How To Discover And Define Your Life's Work

The Importance of Aligning Your Professional Life With Your Life's Work 

Here is a simple tool to help you discover and define your life's work. Write a descriptive statement specifying why you are doing what you do, or what you would be doing in an ideal environment. This descriptive should be a single sentence that answers:

Who are you professionally?

What are you doing for a living?

Why are you doing this?

For instance:

I am a highly paid executive (who)

generating significant personal revenue (what)

to enable me to fund projects that feed the hungry (why).

I am a teacher (who)

opening young minds (what)

so the world will be a better place for my grandchildren (why).

I am a consultant (who)

who advises business start-ups (what)

so I have time to write children's books with moral stories (why).

The "why" should be clearly aligned to your life's purpose, which can either be directly linked to your employment work (as in the case of the teacher example above) or not (as in the other two examples). The "who" and "what" are the means to your Determined Life desired outcomes or goals.

Remember, the "who" in this purpose statement is not a true reflection of who you truly are, but merely a descriptive of who you are in your professional life capacity. 

When you align your professional life with your life's purpose you will be Living A Determined Professional Life. 

When that happens, you will never long to stay in bed longer (even on a cold winter's morning) nor will you ever again not look forward to Monday mornings. 

This article is partially excerpted from our top-ranked personal development book Project You: Living A Determined Life, which is available in Kindle and paperback formats at Amazon.