Do What You love Series Episode 1 – Purpose Vision Future

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vWelcome to Episode 1 of the Do What You love Podcast – this is part of a special 3-part series to help you discover your life purpose so you can have more fulfilment and joy in your life and career.
I’m your host Amanda Heal.
Do you feel like you work just to pay the bills and your weekend is fill with chores?
Do you feel like your life is lacking meaning or significance?
Are you finding that your job no longer brings you the joy and excitement that it used to?
Perhaps you’re fed up with the stress, long work hours and poor work-life balance?
If any of these problems resonate with you, I know exactly how you feel because I was there too once. But then I discovered the solution, which is what I want to share with you in this podcast and this podcast series. The solution is to discover and live out your life purpose.
Have you ever asked yourself what your life purpose is?
I know I certainly didn’t.
In fact, I didn’t begin to wonder about my life purpose until my 27th birthday. I have no idea why. I pondered all through my lunch break, but didn’t come up with anything satisfactory. I asked my colleagues what they thought, and they didn’t come up with anything. I asked my family, and they didn’t come up with anything either, so I put the question in the too hard basket and forgot about it for almost 17 years until the day in late 2013, when I had to face the very real possibility of losing my job.
Drastic cuts had been made to the Public Service during that year and people would ask me if I was afraid of losing my job. “of course not” I’d laugh, “I’m a totally blind lawyer, and a union delegate. They wouldn’t dare!”
But then one day, out of the blue, it was announced that the agency I was working for was going to be downsized by 50%, and that 7 legal jobs would be cut.
While I’d been happy for most of my legal career, I had become restless and unhappy over the past few years. But I lacked the confidence to change jobs, and certainly wasn’t prepared to lose the job I had!
I was suddenly terrified, but managed to keep my emotions in check until I got home. And then I went to pieces. If I lost my job, how would I pay the mortgage? How would I live? being totally blind, it’s not as if I could get a job as a checkout chick or pizza delivery person until I found something better.
Now, I’m a woman of faith, and what I have to say over the next 30 seconds or so relates to that. I’m not asking you to believe what I’m going to say, I’m just telling you what happened to me.
I’ve never been someone who could pick scriptures out of the air, so when Jeremiah 29:11 popped into my head, as I sat crying that got my attention. For those not familiar with that verse, it speaks of God having plans for us for hope and a future. As i pondered this, I was even more surprised when an almost audible voice said in my head “I have a job for you”. I heard this voice twice more over the next few months.
In January 2014, my employer offered me a redundancy, and at about the same time, I was offered the opportunity to sell skincare through a network marketing company. I’d secretly always wanted to run my own business, so I took the redundancy and jumped into selling skincare with the enthusiasm of a woman desperately trying to run away from her past.
One thing that I learnt very quickly was, just because I love a product and am happy to spend considerable amounts of money on it, doesn’t mean that everyone else will, even if I think they should. I was losing more than I was making, but being the stubborn person I am, I pressed on, determined to succeed, if only to prove to my family and friends that I could run a successful business.
In July 2015, whilst at a skincare conference, I fell, and very seriously injured my knee. It’s amazing what 10 weeks spent sitting on a couch, soul searching will achieve.
I eventually admitted to myself that I wasn’t doing at all well in the skincare business, and it was time to make a change. I had done a lot of personal development training through the skincare company, and it was at the very time I had decided to stop selling that the person who trained me called and asked if I’d like to retrain as a John C Maxwell speaker, trainer and coach. I was sure that this would be easier than selling skincare, so I said yes.
When I finished my training, I decided to specialise in career coaching, but was unable to get more than a couple of clients. so I decided to enlist the services of a coach to help me figure out what was going wrong.
Nothing beats working with a good coach. A good coach will ask questions and may even make suggestions, but will never tell you what to do. Their only agenda is your success, and they will help you to discover what you need to do to get it.
After a number of coaching sessions, I began to realise that the reason why I wasn’t getting clients for career coaching was that career coaching wasn’t what I really wanted to do. But what did I want to do?
One afternoon, as I was lying on my bed pondering this, my thoughts were drawn back to my purpose, and how I didn’t know what it was. As I lay there, I started thinking about my speaking and coaching training, and how easy it had been.
Speaking and coaching had come naturally to me. I’d been public speaking in one form or another since I was a child, and I’ve never had the paralysing fear that people describe when they have to stand in front of a group and speak. One of the main components of coaching is listening, and what skill have I had to develop very well as a blind person? to listen.
Then I began to look further back into my past. I remembered all the opportunities I had had to speak publicly, and the hours I had spent listening to and encouraging friends, and how ever since I was a child, I had always wanted some sort of job that helped people.
And then it came to me. I wanted to be a speaker and coach, helping my clients discover their life purpose, so that they could figure out what they wanted to do with their whole lives. This was my purpose. This was what I had been building up to my whole life.
Now I’m living out my purpose, and am happier than I’ve ever been, but more on that later.
Now, if you’ve just stumbled across this podcast, you may not know about my quiz. Would you like to know whether you are living out your life purpose? I’ve created a quiz to help you do just that. Just go to my website https://purposevisionfuture.com, fill in the form, and you’ll get the link to do the quiz. Easy!
In the next episode of this special 3-part podcast series, I’m going to talk about what life purpose is, what it looks like to live outside of your life purpose, and what problems that can cause over the long term.
Until next time, have a great day and do what you love!