Are You Worried You Might Never Find Your Purpose?

Read on for tips on how to find your 'something more'

Photo by laura bicknell on Unsplash

Hi and welcome to ‘Something More’. Thanks for reading this free post. If you’re new here, I’m Caroline Ferguson, mindset trainer and therapist. Every fortnight I provide stories, tips and tools to help you build a growth mindset, boost your self-awareness (#1 life skill) and explore a life that matters. I also run monthly group coaching calls for paying subscribers – upgrade for a month or a year to join us and receive recordings and extra mindset tools in your inbox.

Purpose can be a scary word

In the world of personal development, there’s a lot of emphasis on finding your purpose – the ONE BIG THING we’re supposedly put on this planet to do.

I’m not kidding when I tell you that being clueless about my purpose used to keep me awake at night. For several years when I started coaching, I felt like the only person in the circles I moved in who didn’t seem to have a single, over-arching point to their life. Everyone else had it all figured out –allegedly.

I was wracked by FOMO, desperate to be in on the great secret. I bought expensive online courses and nearly bankrupted myself joining masterminds that promised to help me find this essential new thing.

Sometimes I even felt I was getting close – I’d get excited about an idea, only to realise it wasn’t ‘purposeful’ enough. It wasn’t The One.

Until eventually…

I realised that many of the passionate, high-potential people around me were as lost as I was when it came to purpose. We’d all swallowed the myth, pumped out by guru-coaches, that if we didn’t know what the point of our existence was, we were seriously lacking.

That’s not to say I didn’t believe in living purposefully, but it took me years to feel my way into what purpose meant for me. And then it dawned on me…

All the time I was searching for my purpose, I was ignoring the fact that I’d already found it

The itch I carried for decades – knowing there was ‘something more’ I was supposed to do or be – resolved the instant I made the decision to retrain as a psychotherapist. My ‘something more’ turned out to be helping others overcome their self-sabotaging beliefs and behaviours so they can grow into their ‘something more’.

I’d been looking for a sophisticated and complex new solution when a simple, existing truth was the right answer. No mastermind or course out there could have shown me that – I had to live it for myself in here (points to her heart).

The fact is that purpose isn’t something new we need to bolt on. It grows out of us. It’s an innate mix of our values, our talents, our appetites and the activities that put us in flow. The best way to find it is to get to know ourselves in depth and tune in to what makes us feel most fulfillingly ourselves.

How can we figure out what our ‘something more’ is?

Many of my clients are multi-passionate, high sensation-seekers. They’re good at many things and curious about a wide swathe of topics. How can people with such a shifting, evolving set of interests pin down a single purpose?

Well for a start, I tend not to talk about ‘purpose’ during mindset training – it’s way too loaded. Instead we talk about IMPACT, which can be chunked down into manageable bites.

I ask my clients a few simple questions about the impact they make, like:

“What positive difference do you make? On what, whom or where? Do you enjoy making that difference, and if so, why? What impact do others recognise you have – at work, at home, among your friends and family?”

Those smaller, more specific questions are easier to answer than “What’s your life’s purpose?”.

Often, a person’s impacts naturally group themselves into distinct themes. It’s these themes, I believe, that point to our something more.

Take one of my clients; let’s call her Olivia.

“Hmmm,” she said, when I asked her what positive difference she makes in the various areas of her life.

“I show my kids it’s OK to be themselves and express their wants and needs, and I make sure they know their strengths… For my team at work, I tailor their roles around what they enjoy and are good at… They know it’s safe to make suggestions about how we can improve our individual and team performance. I’ve brought in quarterly personal growth awards just for our team.”

Olivia’s impacts were clustered around themes of authentic living, exploring our potential, and encouraging people that it was OK to be seen and heard.

When I suggested that her purpose might have something to do with enabling others to be their best, she looked at me, stunned, then had a big, snorty cry. She’d never connected the dots herself and she told me it felt like coming home.

This new realisation gave Olivia the impetus to train as a corporate coach. I spoke to her recently and she’s working closely with her company’s learning and development team and loving helping employees to flourish.

Does our purpose remain the same for life?

Each of us is a complex, multi-dimensional being, and our paths aren’t always neatly defined. We’re probably not going to be quite the same person at 20 as we will be at 40, 60 and beyond.

Some people may quickly find the something more that perfectly aligns with who they are. For others (like me), it takes a bit longer to pin it down, because life is a journey of reinvention, learning, and discovery, with each experience enriching the next chapter.

But through it all, I’m finding that a person’s something more seems to remain rooted in a core aspect of themselves that grows and flows as they evolve. The outputs might look different as time passes, but if you drill down, they hold true to the original theme.

When we find that theme, we live and work from a place of genuine interest and passion, and our potential to impact the world is magnified. It’s when we’re acting purposefully that we unlock that time-suspending state of flow – the place where hours fly by and everything feels like play.

Find your something more

If you’re feeling that hunger for a more meaningful life and you don’t believe you’ve found your sense of purpose yet, ask yourself the ‘impact’ questions:

• What positive difference do I enjoy making – at home, at work and elsewhere?

• Why do I enjoy having that impact?

• Who or what benefits from the difference I make? People? Places? Causes? The planet?

• What do others notice about me, in terms of my impact on the world? (Hint: ask them!)

• In any situation, ask, what’s the best possible outcome for me and for others? What can I do right now to help make that outcome happen?

Your mind will provide the answers. Keep asking the questions about different situations and you’ll start to find patterns and themes emerging.

In the meantime, you don’t have to categorically know your purpose in order to live a life that matters. While you’re exploring your something more, you can decide you’re going to be the driver of your life rather than a passenger. Try making choices consciously based on your values, and take note of what changes. (We did a mindset training session on values – the recording is available to next level subscribers.)

And here’s the beautiful irony: by making the choice to live ‘on purpose’, you might just stumble upon the big purpose you’ve been looking for.

Thanks for reading – I’m glad you made it to the end. I’d love to hear in the comments about your experiences of finding your purpose, or searching for it.

If you’ve found this article useful, please help me by liking the post and restacking it so that others can find it too.

Until next time, take care,

PS - I was talking about purpose and impact a few days ago with Sarah Kent, who runs a wonderful project called Dreamworks. She records short conversations with women about their dreams and aspirations and publishes the anonymous transcripts in her beautiful Substack, A Field of Dreams. Please take a look. We had such a chewy, energising chat, which I’ll share with you when it’s my turn to feature in Sarah’s newsletter.