If you’re over 40 and still haven’t a clue as to what your life purpose is, journaling can help you find clarity. Mix and match 3 techniques and 2 strategies to define your life’s purpose in 5 minutes a day. Oh, and you’ll need a journal and a pen!
Is life confusing or what? You should know better by now, and you should be in a better position than you are at this age.
But you’re not.
You’re struggling to find clarity in your life. Can’t find your direction. Failing to see your purpose. You wade in stagnant waters and it reeks!
- What Is My Purpose in Life?
- Use Your Journal to Find Your Passion and Life Purpose
- 3 Journaling Techniques for Finding Life Purpose
- 1. A List Journal
- 2. The Gratitude Journal
- 3. Free Thought Journal
- 2 Journaling Strategies For Finding Life Purpose
- 1. Use Your Journal To Tame Your Emotions
- 2. Use Your Journal To Create Intention
- Self Love Program
What Is My Purpose in Life?
This question is more common than you think. Especially when you hit 40 or another fat rounded number.
You’ve reached a milestone on your journey. So you paused, hopped on that boulder to better see the landscape around you.
You see you’ve come far but you still have far to go.
You also know that to make it to the end, you’ll need to reassess your values.
You’ll need to know where you want to get to, how you’re going to get there.
And, you’ll need to know why you’re going there.
But sometimes, despite our determination and perseverance, we lose our way.
Use Your Journal to Find Your Passion and Life Purpose
If this is you, then journaling can be your new best friend.
Writing in a journal on its own really helps you to learn more about yourself. And if you know yourself, then it will be easier to define your purpose, your direction, and your path.
If you’ve been following this series, you may have already started with basic journaling.
Now, we are going to look at various forms and purposes of journaling to help you dig deeper and make the most of this technique.
The most effective way to use the journaling method is to write when you’re relaxed. Therefore, the best time to journal is early morning, as part of your morning routine. Because when you’re freshly awake, your mind hasn’t been influenced by day-to-day external factors.
And the way to do it is to literally dump on paper the contents of your mind, no thinking required. No spelling, no grammar checks, no syntax are important here. Not even words, you can make those up if that’s what happens inside your mind.
There are various journaling methods that require deeper thinking and yield different results. But this is just a MIND DUMP at this point.
3 Journaling Techniques for Finding Life Purpose
1. A List Journal
This type of journaling is self-explanatory.
It’s an easy method if your mind is faster than your physical coordination, as it’s no easy thing to capture racing thoughts.
With this method, there’s no need to form sentences. Just bullet point anything that comes into mind.
Later, you can return and organize the individual points into categories. You can re-assemble or re-write one topic on a separate page. You can also create a mind map and colour-code the individual points.
The topic of your list can range from serious stuff you’re dealing with, from deeply personal issues, work-related goals, relationships, desires, fantasies, or just fun things that you’ve been thinking about for a long time.
If you take the time to pick and write down your goals and dreams into a separate category. Then it’ll be an easy task to follow up by learning what steps you need to take to turn each of these goals into a reality.
This bucket list can give you some really interesting things to look forward to trying out. For example, one set of bullet points is an accounting of things you want for your life.
Similarly, unraveling the unpleasant issues will help you gain a fresh perspective. And just like with your goals, you can break a situation down into individual blocks and plan how to tackle each, one by one.
Another thing you can do is to list the accomplishments that you’ve achieved in the last year, quarter, or month. This can help you to gain a sense of how many things you’ve done.
Such a summary will give you a clearer picture of how you’ve actually been spending your time and show you that you have things that you can be happy about.
2. The Gratitude Journal
Do you ever find yourself becoming impatient, and unhappy about the things you wish you had?
When things get too much, it can be hard to stay focused on the positive things that go on in your life. As a consequence, it’s so easy to fall into that trap of the negative outlook where we focus on the things that we haven’t got instead of remembering what we do have.
Taking some time out of your day to write down the things that you can feel grateful for can put a lot of minor annoyances into perspective.
Sometimes it takes a good hard look to remind you that life hasn’t dealt you the worst hand, it just feels like that on some days.
What kinds of things do you feel grateful for today? Try to record what you’re thankful for that month, season, and so forth.
Ask yourself this question as often as you can, and you might be surprised that you learn something new about what captures your concern and gives you inspiration.
