2022 June 7 Life your life with purpose!

Hi, this is Jim Cranston from 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com, the podcast and website by, for, and about Baby Boomers. Thanks for joining me tonight to talk a little bit more about life purpose, which we've talked about before, but we'll talk about more. It's a big topic, so let's get started.

But first we have the regular disclaimer that I'm not a medical professional, and I'll be talking about things that I personally find useful. If you’re truly hopeless or depressed, please seek professional medical care help, or just dial 911. Also starting July 16th, 2022, which is just around the corner now, and available in some areas now, dialing 988 will connect you immediately with assistance to the Suicide Hotline. If you’re really feeling blue, it's 800-273-8255 or (988). That should get you to somebody who wants to cover some of those topics with you and get you in a better headspace.

I'm glad you're here.  Thanks for hanging out. Thanks for checking. My regular listeners may remember last week I said I was singing at a children's Mass in the evening. I just want to say that it was absolutely delightful. It was really nice. I wish I could have invited everybody to join in and come along with me. Then later in the week, I also sang with the choir at a Memorial Day Mass at a church cemetery.

And this past Sunday, I was a sponsor for a church friend who was getting confirmed. So it was a busy church week, but very enjoyable. I bring this up mostly to encourage everyone to stay involved in something that you find interesting, and also to get you out of the house and in contact with other people.

There's all sorts of things going on in the world, and there's all sorts of things in life in general, but spending time with others is a good way to reset your attitude and look more outside your own life to see that the world has a lot to offer. But back to the topic at hand, which is actually closely related, which is our own life purpose.

First, a really important point to know is that our life purpose and our life's accomplishments may or may not be completely aligned with each other. Now, if they aren't aligned, it doesn't mean that you have to be dissatisfied all the time. Now, perhaps you're an amazing surgeon, but your real passion is painting.

You might continue in the medical field because you know you're helping people, but still, you always find time to follow your passion and paint and go out and maybe teach painting or whatever. So in that case, there's two things that you find satisfying. One is really passionate and really moves you forward and fills your soul with joy and gets you all pumped up.

But ideally though, our life purpose and our accomplishments do align with each other - either entirely or mostly, because this helps to keep us motivated during difficult times, and also to try and perform at our very best. By doing that, we naturally make ourselves feel better, basically in every way.

So we're going to be going through a little quiz and helping us to identify our life purpose. We'll do that in depth in another episode, but basically we’ll  go over it quickly. Now it comes down to searching for what seems right and makes us excited by doing them.

That's great, but that shows us what we like to do, but doesn't show us our purpose. We've talked about this before - the seven whys, just keep asking why as you drill deeper. So in the model of the seven whys, then ask yourself not just what made us happy, but what was the role that you were doing?

What task specifically were we doing? Just think about whatever you are actually doing. Maybe it was fun to be out with friends. Okay. What was fun about it? I remember, I was acting as a tour guide. Okay. That's great. Then going deeper still. What was the job that was being done in that role or in that task, was it taking the tour guide example?

Was it that you were telling people what to do, or was it that you were bringing knowledge and information to them? So what really was the job that you were doing? Was it caring for others, helping others see things they hadn't seen before? Or helping to get past something that they thought was impossible to do.  

At this point, you're down three levels of why’s, and you're starting to get into identifying what your life purpose is really all about. As you keep drilling deeper, you start off kind of superficial. You say Oh, that was something that made me happy. Just keep asking why, and going down further, now you're getting down to the real reason inside you that motivated you.

As you're answering those questions, keep thinking deeper. You start to get a sense of what your true life purpose really is. As we often talked about before, it's never too late to start living a life that is fulfilling and makes us really excited. Yeah. It may be different now that we're older, but we can still find ways to be excited about what we're doing, and to be just living our lives in a way that really makes us want to keep living full, exciting lives, because we're doing things to naturally align with us.

So that's just the overview, a quick introduction to it tonight. I didn't want to get into it too deeply because otherwise we'll end up having  another 20 minute or half hour podcast. I know those are a little long. We're going to be breaking this down into a course, also. I did want to just go over those, and wet your appetite for the sort of things that we're going to be going over.

Something else I talked about last week, one fun bit of new, because I had said that I was going to be changing my focus and wanted to focus back more on the show and the courses. I have started on that. I did write the outline for my first course, which I mentioned long ago. It's all about how to write to your congressperson, or really anyone that you want to make a convincing statement to.

So a lot of progress has been made on that, and just that refocusing on something that was really important to me has helped me ignore some of the foolishness of the day job, instead to reorient myself and concentrate in the many great people I work with there, and all the other good things in life, like my good friends. 

That plays back into what I was talking about. Back at the beginning - after we had the confirmation ceremony, I went out to breakfast with some people, came back, and then we sang in the choir, the next mass, and then a whole bunch of us went out into different groups. It was just really nice to be with a bunch of people and just enjoy a good time.

It takes a lot of the stress that you tend to live in when you’re isolated from people. Instead, you see that there's a lot of fun things around, good people that have different perspectives. I met new friends this past weekend, which was really exciting. I have an invitation to go to Ecuador, so that can be fun. So it was a really good time. I encourage everyone to try and get out, try and meet other people. The pandemic is officially over, COVID comes and goes. Other things always come and go. Take a chance. Unless you have a health issue or something like that, I encourage you to get out, interact with other people all the time. It really changes your life perspective and refocuses on things that make you happy. It also really helps you concentrate on things outside of yourself, and expand your whole life perspective. 

So that's it for the evening. Thanks for stopping by. Stay healthy. Care for others. Remember to care for yourself so you can always be at your very best. Don’t forget the war in Ukraine, obviously it’s still raging, and the fighting has gotten even worse. Putin is purposely targeting not only civilian areas, but now hospitals and other non military targets and especially churches, schools and museums. He's just truly trying to wipe out the entire Ukraine peoples. If you're able and interested, please, the page with donation links is still up at UKR7.com. Remember one of the best ways to care for yourself is to care for others. If you can and you are able, please consider donating or encouraging others to donate. 

As always be true to yourself, live a life aligned with your true goals and feelings, live according to your own life purpose.

Thanks for stopping by. If you found something interesting, please pass it along. If not, please drop me a comment as to what you'd like to hear. Have a great week. Thanks for visiting. Remember to live the life that you dreamed of, because that's the path to tru contentment. Love and encouragement to everybody, and see you next week on 7EveryMinute and 7EveryMinute.com. Thank you!