How to Write a Life Purpose Statement (with 5 Examples) Leave a comment
Finding your life purpose can feel daunting, but crafting a clear and meaningful life purpose statement is one of the most empowering steps you can take. A life purpose statement is a guiding compass, helping you align your goals, values, and actions with what matters most.
Whether considering a career change, seeking deeper fulfillment, or simply reflecting on your life’s direction, a well-written purpose statement can bring clarity and focus to your path.
In this post, we’ll explore the key components of an impactful life purpose statement and provide five examples to inspire your own.
We discuss a variety of topics here on DGH, but many of them revolve around one common theme: how you can improve your sense of fulfillment in life.
What Is a Life Purpose Statement?
Far too often, we end up chasing after dreams, goals, and careers based on other people’s expectations of us. But when we focus our energy on things we’re not passionate about, we end up living a complacent, unfulfilling life without even really knowing why.
Very few things are worse than going through years of hard and demanding work, going nowhere while pursuing the wrong goals.
Living your purpose is critical to achieving success and living a fulfilling life. Your purpose connects you to your mission for impacting the world and leaving it just a bit better than how you found it.
A life purpose statement clarifies your reason for being and why you do what you do every day, helping to direct your decisions and priorities.
After reading your statement, anyone should be able to explain the reasons behind your actions and what goal(s) you hope to achieve during your lifetime.
Having a life purpose statement can benefit you by helping you focus on your goals and changing your outlook on life.
While your everyday routine may remain the same after writing your life purpose statement, your attitude behind it and your sense of motivation can shift as your priorities become clearer.
Finding your motivation and channeling your energy into turning your dreams into a reality is easier when you have a specific and explicit statement that helps guide you by communicating what you want to achieve.
You may also begin to find more opportunities to live out your purpose in small, everyday moments that can help boost your confidence and motivation to succeed. So, consider crafting a life purpose statement to start actualizing your long-term goals. Let’s look at how you can do this.
How to Write a Life Purpose Statement in 4 Steps
1. Identify Your Strengths and Skills
While the terms are often used interchangeably, your strengths and skills aren’t quite the same, and you want to identify both.
Your strengths are your innate abilities that come naturally to you. You can use your strengths to your advantage and build upon these personal characteristics to increase your sense of accomplishment in life.
In fact, research has found that people who recognize and intentionally use their strengths in their everyday lives are happier and less depressed than those who do not.
Some examples of personal strengths are:
While your strengths exist within you, they’re also refined by your life experiences. For example, you were born with a knack for creativity. This strength may not shine through if you don’t find yourself in creative environments very often.
On the other hand, with practice, you can cultivate strengths that don’t come naturally to you. Neuroscience has found that with enough practice, our brains can build new neural pathways throughout our lives that help us excel in new behaviors.
While it may take thousands of hours of practice, neuroplasticity and determination allow one to develop and adjust one’s ingrained strengths.
Oftentimes, people are unaware of their strengths. If there’s something that you find to be easy, you may assume that it’s easy for everyone without recognizing it as a unique strength.
You may not realize that something that comes naturally to you is a strength until you’ve taken some time to do some self-reflection, or you’ve been exposed to situations in which the strength worked to your advantage.
For example, you might not know that you’re very good at keeping things in perspective until you witness how much someone else allows some of life’s minor, everyday inconveniences to negatively impact their attitude and well-being.
And as you experience this more throughout life, you can pinpoint your ability to cope and your refusal to allow minor setbacks to derail you as one of your strengths.
When it comes to your skills, unlike your strengths, which may have been part of your persona from day one, your skills refer to the expertise that you develop through education and experience.
You can always learn new skills, which is essential because some of the skills that you have today may be irrelevant in the future with evolving technology or simply due to your changing interests.
When writing your life purpose statement, you need to be realistic about the skill set that may be required to have to be successful. And, if there are skills that you need that you don’t have yet, you will need to formulate a plan to cultivate them.
To write a truly effective life purpose statement, congruence between your strengths, skills, and purpose needs to be congruent. Otherwise, you’ll experience conflict between what you’re trying to do and what comes naturally to you.
2. Identify Your Values and Passions
Your core values are the things in life that you refer to when determining your priorities, and they’re probably the factors you take into account when you’re doing a quick inventory on whether or not your life is going the way you had hoped.
When your actions and decisions align with your values, you’re probably pretty satisfied with your life. However, when there is conflict between your everyday routine and your values, you may start to feel discontent.
You have values, whether you recognize them or not. And knowing your values is a great way to help you make decisions that will make or keep you happy in the long run.
For example, if you value lifelong learning and self-improvement, you probably won’t choose to spend a whole lot of your time sitting around watching reruns of old TV shows unless you’re stuck at home sick, as this activity does not help you progress in life.
Or, if you don’t value a competitive working environment, you probably wouldn’t be satisfied with your job if you worked in an extremely competitive sales position.
Understanding your values is best when planning your life in this way because it can help you make decisions that align with what’s important to you, what fulfills you, and avoid situations that don’t make you happy.
Your passions are a little more short-term than your values, in that these are the things in life that really interest you, you want to devote your time to, and you feel like you’re in your element while you’re engaging in them. Consider the following:
While your values aren’t likely to change much throughout your life, your passions may change quite a bit with age and experience. However, if you’re disconnected from your passions, you will probably feel unfulfilled.
