Everyone wants a driving intention, a reason for living. Having this gives people meaning, a sense of direction and a feeling of having a defined place to belong in this world. Because of this, people so badly want to find their purpose. And yet, at the very same time, so many people struggle to find their purpose. It begs the question: Why is it that finding your purpose can be so hard? In this video, I’m going to outline the major factors that can make finding your purpose so hard. The cool thing is, knowing about these factors, can actually bring you closer to your purpose. 

1.  People have a very rigid and fixed idea about what a person’s purpose must look like. Basically, we love to try to cram it into a box. For example, most people see purpose as being a job or career. So, when they are looking for purpose, they are strictly looking for what job they came to this life to do. Or for example, people might see purpose as being of service to others in some way. So, they are strictly looking for what service they can contribute to other people or to the world in some way. The thing is, purpose is far less structured than this. It is simply about having a reason to exist which gives you meaning and a sense of direction. This could be anything that brings this driving intention into life for you specifically. 
2. Many people don’t know what is really important to them. A person’s purpose does not exist outside of the context of their values, desires, interests and passions. Even pre-birth intentions, which play a big role in a person’s purpose, come through in a person’s values, desires, interests and passions; like an artery flowing through a person’s intrinsic motive. But we often lose touch with our values. Why does this happen? The biggest culprit is our need for confluence with other people. We are a social species that depend on each other to survive and thrive. And when we are young, we are socialized. This process of socialization teaches us what others in our social group think is right and wrong, good and bad. Our parents, caregivers, teachers and peers pushed us in the direction of what they think our values, interests and passions should be. And in order to feel secure and get our needs met with others, we allow ourself to blow off course of our own north star so to speak, so as to find confluence with other people. We align with their values, desires, interests, passions and sense of what is important. By doing so, we lose touch with these very things within us that would lead us to our purpose. To know your purpose, you must know yourself.  
3. Defining your purpose may just require you to come up against other people and society at large. This is uncomfortable if not scary and painful. What fulfills you, what you value, what you are passionate about and what you desire may go against the people in your family, culture and society. It may go against things like what they value, how they define success, what they expect from you, what they find interesting, what they deem as important and what they think is right to value. This can make you feel bad and wrong for the very things that point you to your purpose. This makes it harder for you to become aware of, admit to and choose to follow your path of personal fulfillment, and therefor harder to define your purpose.         
4. The marionette effect. People often conceptualize of themselves as a marionette doll or a chess piece being played by the universe at large. With this mentality, they see their purpose as being whatever the universe’s purpose was for them. The only thing is, they don’t know what it was. So, they are lost, looking outside of themselves, either up to God or externally to other people whom they think might know about them what they don’t know about themselves. They want to be told what their purpose is. This is especially true of spiritual people. It is also especially true of people who were conditioned not to trust themselves and instead, trust the guidance of authority figures. The thing is, purpose is something that is intrinsic. Not something you extrinsically agree to. And even the bigger, universal picture of your purpose comes through this intrinsic sense of your values, desires, interests and passions. A person who felt intrinsically that they valued learning and therefore spent their whole life learning this and that would be far deeper in their purpose than someone who was convinced by some authority figure that their purpose was to devote themselves to higher learning and the education system. 
5. People think about what their purpose could be all day without being willing to get their hands dirty and acting so to speak. People find their purpose by trying new things. Experimenting with different opportunities and choices and paths. When a person actively engages with new experiences, they are SO much more likely to quickly define their passions and skills and talents and interests and desires and therefore, their purpose. You can’t think your way into purpose. You have to act your way into it. The thing is, people are very averse to doing this. People don’t like the unknown and the uncertain. They can get themselves very stuck waiting for some kind of sense of correctness rather than trying things.    
6. People’s idea of purpose is entangled in the human ego’s need for worth, value and significance. For this reason, people are on the search for their purpose to be something BIG. This is not to say that your purpose isn’t something you would judge as very big. Maybe it is. But when we are fixated on our purpose being something big, we are more focused on purpose as a kind of trophy. In other words, we are looking for it to be proof of our own worth and value. This makes our quest for purpose an indirect quest for self-esteem, not actually a quest for purpose. On top of this, the fixation on bigness can be yet another “box” that we decide purpose has to fit in. It is also to apply a very human perceptual filter regarding what is important and significant over the objective perspective of the universe at large. All of this can leave us searching externally for what will give us the most self-esteem, rather than what aligns deeply with our values, desires, interests and passions. 
