The beauty of living your purpose is that it delivers results. Results like inner peace, patience, desire, happiness, joy, and many other internal qualities that you can never get enough of. It also makes acting with honesty, character, accountability, courage, and vulnerability a whole lot easier. Living your purpose brings joy to the journey of life through the production of valuable outcomes.
A life that you love starts with the identification of your purpose and the defining of those principles that will direct passionate action (read Find Your Purpose for more on this topic). A properly identified purpose is one that builds a life mission so powerful that it pushes you forward in those times when life is at its toughest, keeps you disciplined when life seems easy and promotes character in all that you do.
To experience the greatness of life, one must be as dynamic as the world around them. Simply putting your head down with the idea to accomplish a set of goals will fail to deliver all that life has to offer. Such an exercise limits potential and possibility. From afar, achievement and the acquisition of external things look to be personally satisfying and the answer to all your problems, but it isn’t. The only way to find true joy & happiness, peace & tranquility, and patience & confidence, is to live your life with a defined purpose.
As individual’s, we have the ability to act with courage, honesty, or accountability. With motivation, we can employ characteristics like these on-demand. This way of being/acting can be turned on and off. However, the task to find inner peace, joy, happiness, hope, confidence, desire, patience, tolerance, and calmness does not come as easy. These traits cannot be turned on and off; they are simply too valuable for that. They are the reward for living life the way you were meant to live it. That is, when you live life based on your purpose, a priceless satisfaction or contentment engulfs your mind, body, and spirit.
When one lives in this manner, it is said they are living their purpose. Again, the process involved to live your purpose has several steps, including:
· Identifying those characteristics that lie deep within your soul. i.e., your core principles;
· Finding that purpose which gives you reason to be a better person today than you were yesterday;
· Making all decisions based on your core principles, so all action is purposeful; And
· Apply true commitment to all that you do.
The good news is, everyone can find their purpose; everyone can identify their core beliefs, and everyone can live life in a manner that results in joy and happiness. Such an endeavor does not require a certain amount of money, level of education, or status in life; it simply takes an unrelenting commitment to identify and be your authentic self.
How You Know When You are Living Your Purpose:
· You are living your purpose when you are contributing to society rather than taking from it;
· You are living your purpose when outcomes are secondary, as your actions become primary;
· You are living your purpose when joy is abundant, and failure motivates.
Why is Living Your Purpose So Important for the Recovering Addict:
Like joy and happiness, sobriety is a result of a certain way of life. Sobriety is the result of purposeful action that is dedicated to a defined journey. When one is living their purpose, they are rarely influenced by events, people, timelines, or outcomes. They are singularly focused on a way of life that they know will produce positive results.
A significant influencer for substance use is that powerful voice in our head that is continuously plotting how to get us to use. What is so scary about the disease of addiction is that it knows it can turn a recovering addict into a user in an instant. Our addiction waits for that moment when the events of life leave us vulnerable to its temptations. At precisely the right moment, addiction will pounce. It could be when we are depressed, fearful, excited, angry, tired, vulnerable, happy, insecure, lazy, frustrated, etc. Unless we are prepared, we will never have a chance to survive its overwhelming power.
When life delivers these moments, which we know it will, the only thing that can overpower our addiction is our life purpose. When we are living our purpose, our soul is filled with joy and desire. This is the same soul that our addiction is trying to fill with drugs and alcohol. While the events of life may cause us to lose some faith in our mission from time to time, we are prepared for these moments because we have a defined purpose. By continuing to act based on our core principles in good time and in bad, we are replenishing our soul with everything it needs. All we need to do is align what we say, what we do, and how we act. When living in this manner, we are living life as designed. From this place, we will receive the rewards of our actions which is a life that we love.
ABOUT CHOICE RECOVERY:
Located in Mesa, Arizona, Choice Recovery offers morning and evening intensive outpatient programming for the treatment of drugs and alcohol. As stated in the post, we believe anyone committed to their purpose can achieve sobriety. Our IOP focuses on the "why" or trauma that triggers one to abuse drugs and alcohol. Equally as important are the tools an individual leaves treatment with In order to stay sober. An individual who has made the commitment to their sobriety and done the work in both areas (the "why" and identifying their purpose) will leave Choice Recovery on a path to living a life that they love free from drugs and alcohol.