Business Meets Life
How To Find Your Purpose In Life
Janine Jakob · 9 min read
You have a successful career, a loving family and a great network of friends. You have what many people consider a perfect life. But you still feel like something's missing — and this something is your purpose.
Finding your purpose is critical to your well-being and leads to a happy, fulfilling and long-lasting life. A 2010 study in Applied Psychology found that people with a sense of purpose tend to live longer and healthier lives.
While each person's purpose is different, studies have found that goals which create a sense of purpose are usually the ones with the potential to improve other people's lives — researching a disease, teaching children, helping people in poverty. To help you get started, Full Potential Partners invited Holistic Life & Empowerment Coach Michelle Pein to share her advice.
Tip 1: Clarify your life motives and guiding principles. Clarity helps us know what's important and keeps us focused on where we want to go — and it stops us being easily distracted. Ask yourself: is there something bigger than me, a cause, that I would like to dedicate my time and energy to?
Tip 2: Rediscover your passion. Ask yourself: What topics or interests can't I stop thinking about? What do I love to learn more and more about? What sets my heart on fire? What do I love to do? It's equally important to identify what you don't want — if there are topics you dislike or experiences you hated, write those down too. That brings clarity as well.
Tip 3: Find your superpowers. We all have superpowers, but few of us know how to release them. These are the things that make you forget about time. Ask yourself what activities you love to do and are naturally good at. If that's hard, ask close friends to help identify your key talents and what makes you special.
Coach Michelle found her own passion by coaching a former client and helping him take charge of his life. During that process she realised she wasn't just doing something she loved, but something she was naturally good at. "I realised that my purpose is to inspire and empower people to take charge of their life, to be the healthiest and happiest version they can be and create a life they love."
With special thanks to Coach Michelle Pein for sharing her guidance and her own experience.
Treat purpose as a direction
Purpose does not always arrive as one dramatic revelation. It often emerges through repeated choices about what matters, whom you want to serve and which problems you are willing to stay with.
A direction can guide decisions before you have a perfect statement. It helps you recognise work that is meaningful even when it is difficult.
Look for the pattern across your life
Review moments when you felt useful, energised or proud. Look beyond job titles to the contribution beneath them: creating clarity, building confidence, connecting people, solving complex problems or protecting standards.
Then review the opposite moments. Frustration can reveal values that were ignored or strengths that had no room to operate.
Connect strengths to service
A strength becomes purposeful when it helps someone or advances something you value. Ask where your natural abilities meet a real human or organisational need.
This prevents purpose from becoming purely inward-looking. It also creates practical experiments: a conversation to have, a problem to volunteer for or a project to test.
Build a portfolio of meaning
One role does not need to satisfy every dimension of purpose. Meaning may be distributed across leadership, family, community, creativity, learning and contribution.
A portfolio reduces the pressure to make one career decision carry an entire life. It also allows purpose to evolve as circumstances change.
Turn reflection into a working practice
Insight only becomes useful when it changes a decision, a behaviour or a system. Choose one action that can be completed this week, give it an owner and define what better will look like. Small, visible progress creates more confidence than an ambitious plan that never enters the calendar.
Review the result after thirty days. Keep what creates clarity or momentum, remove what adds noise, and make the next improvement from evidence rather than enthusiasm. This disciplined cycle is how a useful idea becomes part of the way a leader operates.
Executive action checklist
- List five moments when you felt most useful.
- Name the value or contribution common to those moments.
- Choose one small experiment that serves a real need.
- Review how work, relationships and community share the role of meaning.
Questions for reflection
- What contribution repeatedly gives you energy?
- Which values are non-negotiable in your next chapter?
- Whom could your strengths serve now?
A practical 90-day implementation plan
The value of how to find your purpose in life is not in agreeing with the idea. It is in building a repeatable practice around it. A ninety-day window is long enough to create evidence and short enough to maintain executive attention. Use the following sequence as a working plan, adapting the pace to the realities of your role and organization.
Days 1–30: establish the baseline
Begin with observation rather than reinvention. Document what happens now, who is affected and where the current approach creates friction. Complete the first action: List five moments when you felt most useful. Discuss the result with one person who sees your work from a different angle. Their response will help distinguish a real pattern from a personal assumption.
Choose two indicators that can be reviewed without creating unnecessary reporting. One should measure activity and one should indicate quality. A visibility initiative, for example, might track relevant conversations as well as output. A leadership initiative might track whether decisions are made with greater clarity, not simply how many meetings took place.
Days 31–60: run a focused experiment
Use the second and third actions as a controlled experiment: Name the value or contribution common to those moments. Then choose one small experiment that serves a real need. Keep the scope narrow enough that you can observe cause and effect. Explain the experiment to the people involved, including what you are testing, what will remain unchanged and when you will review it.
Record language, objections and unexpected responses. Executive work often improves through better questions rather than more activity. Return to the reflection prompts above and write a short answer to each. If the answers remain vague, the experiment probably needs a clearer audience, decision or standard.
Days 61–90: decide what becomes a system
Complete the final action: Review how work, relationships and community share the role of meaning. Compare the evidence with the baseline. Keep the elements that improved clarity, trust, consistency or commercial relevance. Adapt the elements that produced useful learning but not yet the intended outcome. Stop anything that added volume without value.
Finally, assign ownership and a review rhythm. A practice becomes durable when it has a place in the calendar, a person responsible for maintaining it and a reason to be revisited. The aim is not a perfect ninety-day transformation. It is a stronger way of operating, supported by evidence and ready for the next cycle of improvement.
Ready to Turn Your Expertise Into Growth?
If you know you're capable of playing at a bigger level, let's explore what that could look like.
