Day 5 – This is it. The final day. Over the past 4 days you’ve made several solid progress steps.
First you identified the RECIPIENT of your purpose, i.e. WHO or WHAT you are compassionately concerned about so you can tap into your passion.
Then you wrote out your gifts so you could understand the ROLE you play in touching other people’s lives.
And on Wednesday you envisioned the ideal impact you could have on one of your recipients, which is your purpose RESULT.
Then yesterday, BAM!!! You wrote a purpose statement using a simple three-part formula that squarely puts you in the sweet spot of whom God made you to be.
No worries if you haven’t gotten this all done. You still have time to work on the lessons.
These simple steps are empowering. We’ve already seen people taking amazing action steps.
But do you want the truth?
Most people will fail to live any differently even after they identify their purpose.
Why?
Living into your purpose can be hard. You need intentional routines and boundaries to succeed. Otherwise, your purpose becomes a lofty intention that gathers dust as other things of less importance crowd it out.
But you don’t have to fail. Living into your God-given purpose is possible and can radically improve your life.
I’m living proof. You can redefine yourself (at any age – I was over 50 years old) to live a happier and more productive life that honors God.
After almost twenty-five years of pulpit ministry, I took a leap into entrepreneurship. I still strongly have a foot in ministry because it is part of my purpose, but now I am living more fully and faithfully into my gifts.
I ALWAYS felt like a square peg in a round hole during my pulpit ministry years. My kid’s heard me say a thousand times, “If I wasn’t a pastor what do you think I should be?”
Don’t get me wrong, I loved my congregations. I had amazing experiences, but the feeling that I was missing something constantly nagged me. Do you ever feel like you’re just not quite where you need to be? That was definitely me.
To put this in terms of what we’ve learned together over the last few days…too many of my gifts were on a tight leash that was choking me to death. If you’re in that space too long you will succumb to overwhelm, burn-out, resentment, or in my case depression.
So what do you do?
Well, today I’m going to give you a quick 30,000 foot view of what it takes. Then, I’ll share one extremely easy life hack you can use everyday to make tiny constant advances in fulfilling your purpose.
THE 30,000 FOOT VIEW – GOALS, ROUTINES, AND REVIEWS
1) GOALS
Once you know your purpose you need a few purpose based goals. Without goals, all you have is a good intention that never materializes. At some point you’ve got to say, “Here’s what I am going to do about living in my purpose…”
Your goals don’t have to be big, dramatic, flashy changes to be life-giving and meaningful. You don’t have to leap out of your job like I did.
For example, my mom’s getting older and more limited. I love the stuffing out of her. She’s given so much to me. I want to give back to her. I want to give her my time. I also want to use my handyman skills to improve the quality of her life. I want no regrets. (Look closely and you’ll see the three core purpose elements in what I just said.)
So, I set an extremely uncomplicated goal for 2016. I would visit my mother at least six times during the year. So many amazing memories happened because of that goal. For instance, we spontaneously went to the zoo for a day in St. Louis. She told me awesome stories about my dad as we ambled along. We took pictures together that I’ll cherish. Plus, I got to help her in big ways, like building a wheel chair ramp for her home and replacing her hot water heater.
So you don’t need crazy epic goals (though those are my favorite), but you need SOMETHING to give your purpose a direction to grow.
2. DAILY ROUTINES
Once you have goals in place, you need solid daily routines to prevent procrastination and neglect from killing your goal.
I read a great quote yesterday, “The secret of your future is hidden in your daily routine.” So very true.
Without daily routines here’s what happens to most goals. You write a goal on paper, make a New Year’s resolution, or vow to make a big change. You start out with a flurry of enthusiasm and rapidly falter into an abyss of quiet failure. Been there. Done that. Have the “I set goals and never finish” t-shirt. At least I used to. Now I have a reliable system to work on goals every day.
Part of that system is daily journaling. For today’s action step I’ll share with you one of the uber easy components of my daily journal. It will help you consistently make progress with your purpose.
First let me interject this – You don’t need big and flashy daily actions. Think about the exercises you’ve been doing; easy actions steps like, do something beneficial for a recipient or unleash a gift today.
Just imagine what would happen if you took action like that every day for 30 days!
3. REGULAR REVIEWS
Another goal saving routine I have is a weekly goals review. This process takes less than thirty minutes a week. Yet, it’s been life changing. Specifically, weekly reviews broke a pattern of “feast and famine” goal-setting. So often I was either all in or hands off with my annual goals. If I had eight goals, I would crush three and barely touch five. That was true until I started reviewing every goal weekly.
I hope I am not making successful living your purpose out sound like an overwhelming big deal. It’s really not. You just need a few simple systems.
For example, each morning and evening I journal. In the evening, I do what I call “counting wins”. Here’s how it works:
YOUR FINAL ACTION STEPS
ACTION STEP #1 – Count your wins.
At the end of the day reflect and write down these two things:
1) Three wins for the day. What are three choices/actions you took during the day related to your purpose. For example, for me activities might include teaching a webinar, surprising my wife at work with flowers, sending my kids an encouraging text, or helping someone solve a time management problem.
2) One thing I could have done better is… Complete that sentence every evening. Look for mistakes and think about how you can avoid them in the future. Over time this sentence can powerfully reveal bad patterns.
These two points of reflection push you to examine your life. You’ll spot gaps between who you are and who you want to be. You’ll stay purpose focused and take incremental steps of faith everyday.
ACTION STEP #2 – Post in the private Facebook page three wins and something you could do better. Click here to post.
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As you know, this is the last day of the 5-Day Purpose Challenge, BUT I know many of you are still working through the steps.
Also, some of you are just getting started. Don’t worry, I won’t leave you hanging. The materials will be available and I’ll be in our private Facebook group for another week or so.
There are also still questions to be answered particularly after today’s post like:
- How do I tighten the focus of my purpose because I still feel like I have too many things.
- How do I set effective goals? I’ve set goals before but usually don’t complete them.
- What EXACTLY can I do as daily routines to keep me on track?
- How do I make my purpose a priority so other things don’t crowd it out?
If you want answers to these questions and are ready to be taken by the hand and shown the exact process, I can help.
I’m putting the finishing touches on a brand-new course that will walk you through a proven step-by-step system for living into your purpose so you can unleash your gifts and make a profound difference. It’s called, Fire Up Your Purpose.
The course will be available for enrollment on Tuesday, June 6th at 10:00 a.m. CDT. I’ll be sending more details as well as a behind-the-scenes walkthrough of the course on Monday.
So stay tuned!
Blessings until Monday,
John Arnold
The Practical Disciple
PS: As usual, I’ll be live on Facebook today (Friday) at 11a.m. to go deeper with today’s lessons and answer any questions. Join me here.