Life Purpose Week | Day 3: Exploration via Visualisations

Welcome to Day 3!  If you have gone through everything I shared on Day 1 and Day 2, kudos to you for being so serious on this topic!  

For Day 3, I’d like to share another tool, visualisation, to help you with your self-discovery journey. 

Exploring your inner wisdom via guided visualisations 

According to this excerpt from Staying Well with Guided Imagery by Belleruth Naparstek, guided visualisation, also called guided imagery, is a “powerful technique that focuses and directs the imagination in proactive, positive ways”.   An ancient technique, guided imagery has been increasingly proven by scientific research to be an effective method to enhance “health, creativity and performance”.  According to Naparstek, the visualisation process allows the unconscious and pre-conscious process to help a person become more aware of his or her own abilities and desires to accomplish a goal.  If you are doubtful of this technique or would like to learn more about why it works, here is another short excerpt from Napartstek's same book that discusses the Three Principles of Guided Imagery in a simple and straightforward manner.

I have used short guided visualisations and follow-up debriefs to help every one of my clients get clear on their life purpose, and every single one of them have so far gained useful insights.  Here are two 13-minute long guided visualisations if you want to give them a try yourself. 

Important: It may be a good idea to do a few visualisations to see whether different things come up. In addition, make sure that afterwards you debrief with a friend or a coach, or at a minimum, journal about what kinds of thoughts, emotions and images arise from the process, and explore how these insights could be apply to the direction of your life.

Now try drafting your life purpose statement again. For a reminder of how to structure your statement, read my Day 2 post.

Expand your life experience

If by now you are still feeling a strong sense of confusion about the direction of your life and/or lacking insights about what abilities you could harness to achieve them, one possibility is that you haven't explored many areas in your life to give you enough information to work with yet.  This could be especially true when you are still at the earlier stage of your career, or when you have been working in the same area for an extended period of time without much diversity.

If this is the case, don’t fret!  Ask yourself, what are a few things you can do to help you gain or diversify your life experience?  A few suggestions would be asking for new projects at work, or volunteering for a local charity.  

As you start to expose yourself to new experiences in life, you’d start to realize what you like, what you don’t like, how you interact with others, etc., and eventually have more clarity as time goes by.

As a wrap-up of today’s post, I’d like to share with you this famous quote by Gandhi:

This post belongs to a series of blog posts starting from Find Career Passion & Direction by Exploring Your Life Purpose.