. Success is an experience. And acquiring things will not give you that experience, or it will give it to you only for a very brief period of time.

So what will give you the experience? What actually creates success? I contend that you are here on earth for a reason, that there is something you are meant to do. And when you are doing that thing, you have the experience of success. Have you ever felt flow? Have you ever felt that you were completely aligned with your world? People report joy, passion, ease and fulfillment when they are having this experience. In these moments, you are doing what you came here to do; you are living out your purpose.

We are drawn powerfully to people who have this clear sense of purpose; being around them gives us a sense of connection to something larger. It gives our lives meaning. We desire it in our leaders, though most leaders are not truly purpose-driven.

But it is very hard to maintain this sense of flow, this alignment with purpose. Why? Well, if you don't know what your purpose is, the experiences of alignment come and go as you accidentally hit on something purposeful. If you knew your purpose, you could make deliberate choices that would keep you aligned. Flow, meaning and fulfillment would become the norm, rather than the exception.

So, how do you find your purpose? Most people use trial and error: they go through life trying different things to see what "feels" right. This method takes a long time and usually produces only a vague sense of purpose. Others look at their lives so far and try to find patterns in the things they've done and the things that light them up; this can produce a "purpose statement," but usually one that's a rough approximation of their true purpose.

I assert that you don't need to go looking for you purpose; it's inside you. It is part of your design, and all the information you need to live your purpose is contained within you. The question is, how do you access it?

Without delving too deeply into psychology, allow me to make a basic distinction: the part of you that you know about, think about, and make decisions from I will call the ego (also termed the conscious in psychology). Your purpose is invisible to your everyday mind (in what Jung calls the unconscious). It lives in the dark, until you find it. For want of a better term, I will call the part of you that sets your purpose your soul. How much religious or spiritual significance you attach to this term depends on your beliefs. I use it because most people understand immediately what I am talking about. An equally applicable term is "entelechy", a principle within an organism that guides its development.

Using this terminology, I would say that all your goals are set by your ego, with varying degrees of influence from your soul. A goal that serves you is one that is consistent with your purpose, and the soul is the keeper of your purpose, not the ego.

How can you determine whether your goals are connected to your soul? Many people use intuition, and this is a fine tool. I offer an additional method: the ego has distinct values, which cause it to choose certain things over others. The soul operates by completely different principles. By being aware of the differences, you may be able to hear or sense which part is driving you.

The ego is in charge of making choices, keeping you safe, and getting your needs met. Things the ego likes:

• Health
• Wealth
• Happiness
• Avoiding fear, pain, struggle
• Particular life circumstances, like owning a home, a fast car, living in a specific place, having a great relationship
• Acceptance, approval, admiration, respect from others
• Dividing experiences into good and bad, like and don't like

The soul's job is to oversee your growth and development and move you forward along your path. Some characteristics of how the soul sees the world:

• Concerned with being, not doing
• A long-term view, sometimes beyond a single lifetime
• No attachment to what form the manifestation of the purpose takes
  ("it's all good")
• No preference for what experience the ego is having; doesn't divide experiences into good and bad
• Sees a person's life as a "work of art" or journey
• Sees all experiences as teachings along a path (no matter how the ego experiences them)

Don't take what I am saying to mean that the ego is bad in some sense, or that its values don't serve. You need your ego in order to function. The problem arises when your ego sets a goal that is not in alignment with your soul. You may have experienced this: you set goals and try to achieve success, but nothing happens. Life is dry and empty, full of effort but without fulfillment or reward. I call this "slogging;" it is the opposite of flow. This happens because your ego and soul are working at cross-purposes: your soul is trying to steer you back onto the path to your purpose, and your ego is pursuing a goal that moves you away from your purpose. Your ego has little chance of winning this tug-of-war.

This conflict can never result in success, in either an inner or an outer sense of the word. My point is simply this: an ego goal or desire that is not related to your life purpose will go nowhere. Even if you manage to succeed at a goal that is not purposeful for you, your experience of success will be brief. This is not true success.

How, then, do you find your purpose? Simple: ask your soul; it already knows your purpose. Unfortunately, "simple" doesn't always mean "easy." The ego usually resists finding your purpose, for fear of what might happen. You must make peace with these fears before you can make contact with your soul and learn your purpose.

Try this: write down a list of all the things that might go wrong if you learned your life's purpose. Don't allow yourself to be constrained by logic; come up with extreme, worst-case scenarios, things like dying alone in the gutter or going to Hell. Don't stop writing until you can't think of anything else that could possibly go wrong.

Now ask yourself, "If I found my purpose and it resulted in all this, would I pursue it?" For most people, the answer is a resounding "NO!" Strangely, it doesn't matter whether you answer "yes" or "no;" your ego just needs to know what the worst case is and what you'll do about it. Write down a list of conditions under which you'd be willing to pursue your purpose. For example, it might sound something like this: "I will pursue my purpose so long as I can still feed my family, I'm able to make at least as much money as I'm making now, and I don't have to move to another country." Go ahead, write it out.

This simple exercise allows your ego to set boundaries. You will pursue your purpose so long as these criteria are met. If they cannot be met, you will stop pursuing your purpose and tend to other needs and problems. This lets your ego know that you will remain safe if you find your purpose.

Now you're ready to make contact with your soul and learn your purpose! "How do I do that," you ask? There are a number of ways: prayer, meditation and hypnotherapy are some popular ones. But the simplest way, and the one I use most often, is by journaling. Not just any journaling; you have to do it in a particular way. You write it out as a dialogue with your soul. Have you ever read the script of a play? It looks like that:

Jane: Soul, are you there?

Soul: Yes, I'm always here.

Jane: Can I ask you about my purpose?

Soul: Sure.

Jane: What is it?

Soul: I thought you'd never ask...

There's no special technique or magic pill; you just write down both parts of the dialogue. "Soul" might not work for you; fine, use another term that seems right, like spirit, or higher self, or God. Choose something that fits your beliefs.

People have strong skeptical reactions because it seems way too simple. Can it really be that simple? Yes, it can. The part of you that knows your purpose is just sitting by the phone, waiting for you to call. And there's no need to restrict yourself to asking about your purpose: you can ask for advice about anything. You might find the results surprising. Don't knock it 'til you've tried it!

So if you accept the premise that you have a purpose, and that you will be more successful if you are aligned with that purpose, then the next step is to find it. Or to choose to be distracted by all the little things clamoring for your ego's attention. Your call.

Copyright © 2007 Timothy A. Kelley. All rights reserved.

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