Guest article contributed by Stephani Cook, EdS
Certified Life and Enneagram Coach
In her book, Made for This, author and speaker Jennie Allen writes this, “Eventually our minutes and days equal our lives. It is possible to waste our lives.”
I was gifted this book a few years ago for my 50th birthday. As a person of faith, I don’t believe in coincidences. But I am almost certain the friend who purchased it likely had no idea she was giving me a lifeline.
As I celebrated that milestone birthday, I was in the most restless season of my life.
I had enjoyed a long career, but not long enough to retire. My husband and I had raised two children and put them through college. They were building lives apart from ours for the first time since we became parents. And I was finding myself in an unfamiliar place. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the rest of my life. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with the next day. I had no idea what I even enjoyed apart from being a mom. I had been functioning on autopilot for so many years that I was numb to my own life.
I was doing almost nothing on purpose or with purpose.
Purpose is the kind of word I put in the same camp as “soul mate” or “passion”. There can be this idea that each of us has only one of them. One purpose for our whole lives. And if we miss it, there’s no way to ever find it again. Because we spend our lives looking for that one thing, that one purpose, we often miss what is right in front of us. And as Jennie says, “we waste our lives.” Or so it seems.
As I searched, prayed, and suffered through that difficult season of my own life, I uncovered some things that I believe matter greatly if we want to live with purpose and intention.
I want to offer you a series of questions to help you give thought to your own life. Some may be easy to answer. Some will be more difficult. But if you will spend time reflecting on (and I recommend journaling around) these five questions, chances are you will take giant steps towards living on purpose and with purpose.
- What do you want?
It seems like a silly question, but I remember a time when I could not even begin to answer it.
It had been so long since I had thought about what I wanted that considering it felt foreign or even selfish. You may be able to answer the question quickly. If so, you are one step ahead of many of us. If not, let me help you. -
- If you knew you had only one year to live, what would you change about the way you spend your time each day?
- What are the things you would make certain you accomplished with the time you had left?
- Who are the people you would want to spend your final days with and what would you want them to know?
- What would you want your obituary to say? Or what would you want said in your eulogy?
It may feel grim to think about, but it is a fact…from the moment we are born, we begin dying. So, what do you want from the time you have left?
- Why do you want it?
At the heart of this question lies your core values. Values are deeply held beliefs that are usually internalized during our upbringing or decided on in adulthood.
We get to choose them.
By spending time reflecting on core values and narrowing them down to two or three, we can begin to make shifts in our daily activities to align them more closely to what we want in life.
You can Google “core values exercise” and find dozens of activities to help you define your own if you aren’t sure where to begin.
- What are your strengths and how do you use them?
Often, we are unable to define our own strengths because they come so easily to us that we take them for granted. We spend more time coveting the strengths of others than we do honing in on and appreciating our own.
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- What is the thing you’ve done that you are most proud of?
- When do you feel yourself come alive?
- What would you do for the rest of your life and not get paid to do it?
Chances are, you are using your strengths in those moments. We are the happiest when we are using our signature strengths for a greater good.
- Who are the people and where are the places I spend the most time?
If we consider that minutes and moments make up our lives, it is likely we need to do an audit of how we are spending those moments.
In coaching, we often say “awareness is key.”
By considering what your days look like now, you will be able to find pockets of time that you are wasting. You will identify things that aren’t helping you get closer to what you want.
Unlike many resources in life, none of us can create or buy more time.
We are all given the same number of minutes each day. The difference between those who live with intention and those who do not, is that the intentional person knows how he will spend those minutes before they come to pass.
- What are you grateful for each day?
It is human nature to focus on what we don’t have rather than what we do. But that practice can rob us of enjoying much of our lives.
In the words of Lysa Terkeurst, “You steer where you stare.”
Living with intention does not mean that we practice toxic positivity or avoid real problems when they arise, but it does mean that we find something in each day that we can be thankful for. When you put this into practice, you may find that your life is full of far more of the things you need to be intentional than you realized.
It is never too late to give thought to living with more intention. It is likely that the way you answer some of these questions will change numerous times over the span of your life. Don’t worry, your purpose has not passed you by and you do not have only one purpose. But considering that today is the first day of the rest of your life, what will you do with it?
About the Author:
Stephani is an author, speaker, and certified life and Enneagram coach. She founded On Purpose Coaching with a passion for equipping individuals with the tools and strategies they need to improve their relationships with God, to live purposefully, and to discover the abundant life we’ve all been promised. Stephani can also be heard as a weekly co-host of the popular “What’s Your Story?” podcast.
Connect with Stephani at:
Website: https://www.stephanicook.org
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/stephaniscook
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/stephani_cook/
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