What Gives YOU Purpose in Life?

Hi there, it’s Paul Krismer, and I’m your happiness expert. This week, we’re going to talk all about how to get more purpose and meaning in our lives. The kind of stuff that we’ve got a reason to get up in the day, it gives us energy and zeal. I can tell you from my own past that I know some of my activities that I did as a young person have had great meaning in my adult life. So, for example, my mom always grew a big garden, and I loved to sneak in there and pick peas and raspberries. She’d take us out into the country, and we’d find wild bushes of beautiful berries. She’d make jams, pies, and all kinds of yummy stuff with it. I loved it, and I still love it today. This video is going to give us some insights on how we get a sense of purpose and meaning, typically from childhood activities, which are clues about how we can get it in our adult life. So, stay tuned.

As a coach, public speaker, and best-selling author, I teach topics just like this one all around the world. So stay tuned, and I’ll give you practical tools that you can use to make both yourself and those around you both happier and more successful. So, purpose is all about the sense that we have an aim that guides some of our life. It directs some of our behavior, and by some scholars, purpose often has an angle to it that says it’s outside of just our own interests. But there’s some broader interests that this purpose leads us to where we serve the world. It doesn’t have to be that necessarily, but we certainly have to have a sense of objective as to why we’re going after things. And when we’ve got this sense of purpose, we have greater well-being. We have a sense of meaning in our lives. We have a reason to get up in the morning, morning after morning after morning. It’s like an essential piece of a happy life. And this one study, a very interesting study, came out looking at the exposure that people had to childhood activities and its relationship to their adult sense of purpose. The conclusions were very clear: young people who had a diverse range of activities and experiences in their youth went ahead into their adulthood with a greater sense of purpose and meaning. I can tell you another little personal anecdote. When I was, I think, in grade five, my mom got involved with a political campaign for a friend of hers. He had no chance of winning in our local riding, but he was the local English professor, she was an English teacher. They got together along with about 20 other people. They wrote this hilarious skit about local politics at the time, and I kind of had little roles in it, including stapling together the scripts that people were reading. I saw the play performed, and it was hilarious. People laughed so hard, and I learned a little bit about Canadian politics at that time. You wouldn’t believe what seed it planted in me. I became such a junkie. I read the newspaper that I was also delivering every single day, cover to cover. I was fascinated by the politics. And then I went on to do certain minor political roles in student union. I studied politics in school, and right out of university, I had a job as a senior political advisor to a cabinet minister. The minister did poorly, which probably said all kinds of things about my advice, but I got some amazing exposure. And even that exposure probably had something to do with the career I have now, trying to guide people through what I say, through persuasive speech, to have a better and more meaningful life. That makes sense. A childhood activity led to my current sense of purpose and meaning in life. And all of us can get that same experience by looking to our childhood activities and recalling what we did that was interesting, fun, and captivated our attention. And then we can even look to our adult lives and say, well, are there some echoes from our childhood, or are there some opportunities in our current lives to pursue broad arrays of activities? Volunteering, community work, preservation of natural spaces, photography, learning a new language, getting up with friends to do a certain activity, a sport. Think of all the range of activities we could do. That when we sample in these many ways, we might find one or more of them gives us a great sense of purpose, that more of our life’s energy will be directed to that. Think of all the people who, in their adult life, travel someplace wonderful and then they sort of catch that bug, and travel becomes an abiding purpose, a meaning in their lives. That they’re going to become exposed to multiple cultures, see incredible places in the world, and they do all of that so that they can get more purpose and meaning. Well, you can do the same. Go out and sample the world in little bits and pieces here and there, and ultimately you’ll find more purpose and meaning, and well-being. That’s all I’ve got for this week. Click the like button, and share this video with your friends and family, and you’ll get more people happy in the world. Thanks for watching, bye for now.