3. Free Thought Journal
Not every single aspect of a journal should be regimented. There are times when it’s a good idea to just let loose and say what’s on your mind.
This kind of journal is usually called a free thought journal. It can help you get out all of the extra thought that gets trapped behind your eyes. You can use this to rattle off random ideas and musings.
One of the biggest advantages of this kind of journaling is that everything that comes out is probably going to be a little bit unfiltered if you can really open up and just let it all hit the page.
Later on, when you’ve had some time to think about things, you can go back and analyze what you wrote down. Some thoughts can get masked by the influence of the world around you at the time of writing. So returning to your writings later might be a revealing process that can push you closer to clarity.
”The purpose of life is a life of purpose.”
Robert Byrne
2 Journaling Strategies For Finding Life Purpose
1. Use Your Journal To Tame Your Emotions
It’s pretty enlightening to look back into the past to see what kinds of emotions you were experiencing during life events. The written word on the page is impartial and honest because it comes from the moment when those things were being experienced instead of a foggy recall from memory.
When we are young, lots of things that happen seem like massive events. But as we mature, we will often avoid assigning weight to things that we know to be frivolous, or fleeting.
When you’re feeling down or you’re dealing with a difficulty, dump your emotions onto the paper and return to it later. You might see, in retrospect, that things actually weren’t that bad and that everything ended well. In any case, you coped and somehow survived.
This changes the perspective on events that you experience in your day-to-day life as well. It shows you how quickly the people, places, and things can seem like the most important thing in the world one day, and then a few years later seem to have passed like a snap of your fingers.
More importantly, it can serve as a reminder that no matter what you went through, you’re still here.
2. Use Your Journal To Create Intention
One of the biggest parts of gaining clarity is understanding purpose and intention.
Writing down goals, dreams, and intentions can and usually will set you on a more structured path that will help you to achieve and attain.
When you aren’t sure of what it is that you’re going for, it’s a lot harder to make sure that you’re doing all of the things that will make your dreams a solid possibility.
But declaring and committing your intentions to paper has a taste of formal obligation to yourself.
Journaling Can be Fun, Seriously
Write down a few things that you want to achieve in major areas of your life, health, career, relationships, finance, fun.
Avoid phrases like ‘want’, ‘try’, ‘wish’.
If you create intention, you must write it like you mean it. So infuse it with words expressing true intent.
Avoid vagueness. Make your intentions specific, trackable, actionable, and realistic.
Where you can, use the ‘who what why when how’ structure to help you do this.
‘I will speak kindly to myself every day of this week by appreciating how hard I work to fix things. I will no longer call myself a useless idiot.’
‘Every Wednesday, I will set aside 30 minutes to do meditation, relaxation, and visualization, 10 minutes each.’
‘Monday to Saturday, I will get up a 6 am to work on my business by completing 1-3 tasks each day from my to-do list.’
You get the idea.
Journaling is one of the best techniques I’ve ever come across and that works for me very well. Not only is it truly therapeutic but it is a treasure trove of hidden gems, ideas and inspiration, and thoughts I never knew I had!
Of course, there are no limitations in what type of list you use and how you use it.
I combine all of them, and I colour-code, draw, doodle, sketch, and jot, and make lots of swirly and crisscross patterns.
So, you see, serious mental work can be fun.
Self Love Program
Self-Love Week 1: 6 Simple and Affordable Ways To Start Practising Self-Love
Self-Love Week 2: 5 Ways to Build a Positive Relationship With Yourself
Self-Love Week 3: How To Treat Your Body With Kindness And Feel Happier
Self-Love Week 4: How To Have a Great Day Every Day? Wake Up Early To Avoid Panic and Meltdowns!
Self-Love Week 5: Start Living Your Best Life Now: Focus On Your Future, Not The Past
Self-Love Week 6: 5 Benefits of Positive Self-Talk For Life Change
Self-Love Week 7: How To Create a Daily Self-Care Ritual
Self-Love Week 8: How to Set Life Goals for Better Future After 40
Self-Love Week 9: How to Find Your Life Purpose in 5 Minutes a Day
This article was written by Zuzana Halliwell. I am not a doctor or health professional and cannot be held liable for the information written here. This article is meant to provide information about the benefits of a healthy lifestyle. The content is based on my own personal experience and on information provided by medical professionals that is available to the public. It is not intended to provide medical advice. Do not use it as an alternative to seeking help from a medical professional.
