Ways To Discover Your Life Purpose

Published on May 10th, 2019

Updated on January 3rd, 2024

For some people, achieving their dreams and goals comes quite easily. Other people find it more difficult to understand what their purpose is in life. Some questions that they might ask themselves are:

Why am I here?
What am I supposed to be doing with my life?
What will bring me the most happiness in my life?

We will discuss some of the ways you can figure out what your life purpose is, to get you on track to fulfilling your dreams. We hope that these techniques help you on your quest to discovering your life purpose.

What do you love to do?

One of the first ways to discover your life purpose is to think about what you love to do. There are many people in this world who take jobs simply to earn a paycheck. They go to work, leave, go home, and repeat in an endless cycle. But many of these people never feel truly fulfilled, because it what they love doing. They are not passionate about their lifestyle.

What comes easily to you?

What are your natural talents and abilities? What are you particularly good at? What do your friends and family consistently comment on, as far as your talents? Your life purpose is generally speaking something that comes easily to you. You naturally find yourself drawn to it, and find it easy to accomplish goals within this field.

If you find difficulty in science in school, your life purpose is probably not to become a doctor. If you can’t commit to learning how to carry a tune, then pursuing a passion as a musician probably is not in the cards. Yes, all professions require practice to evolve and get better at them. But our life purpose is usually found in the activities and hobbies that come most easily to us. If we are struggling to learn something, it is usually not meant for us.

Start with the end in mind.

Think about what kind of life you would like to create for yourself. You can do this in a bunch of different ways. You can create a vision board, adding magazine clippings and drawings of what you want your life to look like. You can do a guided visualization, as you meditate and relax, thinking about your ideal lifestyle.

What kind of lifestyle have you always dreamed about for yourself?
Do you want a traditional lifestyle — one with a husband or wife, a nice house, children, pets, and a stable job?
Do you want something more adventurous, like traveling around the world?
Is it your goal to be famous one day?

Once you have an idea of what your desired goal is, you can work backwards from there.

Start with the end in mind. Once you know your larger life goals, you can create smaller goals in order to achieve them. You can start to plan. You can think about ways you can achieve the things you want to achieve. By having a solid idea of the goals you want, you can live the life that you want.

Think about what you enjoyed as a child.

When we are children, we naturally go towards the things that we enjoy. If you spend time with children, you will notice that children focus their attention on the things that they enjoy. Some children are born with natural artistic abilities, and enjoy drawing and painting. Others show an inclination towards sports. Children are innocent, pure, and they do the things they do simply because they enjoy them.

Later on in life, we become knowledgeable of the constraints of adult life. We are aware that some professions make more money than others. We become aware that some professions are of higher social status than others. We might stray away from our favorite childhood activities in order to pursue things that we know are more acceptable as adults — jobs that will bring us more money and security.

Think back to when you were a child.

What brought you the most happiness?
What types of activities could you do for hours and hours without stopping?
What were your natural interests?

These are the places where we most often find our life purpose. These are the activities we naturally enjoy, and have enjoyed our entire lives. Your inner child wants you to stop focusing on how to pay the bills, and get back to what made you most happy.