Welcome to Episode#79 of the Own Your Best Life Podcast. Why is it easier for you to see other people’s purposes than it is to see your own? I received this question recently from one of the participants in my Spiritual Achiever Leadership Coaching program and I wanted to answer it here because it highlights an important aspect about purpose that will help you as you discover your own.

The ability for us to identify purpose comes with our own ability to think more clearly and cleanly about our life. Most of us go through our lives without that kind of clarity. We are fixated instead on getting things done and out of the way. Checking the proverbial to-do list of our lives, whether it is in the small tasks we do on a daily basis or on the larger items like, “get this job” or “go on a trip”. 

When we operate in this very human realm of using our physical senses and survival instincts, we are usually focused solely on staying alive and out of discomfort. How does this look in your own life? Staying alive is having shelter, money, and food. Staying out of discomfort is seeking enjoyment and avoiding things that we fear or don’t like.

This seems fairly obvious. Why wouldn’t you want to seek enjoyment out of life? Why wouldn’t you want to avoid things you don’t like? Why wouldn’t you want to stay alive? Of course we want all these things. Yet, purpose isn’t found within these day to day activities in this way. If it was, you wouldn’t be asking yourself what’s my purpose in life or what do I want my purpose to be in my work or relationships. Instead, you’d be saying that my purpose is to stay alive and to avoid discomfort.

You’re looking instead for a purpose that allows you to evolve. Purpose can be found in the daily experiences we have in life if we can see how we grow and evolve through them. Yet, we are often so entrenched in living our lives, caught up in the likes and dislikes and the stress of getting things done that we miss our own growth and evolution. We miss the patterns that we play out time and again. We miss the opportunities to see where that road less traveled could take us and instead keep doing the same things over and over again in the same ways we’ve always done them.

Yet, when you’re not in your own life – it is much easier to see what is needed and what is helpful. It’s easier for us to see the opportunities available and the patterns of struggle in someone else. This is why it’s easier to see someone else’s purpose. You aren’t caught in their stories. There is no entanglement of emotion. There is no history or past to let go of and resolve. There is only a birds eye view, a superconscious view of the situation. In that type of clarity, it’s easier to see what is true.

To be able to do that for yourself requires the ability to step out of your own daily life to see it for what it is – a semblance of events strung together. No good or bad energies to anything. Just what it truly is – life happening, events unfolding and the world changing before your eyes. If you were to look at your own life like a movie reel that didn’t involve you but someone else that looked like you and had your name in it, it would be much easier to step into that type of clarity I’m describing.

This is why things in hindsight are easier to understand. We see the entire story and we understand what happened. In this moment, you can see a story emerging if you take a moment to step back and look at yourself from a different perspective.

This is one of the reasons why I like to guide clients through meditations and visualizations. It allows us to drop into that superconscious perspective that has more wisdom and insight than our very human survivalist selves. When you become the observer, you step into what is known as the seat of the soul. That part of ourselves that is not suffering, in pain or caught up in the day to day. That part of ourselves that is witness without judgment of our lives. 

We often get there through meditation, in stillness, nature or by being in flow when we’re lost in the moment to the outer world. Time seems to stand still and we experience life in a way that doesn’t involve likes or dislikes, but involves acceptance of all that is around you. You might have experienced this when you interrupted the automatic behaviors of your life through some kind of external event like loss or grief or the breakdown of the external world in some way. You might have experienced this when you are in your work or in a creative pursuit. 

In those moment’s there is no me, nor I or my personal self. There is just a being without separation. You feel connected. When we are within ourselves looking out at the world from a sense of me, myself and I – we are separate from the Universal wisdom where purposes arise from. You are in the microcosm whereas purpose is in the macrocosm. It answers questions like, “what am I here to learn?” or “why am I here?”

An overarching purpose that can guide your life may be this one. Understanding how to accept all that is happening in your life and allow it to evolve in a direction that evolves you and allows you to cultivate a sense of curiosity, meaning and surrender. It counteracts our very nature to fix and do, yet it is even more powerful because it understands why we try to fix and do. When this happens, you lessen the need to organize and control and you open yourself up to allow and engage.

Engagement in life is a co-creative activity when we move out of this idea that our human selves have all the answers. We decide instead to see what happens when we work with energy that’s not just ours, but belongs to a greater whole – a consciousness that connects all things. If you find it easier to see that for others than for yourself, it is ok. You’re experiencing consciousness all the same, just through an example of someone else. If you want to find it for yourself, allow yourself to shine your light just long enough on you, from outside of you – and perhaps you’ll see that your purpose was always there, it was just waiting to be seen from that which is not yourself.

If this topic resonates with you and you want to see transformational results in your life, you’ll love coaching. Getting coached consistently is the spark that will light the fire of inspiration to make the change you’re looking to make. It is the first step in creating clarity, making a massive shift and moving obstacles out of your way so you can move forward. You can go to www.mayempson.com/contact to learn more.

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If you’re ready to Own Your Best Life, I want to invite you to watch the free training on how to Stand Out and Lead, using spiritual, high-performance strategies. You can access the training at https://may-empson.mykajabi.com/stand-out-and-lead.

You can then apply to join my Spiritual Achiever® program, where you’re going to create your next chapter with spiritual and high-performance strategies to achieve time and financial freedom using my proven method. It’s risk-free. You either start seeing results within your first month or I give you your money back. Schedule your call HERE. We’ll see you inside.