Could You Be Living Someone Else’s Dream?

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If you discover your life's purpose and live it out, you will be living your dream, and work will never feel like work again

 

 

Consider what you do each day. Are you following your passion and doing what you love?

If not, are you following in the footsteps of a relative and doing what they did? Are you doing a job that someone said you’d be good at, or would earn you lots of money? If the answer to either of the last 2 questions is “yes”, it’s possible you may be living someone else’s dream.

Searching for my dream

In high school, I had the opportunity to do work experience with a physiotherapist, and I loved it. So, I structured my Years 11 and 12 subjects to qualify me for entry into Physiotherapy studies at university.

None of the Australian physiotherapy schools would take me back then, due to my total blindness. So I enrolled in the North London School of Physiotherapy in the UK, a school specially designed to train blind physiotherapists.

It’s a long and complicated story, which I won’t go into here, but after 4 months at the school, I was advised to return to Australia and study something more academic. I remember sitting, broken hearted, in my Aunt’s lounge room in England, and asking her what I should do. I had been so focused on becoming a physiotherapist, that I had no other ideas about what to do with the rest of my life.

My Aunt said: “You’ve got a good brain, why don’t you study law?”

I didn’t know the first thing about lawyers, or what they did, but I returned to Australia and obtained a combined Commerce Law degree.

Fortunately, I enjoyed studying, and working in the legal profession. In fact, I worked as a Government lawyer for 17, mostly happy, years. However, while I didn’t realise this at the time, being a lawyer wasn’t my dream, but my Aunt’s.

Like many other people, I got up every day and went to work, and enjoyed what I did. But I always envied those people I would see on TV who were following their passion. They would say things like: “I work 18 hours a day, but I love it so much, it doesn’t feel like work”, “It’s what gets me up in the morning” and “At last, I’m doing what I’ve always wanted to do”.

Discovering My life’s Purpose

After taking a redundancy and running a network marketing business, I retrained as a John C Maxwell speaker and coach.

As I started coaching clients, and did a little speaking, people began to say how I encouraged and inspired them. This puzzled me at first, as I was just being myself, but I eventually realised that to inspire and encourage others is my life’s purpose.

My dream is to inspire and encourage others, through speaking, coaching and writing, to discover their life’s purpose. I love what I’m doing. work doesn’t feel like work as I’m following my passion and living my dream.

Discover your life’s purpose and live your dream

If you are living your dream, fantastic! Please comment and tell me about it.

If not, have you adopted someone else’s dream and made it fit? Wouldn’t you rather discover your life’s purpose, and live your own dream? Comment with “Purpose” and I’ll send you some information on how you can do this.

Editor’s NoteI

This post was originally published on 18 July 2016, but has since been updated.

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