Living Your Purpose Is Linked To Living Longer

Over the past week I have seen two posts confirming this. One was by Dr David Hamilton talking about an experiment conducted in a nursing home where the residents were all given a pot plant in their rooms. Half were told that they didn’t have to do anything and that the staff would look after it. The other half were told that the plant was their responsibility to care for, to place in an appropriate spot to receive enough sunlight. To feed and water. 18 month later, they reviewed the results. Those who cared for the plant were more cheerful, happy and had more mental and physical energy, and the death rate was significantly less than those who didn’t have to care for the plant. They had a reason for being, a purpose!

So how do you achieve alignment with purpose in your career? I have found that discovering your purpose is a layered process, and in my book, Career Awakening: How To Align Your Career With Your Soul Purpose, I share the process with you.  One of the key exercises is values work. Having done values work with clients now for almost five years, helping people align their career with their top values, I’ve consistently seen how being in a career aligned with your top values impacts wellbeing. We sleep better, we have more energy left at the end of the day, we are more resilient and overcome obstacles faster, we don’t sweat the small stuff as much because we’re focused on a bigger picture.

The Japanese have a word for purpose, ‘Ikigai’ which means reason for being, and this is one of the other tools I use, in addition to values work, that helps people bring together their talents, passions and value proposition to help them identify their career sweet spot.

Many people believe that having a purposeful career is not reality, and in fact, you’ll hear many people downplay having purpose and passion as something frivolous. However I can tell you from personal experience, reminding myself of my reason for being kept me going in the early years of starting my business when times were tough, and still keeps me moving forward and taking action today.

So whether it’s finding your purpose and aligning your career, or simply finding a purpose in each day that gives you some meaning to what you do, I invite you to take on the mindset of working more purposefully.

If you’d like to dig deeper and identify and align your career with your purpose, you can work with me here.