We all have questions, don’t we! But perhaps one of the most important and most asked of questions is, what is my purpose? And how do I discover my purpose? This is a question for the ages and I wish it was as easy to answer.

Here is my attempt to answer this question and my hope is that this gives you an idea of how to seek that which you truly love and are passionate about by asking yourself honest and tough questions.

First, you need to define purpose, which is simply this – purpose is your passion zeroed-in, as defined by my mentor and the president of the John Maxwell Team. Purpose is your WHY. Your life purpose consists of the central motivating aims of your life—the reasons you get up in the morning, the reason you were born! Purpose can guide life decisions, influence behavior, shape goals, offer a sense of direction and create meaning.

There are two questions you should ask yourself if you want to find your purpose. First, what am I passionate about? When you find your passion in life by finding yourself through self-awareness, you are then on a journey to finding your purpose. Passion is often linked to purpose because it’s a great energizer. Passion takes you over the edge, it takes you where everything else can never take you, it sets you apart from the crowd. When you are passionate about something, nothing and no one can stop you even when In fact sometimes it’s not reasonable.

The second question is – what am I good at? But you have to be careful here, it is possible to be passionate about something that you are not good at or not gifted in. Passion with the right gifting and skill is almost guaranteed success – we can see great examples of this in musicians or athletes. Now the idea here is to get both what your passionate about and good/gifted at to form your purpose.

As we contemplate about what goals we want to achieve in 2020 and beyond, please link your goals back to your purpose. This is because you must work within your strengths, interests, giftedness and passion. When you work in the area of your weaknesses you get tired, in fact you burn out not because you are lazy but because you are just not energized by those activities BUT if you work in the area of your strengths, you are unstoppable, are always super energized. This is the main reason why NEW YEAR resolutions most often don’t pass the 2 weeks test.

Now, Is it also possible to not have your own dream/purpose? I believe it is possible BUT that’s a story for another day.