Finding Your Personal Purpose

Happy Thursday to you and welcome back to my newsletter! This week we are focused on finding purpose, with thoughts from Jenn Lim, the author of Beyond Happiness as our guide! Also, please join me for my Newsweek interview series, Better, today at 12 pm EDT / 9 am PT/5 pm GMT. My guest is Pamela Slim, author of The Widest Net. She’ll share with us how businesses new and old can find new opportunities and also zero in on their ideal customer. Join us here and bring your questions to pose as we answer them live!

As a friendly reminder, if you aren’t part of my email list, which has completely different content than this newsletter, sign up here - it has advice on personal branding, strategies to grow your business, and ways that you can lead a more fulfilling life.

So many people have felt lost over the past year and a half. The truth is that many had felt just as lost before. People start working at a job for one reason or another out of obligation, and that can lead to feelings of emptiness and fatigue without a driving force of reason behind it. Jenn Lim, CEO and co-founder of Delivering Happiness, has a purpose to create happier company cultures for a sustainable approach to business. Her mission is to teach businesses how to create workplaces that generate profit, prioritize people and growth at every level while having an authentic identity at their core. Here are a few thoughts Jenn shared about how we can find our true self and purpose. If you’d like to watch our entire interview, you can view that here.

Why having a purpose breeds happiness:

“Purpose is actually strongly tied into happiness. We can have all of these different levers of happiness that can increase what's right with us in terms of having a sense of autonomy, having a sense of control over decisions, progressing in life, developing in life, and having meaningful connections. But time and time again, the most sustainable form of happiness comes back to having a higher purpose. Essentially, it is doing something that's bigger than yourself, and for organizations, is doing something that's bigger than just making more money.”

Three guides to identify your purpose:

“Number one is what energizes you? This is not necessarily positive energy, it could be fiery energy too. It could be climate change, it could be social justice, whatever it is that makes you feel that sense of fire and energy. The second thing is talent, and of course, that sounds really simple. One way to test for that is to take a second to reflect on the people that you really respect. What are they coming to you for? They can see what's naturally shining out of you - what you bring to the table that's unique and different and better than anyone else can. And then the third thing is impact. Think really quickly about what kind of impact you would like to make, whether it's at work or in your sphere of life.”

Getting out of a rut:

“What we can do as individuals, is really control and change what we can within, and embrace and adapt to the things that we can't. Take it day by day so that when you wake up in the morning, you think about what's in store for you for the rest of the day. Is this exactly how I want to be spending my time? Is this actually laddering up to what I most believe in and the people I love and the things that are most meaningful to me? It's the little things, we realized over the course of the last 18+ months, that mean the most. Some things you want to stop, some things you want to stay, some things you want to start. Make a list of them. It doesn't have to be for the rest of your life, just day by day. At the very end of your day just sit down for five or ten minutes and reflect on what were the things that actually tapped into what means the most, and how you want to live your life.”

Thanks so much for reading my newsletter - if you liked it, please share it with a friend! Next week, my guest will be Alisa Cohn, author of From Start-up to Grown-up! We’ll be talking about learning how to act as a leader. For a calendar reminder, click here.

Hope to see you today for my talk with Pamela Slim! If you can’t make today’s interview, we always make a replay available on my YouTube page. If you’d like to be notified when the newest episode is available, simply subscribe to my channel and you’ll receive a notification.

Wishing you health and success - 

Dorie