Your Purpose In Life
By Anil Bhatnagar

The happiness, success, and fulfilment that you either lack or enjoy in life are, in a way, nature's feedback on the extent to which you are living your purpose. Any work with good money or better job security may not necessarily be right or fulfilling for you. Your work is wedded to your life purpose and to the spiritual quality of your life.

Life is given to us so as to be prosperous, and we cannot be so unless we honour our dreams and fulfil them through the unique endowments we are blessed with, thus living the purpose we were born for. We do this best when we also contribute to society.

Any seed lying on the concrete can't grow, despite its inherent potential. Similarly, we all have the potential to grow and succeed, but we need the precise nourishment. Just as the length and shape of teeth on a key fit the lock it is meant to open, your unique talents, skills, temperament, commitments, strengths, interests, intentions, resources and capabilities guide you in determining the field you can excel in. Hard work is trying to open a different lock. If you give yourself to opening the very lock you are meant for, the work is intrinsically satisfying.

Here's how to go about it:

Rediscover your dreams
A true dream identifies a work that requires maximum use of our endowments and ensures maximum fulfilment of our dreams through maximum contribution to society. Being, rich, therefore, does not begin to be a dream unless you define what you propose to give to the society in order to earn such riches and what you propose to do with them. Some people pursue their dreams, other pursue their excuses.

Our dreams are truths in our lives. If we discover and fulfil them, we live life more fully. As a child we are full of dreams. The dust of minor failures, however, keeps falling on our faith in our potential, obscuring dreams. We may wake up to our dreams late in life. Nothing is more painful than realizing what we could have been if we had trusted our potential and chose to live life adventurously, faithfully, and meaningfully and without regrets.

True success in life is not piling up impressive possessions or titles, but growing form within. To experience fulfilment, you can’t simply collect degrees, purchase impressive labels, peruse what is hot in the market, opt for the current fad, or seek the best-paying career. You must discover who you are and let your best self shine.

Believe you have the power to fulfil your dreams

Your life is not a product of chance. You are here on earth for a purpose: to discover your life purpose and purse your dreams against all odds. Martin Luther King said, "If you have not discovered something you feel like giving your life for, you have not yet begun living your life."

Life is given to you not just to make a livelihood but also to discover the unique purpose you are born for and give your life to it. If you are not following your dreams, then whatever you are doing hardly matters because it shall be rather meaningless. Nature loads the trees with the fruits of the season. A baby comes to the world only after the mother's breasts are ready with mild. Similarly, God never gives us our dreams without the potential to fulfil them.

Finding your life purpose triangle
A true dream is in harmony with a triangular spiral that moves up with each cycle of accomplishment and aspires for progressively higher goals, enhanced endowments and greater contribution. Ask yourself what work would you do if you possessed infinite courage and if there were no possibility of failure. What are you good at? What would you do if you had no compulsion to earn money? If not done, what would you most regret? What is the one thing you never tire of doing?

Exercise vision and faith in the future
Visualize success and achievement in your chosen field. Imagine your daily routine. Making a decision or taking a new direction requires faith and courage; we are conditioned to equate unfamiliarity with insecurity. However, things that rare uncertain at one point in time often unfold into what is best for us later on / Fear is a constant companion, but it is meant to make us prepare well to do what is needful, not immobilise us.

Work with ethics and joy
Once you have chosen the right work for you, continue to listen to your heart and conscience. Ask yourself: is my work and the way I perform it ethical, responsible, and in the best interest of all concerned? Am I responding from love, ethics, hope and humility or from hate, fear, pessimism and arrogance?


Love and trust people you work with
Perceive people working with you to be already what you would want them to be. Notice their good qualities and appreciate them more. Problems with people display our beliefs and impressions about them and compound if we don’t change these beliefs to positive ones. When you stir some love and compassion into everything you do – in the most mundane and ordinary chores of the day – you prepare yourself to higher realms of prosperity.

Identify your purpose in life and spend your present moments in thoughts and actions that are conducive to the fulfilment of this purpose.

This is an edited extract from an article written by Anil Bhatnagar. Anil is a corporate trainer, author and personal growth coach, and Reiki consultant. You can view the full article at Anil's website www.anilbhatnagar.com