Clarity of purpose and direction is one of the keys to career and life success that I discuss in several of my books: Straight Talk for Success, Your Success GPS and 42 Rules to Jumpstart Your Professional Success. To develop your personal clarity or purpose you need to do three things. First, define what success means to you. Second, create a vivid mental image of you as a success. Third, clarify your personal values.
To develop your clarity of purpose you need to carefully think through your priorities – and then align your behavior to ensure that you are living according to them. To do so, ask yourself two very important questions:
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What do I want to do in this life?
- What is the result I want to achieve?
The answers to these two questions will not only guide the big decisions you make, they will serve as a guide for living your life on a day to day basis.
Here’s another way to look at it. Imagine that you’re nearing the end of your life. You feel happy, content and satisfied. You don’t fear death because you’ve had a happy and prosperous life. You’ve lived and loved and feel that you’ve been blessed.
Once you get yourself into this frame of mind, look back at your life and what you’ve accomplished. Of all these accomplishments, what matters the most to you? What challenges did you overcome along the way to these accomplishments? How did you do it? What messages did you send to others by the way you lived your life?
This visualization exercise should help you in clarifying your purpose and direction in this life. It’s important because it helps you create a vivid mental image of what success looks like for you personally. This is not day dreaming. It is real work. You are designing your future in your mind.
After a lot of thinking and reflection, I realized that my purpose in life is simple – to help others grow and succeed. I am a teacher and a helper. I enjoy helping others succeed. I’m good at it. It’s very fulfilling. When I’m at the end of my life, I expect that I’ll look back with great joy at the number of people I helped succeed.
I keep this mental picture in mind as I go about my day to day business. I ask myself a simple question almost every day. “Bud, did the things you did today support your life’s purpose of helping others learn, grow and succeed?”
If I answer, “yes,” I consider it a successful day. If I answer “no,” I think about what I can do the next day to get back to living my purpose. They have a clear and vivid mental image of what success means to them. They live their life’s purpose every day. If you haven’t clarified your purpose in life, this is a good time to start. Once you get clear on your purpose, live it every day in all your actions.
That’s my take on creating and living a life of clarity of purpose. What’s yours? Please take a few minutes to leave a comment sharing your thoughts with us. As always, thanks for reading.
Bud
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