When You Live With Purpose, You Don’t Have Time To Worry

Are you a worrier by nature? Do you spend your time worry about anything and everything that could go wrong? I’ve been there and done that. It’s not the most pleasant or most productive use of your time. When we worry a lot, it tends to paralyze us. We’re too worried about everything we don’t know yet, what’s out of our control and what could go wrong. As a result, we don’t get to the important part of taking action, no matter what the goal or activity was.

When we embrace living with purpose the act of worrying changes dramatically. When you know exactly what you want and have the passion to go after it, everything becomes clear. You know what your first step is and then the next one after that. You get to work and start making progress. You keep going and keep working away to make sure you get done what you’ve set out to do. In the end, you simply don’t have time to worry about all that small stuff and that’s a very good thing.

Most worrying is frankly pointless. It uses up brain space and energy that would be much better spent other places. That doesn’t help you much when you’re busy worrying about anything and everything. What will help you is shifting your focus, your energy, and your passion to something more productive – your purpose.

When you find your purpose and make it an integral part of your life, you’ll simply be too busy to worry. The cure to too much worrying then is taking massive action. Go do something that aligns with your purpose. It doesn’t matter what it is. Start with something small that feels safe. Getting that task under your belt will show you that your worries were unfounded and that you can push through them. It also gives you a sense of accomplishment and that in turn builds confidence.

Confidence is another great weapon against the paralyzing effect of worrying. Confident people don’t worry. With each action you take, you become a little more confident and a little less worried. Build on each success and keep working on your self-confidence. Keep focusing on why the things you do are important to you and why you embraced a particular purpose. Focusing on how it is helpful to others is another great tool that will help you push through and start taking action. That in turn builds confidence and decreases worries. Before you know it, you too will be too busy to worry because you’re taking action toward living a purpose driven life.

How To Find Your Calling

Vintage style black female author writing and sitting on a chaise loungeFinding and following your calling is a big part of living with purpose. Finding that calling though, can be a pretty big and intimidating task, particularly if you put yourself under pressure to come up with the perfect answer right here and right now. While it is a goal worth pursuing, it’s also important to realize that it may take time to find your calling, that it’s a process that will develop over time, and that you can’t force. In fact, you shouldn’t. A much better plan of action is to take it one step and one day at a time until your calling becomes clear.

Start With What’s Important To You

A great place to start is to think about what’s important to you. It doesn’t have to be huge or all-consuming. Start with something small. Find a cause you feel drawn to and do what you can to support it. Volunteer, learn more about it and share what you’re learning with others, support organizations financially. Maybe this means knitting baby hats for preemies at your local hospital. Maybe it means spending time with an elderly neighbor, or maybe it means saving up for a mission trip next summer. The most important thing is to simply start and do something.

Listen To The Soft Voice In Your Head

Another great strategy is to listen to your intuition. Pay attention to that small voice in your head that tells you what you should be doing. Learning to listen to this little voice can be a bit of a challenge in today’s busy and noisy world.

Spend some time contemplating your values. Educate yourself about causes that catch your attention. Spend some quite time in meditation or prayer to be able to hear the voice in your head. Then start taking action on what you’re hearing and what you know you should be doing.

Walk The Path Towards Your Calling One Step At A Time

Don’t let this process overwhelm you. In the first excitement, you may be tempted to tackle a huge project and set out to change the world all at once. While that’s a great ambition, it’s also something that can seem quite daunting and burn you out. Instead, take it one step at a time. Pick your path and get in the habit of doing something every week, or even daily that aligns with your calling and helps you reach your goals. Pick something that’s easy to do and fit into your already busy life. No matter how small, every little act and effort helps to make a difference and serve with purpose.

The Connection Between Purpose and Happiness

When we start to make a difference and live a purpose driven life, something amazing happens. We become happier and more fulfilled. I’m sure you’ve experienced this. It doesn’t have to be anything big like going on a year-long mission trip or setting out to cure the world of cancer. Even small gestures that make a difference can have a big impact on how you feel.

When you help a fellow student pick up a stack of dropped books, run an errand for an elderly neighbor, loan a great book that’s had an impact on your own life to a friend, or remind a fellow grocery shopper of a left bag, it feels good doesn’t it? We like to help out and make a difference. It doesn’t matter how small the act is.

We have been social creatures who rely on each other for millennia. Over the course of that time our bodies and brains have evolved to give us positive rewards for helping out and making a difference. In other words, it feels good to live with purpose and make a difference. It makes us happy.

It’s one of the biggest reasons why living with purpose is such an important goal. At the end of the day, we all just want to be happy, or at the very least happier than we are right now. Looking at popular media and advertising in particular, it seems that the key to happiness is more material goods. We’re made to believe that bigger and more expensive houses and cars, more clothes, shoes, furniture, electronics, workout gear and the likes are what will makes us happy. If only we can buy and accumulate enough “stuff,” we’ll feel better. Sadly, quite the opposite is true. The more you own, the more you have to worry about and take care of, taking away valuable time that you could be spending on something else.

The key to happiness isn’t to own more. It’s to live a purpose driven life and making a difference in the world. It’s one of the reasons why minimalism is becoming so popular. When your life and mind isn’t cluttered with all the extra stuff, you feel calmer, more in control, and have the time and mental energy to figure out your own purpose.

A purpose driven life is one lived within our core values. It caters to our need to cooperate and work together. It strengthens our confidence and makes us feel needed and valuable. All of this leads to an increased feeling of happiness. The moral of the story is stop buying stuff you don’t need, stop chasing that high-paying job that makes you miserable for 60 hours a week and start living your life with purpose.

What Is Your Purpose?

The first step on this journey towards living with a purpose is deciding that it is a worthwhile endeavor. I hope the first two blog posts in this series have convinced you of that. The next step is to figure out what exactly your purpose in life is. It’s a pretty big question, isn’t it? I wish I had just the right answer for you, but the truth is that our life’s purpose is different for all of us. There is no quiz you can take that spits out the answer. It’s something you have to discover for yourself. I do however have a few thoughts to share with you that will guide you along the way. In the end, your purpose is very much like true love. You will know it when you’ve found it.

What Are You Passionate About?

Start by thinking about all the different things you are passionate about. It doesn’t matter if it’s part of your current work or career, a cause, a hobby, or anything else you can think of. Make a list and keep adding to it as you come across more ideas. Maybe it’s restoring old cars, redecorating your home, or sewing historical costumes.

What Do You Value?

Another good approach for coming up with potential “purpose” ideas is to think about what you really value. What’s important to you? What do you feel would make a difference? Maybe you value the right of every child to grow up in a happy home and make it your life’s purpose to raise foster kids or adopt. Maybe you value animal rights and make it your mission to raise awareness about the low number of wild giraffes in Africa.

What Elicits A Strong Emotional Response?

Similarly, think about what makes you really happy, really angry, or really sad. Having something with a strong emotion attached is a good sign that you’re very passionate about it and that this particular cause or purpose is important to you. Maybe it’s passion on your love of playing piano, your passion for heirloom tomato gardening, or your burning desire to put a stop to human trafficking.

What’s Fun

Last but not least, think about what you enjoy doing. There’s nothing wrong with finding a purpose that is also enjoyable. In fact, it’s important that you like what you do and are having fun doing it. If it isn’t fun, it’s much harder to put in the work and effort required to reach your goals.

Of course not every task and every aspect of what you do will be fun. Overall though, you want to find a purpose and a project that has you excited to jump out of bed in the morning.