7. People think purpose cannot change, but it can. People have a very one-dimensional idea of purpose. It is true that some people come to this earth with a very defined purpose for their existence and because of this, their intrinsic intentions, values, desires and passions will stay fixed on a certain thing. For example, a person may come to this earth with the intention of being a person who advocates for the oceans. They may have an immediate interest in ocean life as a child, take a job as a marine biologist, live their whole life by the sea and that is what they are all about until they die. However, this is not the case for a lot of people. A person’s pre-birth intention can be so many unlimited things. And the nature of life is ever changing. Over the course of a person’s life, due to the ever-changing experiences they are having, they may change their sense of what matters most and what is most important to them. This changes the picture of their values, desires, intentions, what they find meaningful, their interests and their passions. This will change their direction in life and their priorities. It will change everything. 
   A person’s purpose can change over the course of their life. In fact, some people chose specifically for this to be the case before coming into this life. Also, sometimes a person finds purpose in one thing and then the next and then the next. And that entire chain of purposes is merely leading them to deeper and deeper layers of their purpose. A good example is, a person may feel a deep sense of purpose in being a professional athlete. And this may lead them to developing a program for athletes, which feels like even deeper purpose. And this may lead them to developing a nutrition program, which may be even deeper purpose. And they may decide to stop working with athletics and open a holistic nutrition business, which may feel like the purpose that every other purpose led them to. Or, a person may feel a deep sense of purpose in being a nurse and then at a certain point, feel like their values and passions are all swinging in the direction of being a grandparent. And so, their purpose has shifted to being a grandparent. When we feel our purpose is only one thing and that it must be something so unquestionable and so solid that it never changes, we fail to follow the breadcrumbs of our passions, values, interests and desires. 
8. Paralysis and lostness caused by searching for “the perfect” purpose. Hidden behind this behavior is the fear of failure and getting it wrong. Many people imagine how having a purpose should feel… Like that major AHA moment that they have found their absolute and perfect purpose. They’ve gotten it right. But a sense of purpose does not show up like this. Needing to get it right causes people to go into over analysis constantly searching for this AHA feeling, which they will not get. And so, this causes mental exhaustion as well as doubt. This coupled with the terror of failing or getting it wrong, leads to decision and action paralysis. This is very different than the actual feeling of purpose, which is about a sense of intention and meaning and reason in what you are putting your energy into because it is aligned with your values. 
9. We often overlook what pours forth from us naturally. Purpose is a lot about what we offer and give naturally. It is inherent in our skills and talents. What feels so natural and good for us to give, that we would do it even if we didn’t get anything in return for it, like money. We take these things for granted because they are usually something that comes easy to us. Here is an example of what I mean: A man who worked in the financial services had a serious talent for sales. He found himself gravitating more and more towards helping new employees learn how to sell. It took him forever to realize that he had a real gift to offer in something that was truly easy for him, communication. He finally realized that he felt most fulfilled when he was teaching people about effective communication. That was the part he enjoyed about his work, not the status of working for the company he worked for, not the sales itself and not the money managing. Communicating and teaching people to communicate effectively was his true calling, and it was staring him in the face the whole time. 
10. People are unwilling for the defining of their purpose to be a process and a journey, which is what it is. One of the most valuable things you can ever accept about purpose, is that defining your purpose is a journey of following bread crumbs. And those bread crumbs do not stop until the day you die. What will happen is that you will define your values, desires, interests skills, talents, passions and sense of what is most important to you. You will make decisions and look for and take opportunities that are in alignment with those things. And doing so will lead to a life experience. That life experience will further define your values, desires, interests, passions, skills, talents and sense of what is most important to you. At which point, you will make new, different decisions. And that will lead to a different life experience. And so on and so forth until the day you die. Your purpose will keep evolving. This is true when your purpose seems to shift entirely from one thing to the other. For example, from committing yourself entirely to medicine only to find even deeper purpose dedicating your time and energy to your relationships or fashion. This is also true if someone commits to an overarching purpose. For example, say that someone has found their purpose in journalism. This may lead to them becoming a journalist. And this may further define their purpose as being opinion journalism. And this may lead to them further defining their purpose as being a blogger on the topic of politics. In order to define your purpose, you are going to need to follow the bread crumbs. It isn’t a magical moment of clarity that just happens. It is a knowing of your driving intention and reason for living that comes to you as a result of continuing to make decisions and taking actions according to your values, desires, interests, passions, skills, talents and sense of what is most important to you.      

Defining your purpose is not about seeking or being delivered some magical hidden treasure in life, which is how many people view purpose. Instead, it is the result of grappling with your identity. It is the result of grappling with your fears, your aversions, your needs, your preferences, your desires, your choices, you skills, your opportunities, your intrinsic motives, your talents, your values, what you care about and what truly matters most to you. It is also the result of grappling with everything that stands in the way of defining your values, desires, interests, skills, talents and passions. Purpose is something that you define and create and come to the awareness of. It is not something that you “find”.