“Everything is practice” said Pelé one of the greatest footballers of all time. Life is a practice. Parenting is a practice. Even loving is a practice. Everything is practice, it truly is. When we practice something, we are taking action to get better at it. We do something over and over again to master it while continuously learning and adjusting course along the way. Practice doesn’t make perfect however, it simply makes progress.
For some reason when it comes to finding and following our true purpose, we don’t treat it as a practice. It’s more of a dream or a silent longing that goes unacknowledged and unattended to. It’s something to explore when we win lotto, the kids leave home or we retire. We put it off until one day we’re sitting at our desks asking ourselves “is this really all there is to life? Am I really going to be spending my life doing this?”
We don’t need to give everything up and start over to practice our purpose though. We can start small. We first find the courage to admit we have a longing for it and then we devote a small part of our week to practising it – that might be just 15 minutes a day or three hours a week. We make time to tend to our purpose and nurture it until one day we find ourselves doing more and more of it, and getting better and better at it.
A good place to start exploring is with the ‘ikigai’ model, which is Japanese meaning ‘reason for being’. The two circles of ‘what you love’ and ‘what the world needs’ seem so apt right now given the current state of our world. (To dig deep on this model, read The Purpose Project )
As always, if I can be of service, please reach out. I’m here. I care.
With love
PS If you missed my recent podcast Conversations on The Coronation. Listen here
About me: I’m a Purpose Educator and author of The Purpose Project. I help leaders attract and retain the best people by harnessing the power of deep purpose and storytelling. I do this through The Purpose Project for Companies, a customised consultative process for co-creating a new purpose statement and The Purpose Project Course, a 7-step online course to help employees bring their own why to work.