Let’s start with one simple question. “Are you happy?”.
Ponder this with utmost earnestness. If you dive deep into your ‘Self’ and examine your life as it is today, you may realize that perhaps you are not all that happy or, not happy at all. Many times, we confuse success with happiness.
Success vs Happiness
Some of the success indicators we use which lead to our belief that we are happy are:
A good job with an enviable position; (seemingly) meaningful work that we think we love to go to; a fat salary; a comfortable financial position giving us the freedom to do whatever we want, whenever we want, with whomever we want; a stable, active family (well-settled job or school); a good mix of leisure activities (social gatherings, pleasure outings); a connected, but not intrusive, extended family; and anything else that you can add as a social measure of success.
Depression of Success
Do these truly represent happiness? They do, maybe for some time, a short time for some, and a longer time for others. However, if we were to sit alone and contemplate honestly on if we were truly happy, the answer would not be a resounding yes.
True, most of us can say that we have a wonderful family, which includes beautiful kids, an excellent profession that we are proud of, an enviable position where others listen to us (or at least they pretend to), and so on. We seem to have hit all the right emotional and logical notes, that determine our happiness.
Still, I am sure you will agree that something didn’t feel right. Don’t get me wrong; those things are all great and they do bring us happiness, but the point is, it doesn’t last, which makes us unsettled at some point in life. There will come a time when everything would start feeling the same old, same old. Something will be missing.
That is the depression of success!
It, therefore, becomes important for us to examine what that missing thing is and find it. I call it purpose.
Are you truly happy?
Here are some questions you can ask yourself to determine the answer to the above question.
· Does your life feel stuck and is not moving smoothly like a stream?
· Do you have a nagging feeling that things are too good to be true, leading to a “back-of-the-mind” fear of the unknown?
· Does it feel like things no longer fit like a puzzle, as they used to?
· Is your life lacking the “spunk” it used to have?
e.g., the job is no longer exciting, relationships are not truly cordial, love for the partner is waning, the city is no longer charming, no time for things you truly like, and so on.
· Do you get a sense that you no longer know what you really want?
· Does it feel like expecting to be happy is a luxury?
· Is there an intolerable gap between what you want and what you have?
· Have you lost your sense of direction or purpose?
· If there was no fear, what would you really want at this stage in your life?
These and any more questions you can come up with based on deep introspection will reveal your honest response to the question, “Are you happy?”.
Now what?
How do we avoid going too far down the path of pursuing what we think is happiness? When we recognize that things are not going well for us (as indicated by the answers to the questions above), it will bother us today. It may shake us, or at the least wake us up from our slumber. However, it is a positive sign, as long as we recognize it and decide to do something about it.
If you are constantly daydreaming about something different, it is a clear indication that a change is necessary. Listen to your fantasies!
We don’t need to completely abandon the current. It’s an opportunity to review what we no longer want to continue in our life and discover what we truly want in its place.
A better version of yourself
Examine the train of thoughts your brain brings out as soon as you wake up every day. These are very likely the clues to what you should be paying attention to on that day. It’s the ‘to-do’ list for you if you will. Now examine what is there in that list and the quality of those items. Perhaps, you have a list of meetings you need to attend, a list of ‘must-do’ tasks for the day, and some other mundane things that need to be completed. If you are aware of Stephen Covey’s time quadrant, the items on your list are most likely to be in the first, third, or sometimes the fourth quadrant (Q1: Urgent and Important – fires to douse, Q3: Urgent and Not Important – Interrupts and Q4: Not Urgent and Not Important – Time wasters).
Ask yourself,
· Are those items that are part of your daily life worthy of your being?
· Do they define a greater version of yourself than what you are today?
· Do they define a greater vision that you ought to be carrying to justify your existence?
If the answer is no, stop, think, and do the following.
· Define a greater vision that you want to live and
· Build a greater version of yourself than what you are today to express that vision.
The greater version of yourself, and your vision become your purpose.
Purpose – the road to happiness
Every one of us has a special purpose for being here which is the greatest version of ourselves and a vision for our existence, as we saw in the previous section. The Universe wants us all to live our purpose. Sometimes, when we continue to go down the path of pursuing pseudo-happiness, ignoring the “uneasiness” caused by the symptoms of the depression of success, the Universe will remind us. It may be a gentle tap or a harsh blow depending on how we respond or not to the reminder.
Why is Purpose important?
Finding and living our purpose makes our lives more meaningful and joyful. When we are living our purpose to the fullest we won’t constantly crave something different. We will be so passionate about what we are doing that we won’t want to be doing anything else.
It will make our daily life and the work we do inspiring. We will rise every day with spring in our steps. We will enter the flow state and be in a sublime state of execution. Our effectiveness and the quality of our work will skyrocket. We will look upon our work as an opportunity to be seized with joy and made the most of, and not as a painful drudgery to be reluctantly endured. Daily trifles will become exciting challenges that we would want to conquer rather than problems that we would dread. We will have a sense of contributing.
Other areas of our life will transform magically. Our relationships will improve. Our work-life balance will be at its best because our job will no longer feel like a chore.
We will feel whole!
Career Purpose
A possible question is, “Whether one’s purpose has to be a career purpose or a life purpose?”. My response is, “How does it matter?”. However, if we want to be pedantic, the response would be, “It has to be the life purpose – which we work on carrying out to express our greatest self”! In other words, what we discover to be our life purpose should determine our career.
Let’s examine some common motivations for us to work. They range from “earning an income” at the basic level, to “living our purpose” at the top, with other things like, enjoyment, contribution, fulfillment etc. in between.
Isn’t it true most of us feel we are in the wrong jobs? Why are we in the wrong jobs in the first place? Reasons can be many – attraction towards money, social pressure, we thought it was what we wanted, etc. We don’t seem to truly know what we want.
What is the effect? We just pull the cart, as long as we can. We lose motivation. We try one after the other. It becomes a vicious cycle. Over a period of time, we lose our worth. This cycle creates a harmful effect on other areas of our lives. Our relationships start suffering. We overwork, losing precious time we could spend with family, and we become aimless.
And lastly, the How?
From where most of us are today, identifying our career purpose may sound like a luxury.
While it may take long for someone to realize their purpose, it is not impossible. It’s a process that involves introspection among other things, like identifying one’s passion, what drives them, what excites them, recalling when they were in a state of flow, times when they produced their best work, etc. It doesn’t happen overnight.
Identifying one’s purpose is a key area I help people with, in What’s My North?
Further, once we identify their career purpose, I help people make that switch to pursuing their passion by staying focused on their purpose. We work together on a path that feels right for them, through short-term, incremental shifts in their career, to get closer to their purpose.
If this topic is of interest to you and if this article has made you think about identifying your life purpose, do get in touch through What’s My North?. Click this link for a free sample session on What’s My North? coaching. I can assure you that it will be a worthy conversation.
What's my North? 
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