1011 Do This Exercise to Find Your Purpose

This is Five Minute Friday.

Here's a quote from Mel Robbins. The time is now. Stop hitting the snooze button on your life. Dr. Ivan Joseph is a high performance coach, a sports psychologist, and the author of youf've Got this: Mastering the Skill of Self-Confidence. He also gave a TED Talk on the topic that has received 19 million views and counting. We had a truly enlightening conversation on mental and physical routines that are essential to success. And in this episode, we talk about using a simple exercise to find your values and your purpose. And this was powerful. How to avoid the simple things that ruin people's pursuit of greatness. I think you're gonna love this episode. So please share this with someone who you think needs to hear it. and let me know what you think about it while you're listening.

There's two factors I've always seen that derail a young athlete or a young professional's career. Number one is their self-doubt, right? Their inability to believe in themselves. And interestingly enough, number two is the people that they have surrounded themselves with that become distractions that take them away from their goals. Over and over and over again, they fall into the wrong crowd, they get with the wrong partner, the wrong advice.

So how do we make sure that we get out of that? When we're such social creatures that we don't want to hurt people's feelings, that we it's hard to go meet new people. You know, this is your comfort zone. These are your boys from the past. Like they've been with you. How do we get out of that and say, Hey guys, like, I'm going.

To do this thing over here instead. Oh, I wish I could give you the gospel on that because that is harder to do than what I'm going to say. But here's where I always believe. And every time I have not done this, I have faltered. We all have that little tiny voice in our head. Whenever I don't listen to that little tiny voice in my head, I falter. And to me, that tiny little voice is, I don't know, I'm gonna now use some voodoo language. You got your head voice and you got your heart voice. Whenever I make a decision purely logically, I always am bitter, right? If I buy the cheap car instead of the one I want, if I do the practical decision instead of the emotional one, I'm always bitter. You got this little heart that's sitting there, that little self-conscious piece that's telling you when you know when you're going south. I don't know if it's your crap detector or your holy smoke detector. There's no science behind this, but anytime I don't listen to that voice, when I fall off my values and my principles, I go south. And it's cost me money, it's cost me friendships, it's cost me opportunities.

How do you determine what your values and principles are? when you're not sure?

Ah, that's a good question. I'm gonna walk you through a little exercise. I call it my purpose exercise. In the last 18 months, what's the most important decision you've made? I'll do mine, right? And we'll share it for 30 seconds. In the last 18 months, I gotta be careful with this one, but I've made a decision to take the vice president's job at Dalhousie University. I was the king of my fiefdom. I had all the freedom, all the things I want, and I made a decision to take that job.

Decision I made was to get into a relationship.

Ah.

Yeah, a new relationship in the last 18 months, yeah.

You got now seven words. Only seven? To tell me why you made that decision. And so I could be nice and fluffy. It was time for a new challenge. Seven words. I could say, I had outgrown the job. I was bored, whatever it is. But seven words.

She made me a better version of myself.

Ooh, nicely done.

I'm going to put that at seven, but.

Yeah, that's pretty close. Why her? So for me, why this job? The one word and it's gotta be a value, the challenge.

One word? Yeah. Why her? Vision. Five years ago, I had done a guided visualization of the dream person I wanted to be with. Yeah. She was the image of that.

So now we've just found two values, right? For one of my values is challenge. One of your values is growth, vision, whatever that word is, this you saw it. And so when you start asking yourself these questions, What's the most important decision you made in work? What's the most important decision you've made in your family? What's the most important decision you did for yourself? What's the most important decision you make when taking on a conflict? That's the exercise I do to help me find my North Stars.

Interesting.

And whenever those things are in alignment, happiness, confidence, success, performance goes up. When they're not, sick days go up, disease goes up, conflict arises.

Poor choices.

Yeah. Right. And so those are the things you need to think about. Now, that's the exercise I use, but I find it very, very helpful.

Thank you so much for listening, and I hope you enjoyed this Five Minute Friday. As always, check out lewishouse.com for more School of Greatness inspiration and find me on social media at Lewis Howes. You can always text me the word podcast to 614-350-3960 to get weekly inspirational messages directly to your phone from me. And I'll leave you with this quote. Napoleon Hill said, every adversity, every failure, and every heartache carries with it the seed of an equivalent or greater benefit. Remember, you are loved, you matter, and you're worth it.