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. 

Working To Live A Determined Professional Life

Do You Love What You Do? 

Your life's work is not necessarily your employment work. The latter is how you put food on the table, clothes on your back and shelter over your head.

It is interesting that the workplace has so many Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) tracking a variety of areas in order to measure organizational success and improvement. And yet, very few people use the one solitary KPI of determining their own career success that makes the most sense ── do you love what you do?

If you do not love what you are doing in your employment chances are you are working to live ── generating an income to meet your financial obligations and some of your wants and desires. Hopefully some of these wants and desires are aligned with your Determined Life goals and desired outcomes.

You can leverage your income generating activities one of two ways:

1) continue to climb the income and status ladders in your organization or industry and focus on career success as a key metric for your life, or

2) use your employment income to fund your dream fulfillment and achieve your Determined Life goals.

The first alternative makes your personal revenue scalable, but often results in the postponed pursuit of your dreams, goals and life's purpose. 

The second alternative leverages your ability to produce sufficient (though perhaps not maximum) income while making your Determined Life dreams and goals scalable by reserving the majority of your time and energy for pursuit of your goals and life's purpose.

Albert Schweitzer understood the linkage between success and doing what you love: "Success is not the key to happiness. Happiness is the key to success. If you love what you are doing, you will be successful." 

That's what we would call Living A Determined Professional Life. 

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.