4 elements of purpose

Are you equating life purpose with mission?

Many people make the mistake of equating life purpose with mission. I did for the longest time, and it kept me from learning the details of my purpose.

There are many ways to think about purpose. No one has the definitive framework on purpose. However, most purpose frameworks focus on the doing components of purpose, and ignore the being components. And most of those that focus on the doing components, tend to focus on mission - i.e. the thing you are supposed to do or achieve or change in the world.

Why does this matter?

Mission is important. However, while many of us secretly hope there is a grand reason for our being here, we are also scared to learn that reason. What may be asked of us? Will we be up to the task? What if it is something we don’t want to do? Or something that makes us uncomfortable? Our egos have developed to keep us safe, and anything that might threaten our safety will be quickly dealt with or kept at bay. Knowing our mission is threatening. It’s safer to not know. And so, we can be kept from learning our purpose by ourselves - particularly when we are overly focused on the mission aspect of our purpose.

There is another reason. Who we are, who we are being matters. In our action oriented world, we tend to over focus on doing at the expense of being. When doing arises from a place of reaction or anxiety, it misses much. When doing arises from a place of deep being, the effects can be profound with much less effort. And we are more likely to bring the best of ourselves forward in the ways that are needed.

Our true purpose in life is a combination of being elements and doing elements. To know our true purpose is to learn all 4 components of our true purpose (essence, blessing, mission, and message). This is the power of the true purpose framework. It gives us a way to learn and know ourselves at the level of being - our essence, and why we are here - our blessing (a bridge between being and doing), our mission and our message.

You can learn more about these components here.