This is the final article of a 3-part series on using your life purpose to make greater impact in the rapidly changing world of today.
The previous articles in this series explain the importance of re-cracking the code of your life purpose when at life’s crossroads and the step-by-step process of delineating this purpose.
In this present article, I explain how you can make greater impact and create a worthwhile legacy using your well-defined purpose.
The knowledge of your life purpose, although very powerful and liberating, is only a starting point on your road to a living a fulfilling life.
With your written purpose statement, you can begin to craft out ideas of how living with that purpose will look like in different areas of life. Congruence between your new ideas and your purpose will help create excitement and momentum towards seeing the reality of those ideas come to life.
Here is a step-by step process of charting how to make great impact with your re-delineated purpose:
- It is essential that you take some time to give an explanation of why the purpose statement you have written is your purpose. This step will help you to identify what motivates you and will go a long way in helping you stick to maintaining the long haul in purposeful living at such uncertain times as we are in.
When Anna Edwards who was at a major life crossroads took the steps outlined in my previous article, she came out with the following purpose statement which is a metaphor:
‘My purpose is to be the ballerina in my dance company, taking the centre stage while using my dancing and style to define the poetry of the production around me.’
When she reflected on her ‘why’, she identified that being a great ballerina had been an object of her admiration right from her childhood when she took ballet lessons and performed in many shows. Although she ultimately did not take the professional ballet dancer career route, she continues to be an avid ballet enthusiast, attending shows in her leisure and keeping up with the professionals. So when she wrote her life purpose in ballet metaphor, she connects with it to the core.
Identifying this reason gave her more zeal to enact this purpose in all areas of her life.
- Analyze each area of your life and start writing down some big ideas of how your purpose will be lived out in each of them. Do this for your career, family, leadership pursuits, and community engagements.
- Take a long haul of envisioning 3-5 years into the future to see how living out your purpose in each of these areas of your life could look like. With this bright outlook of an ideal future, take time to draw out 3-5 year development plans towards this envisioned purpose-driven future.
Having these long range development plans written down will prepare you for the next set of steps. You will be energized to set intentional goals towards making these purpose-driven ideas come to reality.
- This step involves breaking down the bigger 3-5 year plans into goals that could be attained within 2 years. Write down goals that you could set a target of 2 years to achieve towards your purpose-driven life in all areas of your life stated in step 2.
- Using your 2-year goals as a framework, you are now ready to be more specific. It is now time to draw out action steps for the next one year towards the 2-year goals.
- The details of action steps required for achieving your one-year goals need to be broken down further into actionable steps for 3 and 6 month target dates. So take the steps from step 5 and draw our smaller, shorter due-date action steps that could be completed within 3 to 6 months and that will help fulfill the longer one-year target plan.
- Now you are armed with easy to-reach targeted action steps that you can begin to act upon immediately. As you complete the shorter range steps, you will need to go through the steps (5 & 6) again. The big picture is that you need to be consistently intentional.
- As you take an overview of your new plans, you may discover that some of the engagements or tasks you are currently engaged in may need to be dropped as they may no longer be congruent with your new purpose-driven action steps.
- You may also need to downgrade some relationships in your business and/or personal life that are not going to help you live out your purpose.
On the other hand, you most likely will need to form new partnerships and/or create new relationships with people and entities that will fortify your efforts and help you accomplish your new goals.
- Keep re-visiting these planned out action steps and goals, re-evaluating them and re-defining them to ensure they continue to serve towards fulfilling your purpose amidst rapidly changing external situations.
The intentional act of creating relevant action steps and goals towards living, working and leading with purpose in every area of your life is a solid framework for making great impact in your circles of influence, community and the world at large.
When well performed, this kind of mapping exercise will steer you to the right directions and propel you towards creating a worthwhile legacy. So do not wait on the brink line. Go ahead and map out your unique plans around your decoded life purpose and get set for a fulfilling life.
What are your thoughts on the above steps for developing a plan to use your purpose to make great impact in today’s world?
Have you mapped out a similar plan? How is it working out for you?