by Safiyyah Boolay-Jappie
Over the past 2 days I've shared some thoughts about exploring and discovering your purpose. For most of us, this is neither easy, nor comfortable. It requires us to see ourselves without the conditioning that has shaped us throughout our lives. No mean feat. But if we miss this step in the process discovering our purpose remains an intellectual ideal that becomes a point of pain, frustration and despair.
A critical part of your journey to purpose is to discover the small ways in which you can accommodate your purpose in your life and to begin implementing changes that help to align your daily life with your underlying purpose. Our brains pull out all the stops when we try to do this by conjuring up the most magnificent ways in which to make purpose manifest in our lives. Grand and elaborate ideas come to mind. Things that are so spectacular, that it sends our nervous system into a tailspin. And we stay stuck. Frustrated and disillusioned. We lose a bit of ourselves when have a sense of our purpose, and feel unable to move in its direction.
Again, Keep it Simple Sweetheart. Make the littlest of changes. Things that feel unradical, mundane and pedestrian. But aligned nonetheless. By making the littlest of changes in your day-to-day life, you will start the process of living in alignment with your purpose each and every day. Your logical mind will rebel and even dismiss your attempts at integrating your purpose into your life in small ways, but pay it no mind. Stay on course.
I believe that Small Shifts culminate in Big Changes. It might take a while, but by becoming aware, intentional and deliberate about this integration, you will certainly start to feel the difference in your enthusiasm for life as a whole, and your clarity about your purpose will emerge incrementally. If you've come to see how important being amidst nature is for you, plan out your week around nature. Redefine what being in nature means for you. One client of mine took the meaning that eating her lunch under the blue skies at work would be her nature stipend for the day and her walk in the mornings become an escape among the trees in her neighbourhood and an opportunity to be in the open.
Maybe an outing with your children could be enough to recover your energy.
If you enjoy helping those in need, start to look for opportunities to volunteer in your community. Or, you might even want to change your job, or start a new business that is more in line with your mission. Perhaps this is a bigger step you can take over time, but there is no reason why you cannot do this, especially if you've given yourself the space to make your purpose more prevalent in your life on a day to day basis.
So there you have it!
By following along with the steps outlined above, you could easily be on your way to finding and living out your purpose.
Safiyyah Boolay-Jappie is a life coach, based in South Africa. She helps high achieving, ambitious women to create impactful careers without sacrificing their well-being, themselves, their relationships, and quality of life. She helps women to beat burnout and to thrive. Having worked in the corporate world for 20 years, most of these in complex leadership roles whilst raising two children, she understands the demands being juggled by professional women, both in their professional and personal lives. Today, she wants to share those learnings with other women through her personal coaching and training.
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