GET CURIOUS
How do I make a real change so I get to do work that matters? This was a question I found myself thinking about day after day, month after month, year after year. The question would rise up and distract me as I rode my bike to the Levi's headquarters downtown San Francisco, where I was working at the time. I was in my 30s, with two young babies, and I was increasingly aware of a deep-seeded yearning to make my work meaningful.
I looked around at people I knew, as you would when you want to buy a purse, or a new pair of jeans. Who does work that they love? And what do they do that could also do? Doing what others do was, of course, not the answer. As I later learned, as much as I wanted a shortcut, finding a pair of jeans that looked good on others wasn't what I really needed. What I needed was to make my own pair of jeans, and that meant, understanding what would really fit ME.
You see where I'm going with this analogy.
There really aren't shortcuts when it comes to finding what fits YOU. The only shortcut I discovered is actually stopping and taking it all in. To ask, as Elizabeth Gilbert advises, what makes ME curious? What have I always been interested in? How can I learn more about it? And - here comes the hard part - satisfy your curiosity, deepen your knowledge, BUT let go of the desire to have a set plan.
I discovered the long way that the blueprint for finding what makes us tick, the work we're here to do, and a sense of purpose (or you can call it personal success) is not following other people's path. It's going your own way.
For me, once I discovered that I was interested in learning about Happiness, I read books, journaled, and eventually decided to interview people. I created a discussion guide for those interviews. I looked around at people whom I found interesting, and asked if I can interview them. Then I asked them to recommend someone they know who's interesting, and they made the introduction.
Our own happiness is a project we can tackle directly - the bootstraping way.
If this sounds complicated, you're right. It is. But it doesn't have to be. I learned a lot of useful tools during my entangled journey to find what makes me tick (which for me was two-staged, first, being a freelance researcher, and later, a coach).
Why should you look for work that makes you tick? YOU HAVE MORE TO CONTRIBUTE THAN YOU THINK. If you're interested to have a partner, a coach, as you take this journey, I'd be honored to support you.
#findyourpurpose #findyourpath
