The Charged Life

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– Summary –

Our purpose is rarely just “found” randomly one day; rather it is self-defined. The universe has given us a few hints about what that purpose might be:

1. Since we are all clearly alive, then perhaps a hint to our purpose might involve being fully alive.

2. Since we are all unique, then perhaps a hint is to be our genuine and unique selves throughout life without apology. 

3. Since we’re all connected and driven by belonging and love, perhaps a hint is to create meaningful connections and loving relationships.

4. Since we’ve all been granted with free will and consciousness, perhaps we are to use that power to be intentional and visionary versus impulsive and reactive.

I don’t have all the answers. But since humanity shares all these things perhaps we can pay attention to our blessings and choose to amplify them.

The more we are intentional about setting our own purpose each day, the more likely we finish our lives and say, “I lived a life of purpose.”

– Begin Full Transcript –

People ask, “Brendon, how do I find my life’s purpose?”

I’m like, gosh, I can’t find a good haircut!

It is not an easy question, but I get it on stages around the world when I’m speaking. We get so many submissions here to this show. Brendon, talk about life’s purpose. How do you find it?

First and foremost, I’m not sure that you ever “find” it. I’m not sure that you wander outside of your house one day and the piano of purpose falls on to of your head and suddenly you’re like, “Oh, that’s why I’m here!”

I think purpose is more self-defined than just discovered. I think that we have to decide what it is for ourselves.

But I think, “We have been given some clues.”

I don’t pretend to know the answer to what your life’s purpose is or anybody’s life purpose outside of even my own. And honestly, my own has shifted and shaped its way throughout my life to emerge into what it is today (and I’ll share what I think mine might be with you).

I got mine, I think the way everyone else gets theirs. It’s through that process of just asking…

What are we about? What do we want to serve and give to the world? What is it that we want to stand for? What do we find meaningful in our own lives?

We can ask a series of questions that might get us closer, but we shouldn’t miss the hints that are right in front of us every single day.

I don’t think you have to be operating just from a place of religion or spirituality to find the answer. Often people go to those two realms to find the answer and I think that’s vital and it is important, and I found most of my inspiration from this category of life.

But as a realist, looking around the world you can observe that something is unique about the human species, about who we are and about how that might give us some indication into what life’s purpose might be for many of us.

That first thing, if you look around the world and you start paying attention, you start to notice that we’re all alive. You’re alive. I’m alive. If you’re watching this than you’re alive, right?

So maybe there’s a little hint there, a hidden joke, that if we are alive then maybe part of life’s purpose is to be fully alive.

How simple is that? What if that was your day?

You just say, “You know what, today I’m going to be fully alive. I’m going to feel an incredible sense of vibrancy and joy and real zest and presence to my life today.”

You know what, what a gift it is I’m still here, that I’m alive. To really fully sense an aliveness and to cultivate an aliveness in our body and in our mind and in our spirit, so that we exude life to other people.

Do you want to learn how to be sexy or attractive to other people? Be alive. Isn’t that the people that we’re most attracted to, those who are joyous and who have something about their spirit? There’s a spark there, what we call a charge. There’s some kind of internal charge about them that they just stand out, but you know what? They also feel different. By cultivating a sense of aliveness and presence in our life, life feels different.

You talk about people’s life purpose, I mean, everyone wants in some way to feel alive, alert, aware, conscious, because that’s what we have, we’ve been given.

So I just ask; what are you doing to make yourself feel alive? Are you doing activities that draw out your passion? Are you exuding and giving passion to the world? Are you truly sensing the spirit, the joy and the energy of this universe that makes you animated as a human being? Maybe those aren’t your things, but they are for me. I just think what an incredible hint, we’re alive. So be alive! I think It’s so simple.

I think the second big hint that we’re given is that we’re all unique.

Seven billion plus people on the planet and you’re different than every single one of them.

There’s a unique aspect to your personality, your style, your intentions, your actions, your habits and your beliefs, who you are and the way you think is unique from everybody else.

We can measure it by science. We can measure it by observation. We can measure it just by simply asking people basic questions to discover, everyone has their own opinion. Everyone has their own world view, and because of that, then we have to ask, am I living my life uniquely?

• Am I expressing who I genuinely am?
• Are my expressions genuine, authentic and spontaneous to who I am as a person, or am I living a façade?
• Am I trying to be somebody else, to please somebody else, to gain acceptance or love over here or am I truly being true to myself, to my unique self, to the inner side of who I really am and what I want to show to the world?

Because, a lot of people really struggle with this and the reason they start setting out to look for their purpose in their life is that one day they wake up and they realize they’re not living their life. They’re living their parent’s life, their professor’s life, their teacher’s life. They’re living the life that society, their culture or their norms told them to live, and one day they wake up and say, “Whoa! Why have I conformed to the point that I don’t even know who I am anymore?”

Then they start this journey sometimes to look for life’s purpose because they’re trying to find it themselves. They aren’t looking for a big purpose they’re looking for themselves.

And sometimes when we can tap back into that uniqueness of who we are, then the magic of life comes alive again. That requires us to not only exude who we are to the world, but to genuinely express who we are, what we think, what we desire of life, what we need, how we truly feel and think about the people in our lives, the things that we’re doing with our lives, the places and directions that we’re going. We have to do that if we want to sense that full uniqueness of ourselves.

Often, it is by suppressing ourselves that we begin to suffer.

We have to again ask: what is the point of all this? Is it to live as a carbon copy of everybody else or to fully, with full intention and aliveness animate the best of who we are uniquely?

