Follow your Bliss: 10 steps to discovering your life purpose

‘Follow your bliss. Or you may get to the top of the ladder, only to find that it’s against the wrong wall.’ – Joseph Campbell

There is at least one thing that you have spent your whole life getting ready to do. Sometimes it’s something no one else could do. But usually it’s something millions of people do every day, but you love doing it anyway.

Sometimes you know what it is but you don’t know how to make it happen, you don’t know how to turn a passion into a job, or you’d just feel guilty doing something that makes you feel that good and calling it a ‘job’.

More often than not, you really don’t know what it is; you‘ve built up such a high wall of ‘thou shalts‘ and ‘thou shalt nots‘ that you‘re completely cut off from it.

In spite of this, once you find out what it is, looking back, it reads like a novel; as if everything in your life was pointing right to it. And you know what? It was.
1 Know that you are meant to follow your bliss. It’s what you are here to do. Everything that has happened to you during your life, whether you view those events as positive or negative, have prepared you for your life purpose.
2 Do what you love. Obviously, if you already know what you love to do, and you’re currently doing something else for a living, you just need to figure out how to switch between the two. You can think of a million different reasons not to do this, right? You need to skip straight to step 6. For those (most) of you who don’t know what it is, read on.
3 Be alert to signals. Okay, losing your job in the bank is a hard one to ignore, but there are other signals that are less obvious; like a fly fishing magazine that you pick up in the doctor’s rooms, visiting a sick aunt in hospital and wandering into the kids’ cancer ward by mistake. You would be amazed at how often misfortune is the gateway to bliss.
4 Pay attention to your guides. Everyone in your life is there for a reason. Some are there to steer you towards your bliss. A teacher who inspired your love for literature, a cousin you admired who could play a musical instrument, a chance discussion in the supermarket aisle that piques your interest, even a friend that tells you about a job interview he’s going for. (This actually happened to me once … I was the one who didn’t get the job.) Sometimes these guides will be well disguised, like the traffic cop who pulls you over to give you a ticket, the tax collector, your mother in law. In every conversation with everyone you meet, try and discover what they’ve got to tell you. Ask questions and listen carefully to what they say.
5 Go with the flow. You can determine the destination, but you can’t determine how you get there. You must learn to let go. Learn to trust and follow your intuition, even when it seems to be taking you in the wrong direction. (Don’t ask me why, but that’s calledbeing counterintuitive.) Intuition presents itself as feelings, and your first reaction is usually to dismiss it as fanciful or silly. When you’re trying to tap into what you love you can’t have your head overruling your heart.
6 Get out of your own way. When your head does try to control your heart, you’ll find that conditioned reactions – such as fear, ‘responsibility‘, lack of confidence, reminders of past failures – block your path, it‘s important to be able to see them for what they are; they are nothing but obstacles on the slalom course that is the path to your bliss. Zig. Zag. Go around them.
7 Be prepared to fail. Fear of failure is the number one reason people don’t follow their dreams. And, believe it or not, rebounding from failure is the number one thing that daring entrepreneurs claim got them to where they are today. Who dares wins.
8 Take one small step every day. Take some of the fear factor out of it. You don’t have to bite off more than you can chew today. Break it down, put it on paper, with dates and tick boxes. You’ll look at your plan – even if it runs to several pages over weeks, months or years – and say ‘Yes, I can do this!’

9 How can you help someone? Many people know exactly what it is they love, but they then say ‘So what? Who cares?‘ If you can express your bliss as ‘I help X do Y’, it gives your passion more meaning, purpose, focus and value. Of course, moulding your bliss around helping people will inevitably make it more fulfilling for you.
10 If you can’t do what you love, love what you do. If the one thing you love doing is beyond your reach for now, change the way you approach what you’re doing already. As Martin Luther King said, if you sweep streets, sweep streets like Michelangelo painted pictures, like Shakespeare wrote poetry, like Beethoven composed music. Do it wholeheartedly, enthusiastically, bring bliss to what you do; that in itself may lead to the circumstances in which you’re able to do what you love.

There’s a now-famous story about a Cape Town dustbin man who really loved to sing, so he sang while he did his job. Someone heard him through an open window early one morning and was so impressed with his singing, they helped him get a music school scholarship. He’s now a respected tenor performing on stages across the world. Now that’s following your bliss … and that’s FeelGood!