In this article, I offer you some advice on how to find your life mission. These tips come from my professional experience, my private life, and also from scientific research.
This article doesn’t pretend to be a 100% answer to such a vital topic. However, the tips I’m going to share with you represent a starting point to begin finding your life mission.
This means that reading these tips is no substitute for the kind of personalized guidance I can offer you as a life coach.
Now, let’s move on to the tips.
4 tips on how to find your life mission
1 – Make decisions with your heart, not just with your brain
We live in a world that values rationality, well-considered choices, and decisions based on what makes sense.
But we all also have a more intuitive form of intelligence that doesn’t boil down to a logical series of evaluations or calculations.
We are not only rationally intelligent beings, we are also gifted with intuitive intelligence.
Science demonstrated the presence of neurons in the heart in “Evidence for functional neurons in the human heart”.
This paper was published in 1991 in the journal “The Lancet” by J. Andrew Armour and his team of researchers.
Through their research, they proved that the heart contains neurons that are not brain-dependent and play a crucial role in regulating heart rhythm and contraction.
This discovery has opened the way for further studies to understand how the heart and brain interact to maintain health and well-being.
Of course, this research does not show that the heart is totally independent of the brain in all situations.
On the other hand, we’ve all made decisions based on our hearts, putting aside what our rational minds were telling us.
If you want to find your life’s mission, you can’t just make decisions like most people who are content with a decent life with no great aspirations.
To find your place in this world, you need to make decisions from time to time based on what’s right for your heart, or even better for your soul.
In short, our rational mind allows us to navigate the river of our life well most of the time, but when it comes to finding what will fulfill you, your heart can lead you to live the life you deserve to live.
2 – Read books on personal development
Sometimes, the best way to find your life mission is to find and read books on personal development.
In my case, I read Anthony Robbins’ book Unlimited Power in 1995.
This book enabled me to activate and bring out something that was already inside me, namely my passion for psychology and coaching.
This book made me realize that I could turn my passion for helping people overcome their difficulties and have a better life into a real career.
You can also read books about finding your life mission. When I first found this book, I remember that I wasn’t actually looking for it.
Sometimes I think it wasn’t me who found the book, but rather the book that drew me to it.
Of course, there’s nothing rational about what I’m telling you, it’s just what happened to me.
When you walk into a bookshop or browse through a book sales website, you can choose a book either rationally, for example by reading the reviews of other people who have read the book, or you can follow the advice of a friend who has read it, or you can trust your intuition.
All three possibilities can help you make the right choice, but when it comes to finding the resource that will enable you to activate what already exists within you, your intuition can help you find your life mission.
In a nutshell, self-help books are a way of activating something you already have and bringing it into your life.
3 – Master your fears
Finding your life mission requires you to step out of your mental comfort zone. This doesn’t mean you shouldn’t consider the possible consequences of your choices.
On the contrary, if you think back to experiences from your past, you’ll understand that what can block you is not what’s real, but rather what you imagine to be real.
Being aware of this is the first step towards mastering your fears.
Next, you can write down on a piece of paper what scares or stresses you.
Then you can jot down what might happen to yourself and others.
Then you can note what is likely to happen from a more rational point of view.
Then you can mark down what you’re going to do if all goes according to common sense.
Finally, draw up an action plan to begin dealing with a situation that could become more catastrophic.
By doing this, you’ll be able to:
- avoid procrastination
- take action
- start getting feedback or results
- reduce your fears
- improve the quality of your life
The cognitive-behavioral approach provides us with two valuable tools: implementation intentions and mental contrasts.
The former are affirmations such as if…then. For example, in this specific case, an implementation intention might be: if I feel fear, then I will still carry out the task I programmed the day before.
Mental contrast is precisely what we saw earlier, i.e. listing everything that could put you in difficulty or prevent you from carrying out the actions you had planned. Next, you’ll identify the solutions you need to deal with these difficulties before they arise.
Implementation Intentions and Mental Contrast are effective in helping you overcome your fears, because they enable you to break out of your habits, minimizing the effect of your fears and making it easier to take action.
To find out more about fear, I suggest you read my article on overcoming the fear of taking action.
To sum up, with the right strategy you can minimize your blockages and take the actions you need to thrive.
4 – Take advantage of research from life mission theory
Ventegodt’s Life Mission Theory (2011) is a very important resource if you want to find your life mission and improve the quality of your existence from a global point of view.
To go further on this theme, I invite you to visit the Quality of Life Research Center website, of which the previous author is the director.
In this paragraph, I’m just going to share with you one aspect of this theory, namely the theory of talent.
According to Ventegodt (2004), to thrive with our core talent and achieve the state Abraham Maslow called self-actualization, we have a triple need:
- Recognize our core talent (our purpose in life) and put it to work.
- Understand our potential powers and know how to express them.
- Accept our human form, including our gender, and express it.
I will now give you my interpretation of these different dimensions.
First of all, recognizing our main talent in life is the essential step in finding our life mission.
It’s often others who help us become aware of some of our talents.
On our own, we can also identify these talents, but this requires us to develop greater self-awareness.
Then we need to learn how to put our talent into practice.
This requires developing sufficient self-esteem and self-confidence to give ourselves the right to bring that talent to life.
Next, we need to realize that our talents can have an impact on our lives and the lives of others.
This helps motivate us to practice them regularly and to confirm their effectiveness and value even more.
Next, we need to accept ourselves completely, so we need to learn to love even our flaws, weaknesses, etc.
This enables us to activate our true nature and thus access our full potential.
As a final point on this aspect of the theory, one way to find one’s life mission is to identify one’s talents and understand their value.
But putting them into practice requires total self-acceptance, which in turn fosters the development of self-esteem.
With greater self-esteem and an understanding of what we can bring to others, it becomes easier to take action and express our talents more and more fully.
It is these talents that will guide us in the search for our life mission.
What are the best books on personal development?
There are many books that can help you go further in the field of personal development, but choosing the ones best suited to your needs is not easy and requires time. To make your search easier, I’ve put together a guide to the best books on personal development.
Conclusion on finding your life mission
In this article, I’ve shared with you a wide range of advice on how to find your life mission.
Each one of these tips is designed to give you greater clarity on the path that will lead you to the life you are born to live.
If you want to be coached by a life coach, you can write to us now through our contact form or call us by phone or WhatsApp at +33 6 69 46 03 79.
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Read this article in other languages
Français : Comment trouver sa mission de vie et vivre une vie épanouissante
Italiano: Come trovare la propria missione nella vita e vivere una vita appagante