Celebrity Expert Series #2
In this article series I’m sharing tips and tricks from my new book How To Be A Celebrity Expert about how to build your powerful personal brand.
Today, we’re going to take a look at how to define your life’s purpose. There’s a chance that you already know what your life’s purpose is and, if so, congratulations – you’re off to a good start! But for many of us who are still not sure, this can seem like an overwhelming place to start the process of marketing your business.
Please don’t be intimidated, because the journey that you’re undertaking is going to change your life for the better. I’m going to show you how to lean into your personal passions and to build on your strengths to create a powerful, freedom generating business that’s uniquely tailored to your goals and outcomes. And the best way to start is by answering a few questions.
The questions to ask
The questions below are crucial when it comes to laying the foundations for your books and for your powerful, personal success system. Don’t skip them!
- What are you most qualified to teach people?
- What do you love to do?
- Who do you do it for?
- What do those people want or need?
- How do they change or transform as a result of what you give them?
With the answers to these questions in hand, you can get a better idea of who you really are and what you have to offer people. You can also augment this picture of yourself by taking personality tests like the Love Dynamics test, the Profitology test and the Myers Briggs test.
15 more questions
If you’re still struggling to define your life’s purpose then it can help to ask yourself the following series of questions. But before you just jump right on in, I want you to book out a chunk of time, find somewhere you won’t be disturbed, switch off your mobile phone, and then write down your answers to each question. Write the first thing that comes to mind and try to spend between 30-60 seconds on each question.
Here are the questions:
- What brings a smile to your face?
- What are your favorite activities to do?
- What makes you lose track of time and the world around you?
- What makes you feel good about yourself?
- Who inspires you?
- What are your skills and abilities?
- What do other people always ask you for help with?
- What subject could you happily teach on?
- What would you regret not having, doing or being in your life?
- Looking back at your life, what actually matters to you the most?
- What are your deepest values?
- What are a few of the difficulties, challenges and hardships that you’ve overcome?
- What causes do you believe in/associate with?
- What would your message be and who would you want to reach with it?
- How could you use your interests, qualities and gifts to help other people?
You might notice a trend with these questions. They start broad and slowly narrow in until those final few questions are pushing you to take what you identified in your earlier answers and to use them to draw larger conclusions about your life and what you could be doing with it. The next step is to come up with a personal mission statement.
Your mission statement
A mission statement is an important part of your personal development because it forces you to think intensely about your life, to clarify its purpose and to determine what’s actually important to you. Take some time to draft up a short personal statement that answers the following three questions:
- What do you really want to do with your life?
- Who do you want to help?
- What should the outcome look like?
If you’re struggling with your personal statement, go back over your answers to the earlier questions or try listing out action words that you associate with. Examples of action words include empower, promote, educate, accomplish, improve, inspire, motivate, master and more. The goal is to find your ultimate objective by determining who you’ll help and how you’ll help them. Then consolidate that into 2-3 sentences which summarize what you do and why you do it.
This week’s action
Plan out some time in your calendar so that you can answer the series of questions that I asked earlier in this post. You’re going to need the answers to those questions for later posts in the Celebrity Expert series. In the meantime, regularly revisit your answers and see if anything changes with time. And of course, think about how your answers could point you in the direction of your future career.
Conclusion
Defining your life’s purpose is unbelievably important. They say that if you choose a job you love, you’ll never have to work a day in your life, and there’s a lot of truth in that. And of course, the best way to make sure that you love your job is to find one that aligns with your purpose and which helps to advance it.
In my next article I’ll talk about defining your ‘Why’ and why it’s so important at the foundational stages, and all the way through the growth of your business and brand.
About the Author
Cydney O’Sullivan is a multiple best-selling author, award-winning international speaker and communications consultant who helps experts and businesses stand out from their competitors.