I think that you being yourself is a grand purpose.

I think the third thing that we’ve all been also blessed with, if we can just observe and pay attention is yes, there are indeed seven billion plus other people in the world.” What does that tell us?

Maybe we’re all connected. That while we are all unique we all share similarities.

All human cultures across the span of time have been found to truly value very simple basic things. Love. Truth. Fairness. Freedom. Unity. Respect. Responsibility. Tolerance. As we recognize those, not all of them exude them greatly, but as part of their culture there was an operating norm that valued those types of things.

Something connects us. It’s a human fabric of values and of beliefs that usually center around caring, compassion, love and truth with one another, because that’s what keeps us all together. That is what not only helped us survive at one point, but more importantly, it made us feel spiritually fulfilled.

Love is a purpose. Love has been argued to be the purpose, by a whole smarter and more intelligent persons than the guy you’re listening to right now, I can tell you that. But if that’s true, if connection, love, is so vital, how are we doing in those categories?

Are we living purposely with the people around us? Are we even sensing and seeing them so that we can connect with them and live out that purpose and sense that purpose by really connecting with the people that we truly love and adore?

A lot of people are so distracted today they can barely even look someone in the eye when they walk down the street. They can’t even pay attention to their spouse or lover when they walk into the house. They are distracted, detached and dissipating in life energy, because they are not giving and receiving that incredible energy that can only happen between two human beings.

So we have to ask, how are we doing in our relationships? Could we give more purpose to those relationships so that you can sense more purpose in life?

Then I would say probably the last thing that I think we can all recognize in some way or another is that we, as a human species, have been granted an incredible gift of intentionality and of consciousness.

Some people struggle with the word intentionality, but think about it in two ways.

First is vision. We’ve been granted a very unique level of vision and anticipation in our lives, not to just anticipate and to look out to tomorrow. That’s not what makes us unique, believe it or not, as the spider looks out to tomorrow. It anticipates that if it builds its web something is going to get trapped in it and its going to eat it up. The bear anticipates the oncoming season so it starts feeding itself so it can hibernate. Animals and nature already anticipate and see the vision coming of the future, but the difference with them is it’s all sort of intuitive. It’s an impulse to do by nature, where we can actually override our impulses. We can be scared of something and still face it. We can see things tomorrow that do not exist today. 

We’re not operating on the impulse or reality of our situation but something that we can’t even imagine tomorrow. We can imagine skyscrapers and men walking on the moon. We can imagine crossing the seas. We can imagine something so extraordinary for our lives that nobody around us even believes it.

That vision is what gives us intentionality to live our days, and some people when they’re just struggling in life and they don’t feel connected to their purpose anymore, part of it is because they haven’t had a vision for themselves for so long.

Those who are really struggling with sadness or the depths of despair and sometimes even depression, helping them realign and get some clarity to something compelling and magical, beautiful and important and meaningful, to chase, can turn their life right back on again.

What’s your vision? What is you see out there for yourself? Have you dreamed enough? Have you allowed yourself to dream and see something magical out there for yourself?

I think you can bring in that greater sense of purpose and now you can aim your life to a life of purpose to accomplish at least some of your dreams. To march towards something that you find meaningful, because the second part of intentionality if vision is there, is self-direction.

We have a unique capability to direct ourselves to wherever we want to go. You can go against the grain or with the grain. You can choose to fight your impulses and overcome them or fall slave to them. We have the ability to direct our own will, our own mind, our aim, our attitude, our actions and with that ability to be self-directed, comes a tremendous amount of responsibility.

When we do not direct ourselves, those are the times when we often feel the most lost. We’re just wandering around, we don’t know what’s going on, we’re unconscious, we’re not present, we aren’t intentional about anything at all. And not that we can’t experience life in full in the moment, but over a series of moments and a series of years and decades without any intention or direction to our life, we often feel lost.

How intentional are you being with your day today? How intentional are you being about this upcoming week? How intentional are you being about the next month or the next year?

It’s not about being obsessed with the future; we still have to live today, right? Aliveness… that was the first thing I talked about, to sense and feel the magic of this moment. But if we could also direct ourselves, give ourselves aims – the human being is driven by so much of its goals and its dreams and desires for the future. We should disconnect from any time zone. We should feel a great gratitude for the past, a great presence with the present mode of reality that we face right now, and a great connection to our future too. Like, we should be happy with all of those and be moving our lives progressively forward, because that’s what intention gives us.

So aliveness, uniqueness, connection and intention… those are some of the hints we’ve been given. From there, it’s all about self-definition. It’s about deciding who is it we want to be. What is it we want to do? Why that gives us our purpose. We can build statements around it all day long can’t we?

I have. My life’s purpose is very simple, it’s about being, doing and for a reason. Mine is to be something:

“The purpose of my life is to be fully alive and vibrant…” and then moves into doing something…“to adore and appreciate my loved ones, to strengthen and share my gifts so that I might inspire other people to live more fully, to love more openly, and to make their difference today.”

You might not ever find a purpose. It might not land on you tomorrow, so define one for yourself. Take some hints from the universe, along with that journey and no matter what you do, realize that life’s purpose is entirely up to you, and with that comes a responsibility and a great gratitude that we can choose our own way, our own aims every single day of our lives.

So go do that today.

What’s this day going to be about?

What’s the purpose of this day?

What’s the purpose of tomorrow?

Add enough of those intentionalities across the span of your life and suddenly you wake up one day and say, “I lived a life of purpose.”