Purpose vs Career - What am I really looking for?

I watched this TED talk by Emilie Wapnick whilst on the treadmill yesterday morning (one of my 'how to find time to do things outside of work' tips!). It resonated with me and has got me thinking.

In my introduction to this whole experiment I talked about purpose not being a career. It took me a while to figure this out. As Emilie points out in her talk, from the simple question 'what do you want to be when you grow up?' we're so used to thinking that from school, through college, through university that there should be one career or one type of job out there that we should choose and that's what we're going to be investing our time in. We look through hundreds of brochures (brochures in my days, now its all online!), lists of jobs, career paths and automatically end up thinking about the what, rather than the why.

What do I want to be versus who am I and how can I impact the world or others with this. At least this is where I had been stuck in a loop.

For example, we hear 'be a doctor', 'you should be an accountant' or 'I want to be an artist'. There's nothing wrong with this but I think there are some preceding steps before getting to this.

If you've been on the journey and hit a brick wall of 'I want to change my job but have no idea what to do' you may well have, like me, started looking at lists of job categories and profiles on recruiting websites. I used to think this was a good start to see if something stands out to me when I read it, but I got nothing. I used to try this every few months and still nothing. I'd either convince myself I wasn't good enough, didn't have the right experience, it wouldn't pay enough or it sounded boring. Would love to hear if anyone else has been through this.

But what I had failed to determine before I looked at available jobs is taking a step back and working out my bigger goal first - what is my unique nature and how can I use that to bring meaning to what I do and in turn fulfilment.

An example of Jack Canfield's purpose is “Inspiring and empowering people to live their highest vision in a context of love and joy.” His unique nature is to teach, bring people together and tell stories. He's created a role for himself to do this while inspiring others.

So back to the doctor, accountant and artist examples - they all have a purpose and in many cases multiple purposes depending on the individual but we don't talk about those when we scan the job profiles or when we think about what we should do for a living. You could be a doctor and have a purpose in teaching others in less fortunate countries how to manage their healthcare procedures. You could be an accountant with a purpose of helping distressed homeowners refinance their properties, you could be an artist with a purpose of healing people with disorders and so on. I could have probably worded these better but hopefully you catch my drift.

I think the exercise of looking at job profiles is a great one to start bringing some reality to your purpose once it's defined and to see whats out there but the work to self dsicover your purpose is a must as a pre-requisite and you shouldn't let the web of job profiles limit you either. I love Emilie's idea of showing that's it's ok to not have a simple 'box' or job profile that you sit in and we should support each other if we do or if we don't. For some of us it's better for to define our own role if it doesn't exist. I definitely see myself leaning towards a 'multipotentialite'.

What I also think is important to note here as I go through my self discovery journey is that a purpose is much more about a lifestyle instead of a career choice and a job. It's all and everything you do. All your daily actions towards your purpose and goal must be in tune. Whether it's how you treat people, build relationships or have a work life balance. Hence my concept of 'Lifestyle Adventures' - it is not just about your 'work day' itself but the lifestyle and behaviours that you create with it.

Over the next few blog posts I am planning to share some of the different self-discovery exercises I have tried to pull these puzzle pieces together for my purpose statement. The aim is that these pieces will help guide my choice of lifestyle adventures to really see and feel it, and with those experiences I will be able to define my purpose statement. That is the goal :)

I would love to hear if this post resonates with you and I hope you find the TED talk useful too.