"In his heart a man plans his steps."

Plans change, but purposes don’t. It’s a daunting task finding an overarching theme by which to carry out our daily lives. It’s never easy, nor is the path ever clear. The beauty of it is that once you find that underlying theme, you have the tool by which you have the means to get back up. This is because the purpose is the fundamental building block of who you are, not what you do. The answer may not be obviously clear all the time, but there are a few underwritings we can use to start the process, maintain the process, and see where we’re going.

How to start: What are you called to be, not do? The basic elements of this are who we are at the end of the day when profession, social status, and measures of success are stripped away. It’s easy to say that that there are no metrics by which to measure ourselves. The reality though is that the metric is ensuring that the most basic part of who we are is the metric by which all those other things are built. Find a burden. What is it that ails or moves you about the world such that the core of your being is compelled to act? That is the "be." The "do" will follow. We begin to realize we’ve found the "be" when all other measures are stripped away and we can still find the core competency we’ve defined ourselves by.

How to progress: Life-on-life contact makes changes. We can’t possibly know if the "be" has been found unless we go out and use it. If we’ve found the burden, great. Go and use it. The next gauge is that we begin to use our personal and financial resources to interact with life and other people in such a way that it is clearly apparent we believe what we’ve set as our "be." It can’t be done by pretending it’s been set. Write it down and let people know. The best part is that if it’s done correctly, then people will know that it’s what we choose to be even if we never actually say it directly. Sometimes we may even have to do things that are related indirectly in order to achieve what it is we want to be.

How to reflect: Indicators of success are not always indicators of fulfillment. The beauty of the "be" is that we might find unintentional success in accolades, promotion, or awards of some intrinsic or extrinsic manner. Who we are begins to reflect who we choose to be and what we do begins to fall in line with it too. The success isn’t the real indicator though. We must be able to remove all of these things and get back to the basic core elements of our "be" and the burden that constitutes why we’ve chosen to be that way.