So by identifying the things that motivate you at this point in your life, you can pinpoint ways to make some changes to increase your content by spending more time engaging in these activities.
When you identify your values and passions, you’re one step closer to knowing your purpose. This knowledge will help you live an intentional life and set goals that are aligned with who you are.
When your strengths, skills, values, and passions align, you’ll live a life of purpose that will be fulfilling both in the short and long term. Alternatively, if your days are spent doing something not on a relevant path, you will not feel satisfied with life.
3. Determine Your Desired Result
What do you want to be remembered for doing when all is said and done? What outcome do you want to produce from your passion and hard work? What direction do you want your story to go?
Researchers studying the correlation of happiness, meaning, moods, relationships, health, etc., found that one’s sense of purpose in life generally comes from giving to other people–while happiness derives from what other people give to you.
So, what can you give to the world? What problem can you help fix? What difference can you make? Making a difference is critical to feeling fulfilled, as it will help you feel important, which equates to having a purpose.
4. Create a Draft
When you’re creating a draft of your life purpose statement, don’t overthink the process or your wording. Allow your thoughts to flow freely on paper as you draft, knowing that you will come back later to clean it up and make your purpose statement more concise.
Write in the present tense and use an active tone. Rather than writing about things that you will avoid doing, focus on what you plan to experience and achieve starting today.
Getting your thoughts and first draft on paper will give you a launchpad for writing your life purpose statement, which shouldn’t be more than a sentence or two. Your final statement should be clear, concise, inspirational, and realistic.
Before you get to work, let’s look at some examples of life purpose statements that you can use to help guide you in writing your own.
Examples of a Life Purpose Statement
1. “My purpose is to become an expert in my career and add valuable contributions to the field. I hope to feel fulfilled with my accomplishments when I retire.”
Many people find satisfaction through career success and their personal contribution to their field of practice. Having a career that fulfills your desire to do meaningful work will keep you intrinsically motivated to get up and get moving every day.
Finding purpose in your work may result from dedicating your life to something other than climbing the corporate ladder, which is why many professionals feel more content in a position where they can make some kind of unique contribution.
This is especially true in positions that focus on helping the community and those which are more oriented toward service than simply building the bottom line of the company.
Finding purpose in your career comes from doing something that you’re passionate about instead of simply finding a way to clock in and out every day to earn a paycheck.
If your life purpose statement is centered around your career, consider what about your job gives you such a deep sense of purpose. This way, you can ensure not to lose sight of this aspect of your career as time progresses.
2. “My purpose is to foster meaningful relationships with other people by loving unconditionally, practicing generosity, and always being open to forming new friendships and connections.”
If you find satisfaction through your personal relationships, having a purpose statement like this may feel right to you.
Research has found that the intensity and quality of people’s friendships is directly associated with life satisfaction. The more social integration that one has in their everyday life, the more satisfied they will be.
With this in mind, it’s not surprising that many people may revolve their life purpose statement around their relationships with other people.
3. “My purpose in life is to be a positive role model for others. Through supportive individual and group activities, I will empower younger generations to be independent, confident, and self-reliant.”
If you’re a great leader, you believe it is your purpose to inspire and motivate other people to become the best version of themselves. This life purpose statement likely resonates with people who care about and are hopeful for future generations.
Spending time helping our future leaders with their personal development is an important task that many people could find meaning in.
Being a mentor is a great way to improve the lives of others and set yourself up for a life filled with learning yourself as you meet and interact with new people and hear about other people’s experiences and struggles.
Working with people regularly with whom you have no natural connection by offering guidance and support will help you continue to hone your leadership skills and self-growth as you help people figure out their best path forward.
4. “My purpose is to instill healthy eating and exercise habits in children to help protect the physical well-being of our population.”
Encouraging positive lifelong eating and exercise habits at a young age can help prepare children for a healthy future. Children who give their bodies proper nutrition and plenty of exercise build the foundation for healthy growth and development, leading to lifelong well-being.
And these days, too many children aren’t receiving the proper nutrition or getting enough physical activity during the day, which is allowing the obesity epidemic in our country to continue.
The national prevalence of obesity in children lingers around 20%, which puts kids at risk for health complications once they get older.
Those passionate about physical health and disease prevention may feel it’s their purpose to make a difference in this sector of society, which would make this an appropriate life purpose statement.
5. “My purpose in life is to motivate and inspire positive change through my writing.”
If you’re passionate about writing and communicating with people in this way, you may feel that your purpose is to make a statement and a difference in people’s lives through the written word.
Whether this is by doing research and writing peer-reviewed publications to share your findings, or you feel you can be inspirational through more subjective writing, this purpose statement demonstrates exactly how one may want to make a difference in the world.
Final Thoughts on Writing a Life Purpose Statement
In summary, your life purpose statement will be unique to you and not catered toward the expectations of others. It will guide your time and attention and help you determine what goals to set and how to spend your free time.
By creating a life purpose statement, you will better understand yourself and help yourself become the best version of yourself. (To learn more, check out our post on mission statements vs. goals.)
Follow the step-by-step process in this article and use these examples as a guide to write your own statement. Display it where you can see it often to remind you why you do what you do every day.
Further Ideas to Set Goals for Your Life:
Finally, if you want to take your goal-setting efforts to the next level, check out this FREE printable worksheet and a step-by-step process that will help you set effective SMART goals.
