Do you feel you have a purposed filled life?

If not, think about how the world would be different without you.

The lives of everyone you have ever known or encountered in some way would be altered in some small or significant way.

The world population is nearly 6,700,000,000. If everyone in the U.S. alone lined up single file, the line would stretch around the Earth almost seven times. That’s a lot of people. Why are all of these people here milling about on the planet for our 85 or so years?

In the scheme of things, you and I are infinitesimal drops in an enormous sea of humanity.

It makes you wonder if your life makes any measurable impact in this big world. What makes one life (yours) exceptional and memorable? How do you live a life filled with purpose?

For some of us, spiritual faith and a belief in the afterlife provide the foundation for a purposeful life.

But for now, let’s focus on the life you are living right now and how you want the world to remember you.

What are you doing every moment and every day that serves the larger context of your religious or philosophical beliefs about a life worth living? It is how you spend those moments and hours that add up to a life filled with purpose and meaning.

The vast majority of your life is in your control. You can decide what you value and love and then create your life accordingly. You always have choice, even over the areas of your life that seem out of your control. You can choose to resist and struggle and bemoan your circumstances, or you can choose to find meaning in the situation in spite of the pain or discomfort.

The renowned Austrian psychiatrist, Viktor Frankl, survived the Holocaust, even though he was in four Nazi death camps, including Auschwitz from 1942-45. During, and partly because of, his suffering in concentration camps, Frankl developed a revolutionary approach to psychotherapy known as logotherapy.

At the core of his theory is the belief that humanity’s primary motivational force is the search for meaning, and the work of the logotherapist centers on helping the patient find personal meaning in life, however dismal one’s life circumstances.

Whatever your life circumstances may be, you can make a difference in the world and find meaning in your life.

Most likely, you will directly impact only a small group of people during your lifetime, unless you are a world leader or celebrity. But through your small network, your decisions, behaviors, ideas and attitudes will spread ripples of action that touch unknown thousands, maybe millions of people.

With the knowledge that you have the ability to generate positive change and action, you can take advantage of a powerfully creative choice for your life. One decision can launch a life filled with purpose.

Here it is:

Decide what you value and love most, and then mindfully craft your life accordingly. Become a living example of the legacy you want to offer the world. As you create this legacy for others, you will discover a deep sense of meaning and purpose for yourself.

A purposeful life doesn’t just happen. It is a willful act of creation every single day.

When you uncover what you value most in life, you will discover sustained happiness in daily living. These areas of value are where should spend most of your time and energy.

Here are seven areas that support sustained happiness and provide a foundation for making an impact on the world and living a life of purpose.

1. Security and Comfort

How much energy and time should you put into achieving and acquiring? How many creature comforts and material things do you really need? Find the balance between living a comfortable and secure life while allowing yourself the time to pursue what you value and love most. Experiential pleasures usually provide more sustained fulfillment that material acquisition does. Don’t pursue money and things beyond your ability to find meaning from them.

2. Balance and Moderation

Americans work longer hours and take fewer vacations than other advanced economies. Why do we fill up so many hours with work when there are so many other valuable and interesting ways to spend our time? We have become brainwashed into believing that work should take precedence over every other area of life — at the risk of our mental, emotional and physical health. Not only with work, but in all areas of our lives, we need to find balance so that we have the room to find purpose.

3. Contribution

Everyone wants to feel they leave this Earth having made some positive contribution. You can make contributions of excellence, encouragement, purpose, and love. A contribution to the world doesn’t have to be a dramatic gesture or sacrifice. It can be as mundane as helping a neighbor with groceries or reading a story to your child. When you give something of yourself, no matter how small, you have created that ripple of positive action. Use your time, energy, talents and money for good.

4. Relationships

If you listed what you value and love most in life, your close relationships probably rise to the top of the list. These relationships are not only vital to our sense of well-being and happiness, they also profoundly affect our health. People in supportive relationships are happier and healthier. They are so very important, and yet we often neglect them. Nurturing our connections with these people is the most valuable endeavor you can make. And reaching out to those outside of your immediate circle with expand your sense of connection and meaning.

5. Beauty

Beauty is the quality that thrills the soul and makes life vibrant and juicy. It elevates us beyond the mundane and connects us with something divine. Beauty provides fulfillment, awe and connectedness to the world around us. And it forces us to slow down long enough to savor it. By inviting beauty into your life, you open the door to a more profound and exquisite journey. Explore beauty in nature, art, literature, and music. Find ways to share and support beauty in your community.

6. Creativity

Creativity is not the exclusive domain for those born with natural gifts and artistic leanings. Anyone in any discipline can be creative by applying the same learned skill set: dedication, hard work, seeking new challenges, boldness, and follow-through. The pursuit of creative endeavors is critical to the development of our personalities and our relationships. It also allows us to live in the moment. When our moments are filled with creativity, we feel purposeful and happy.

7. Personal Growth

Introspection, seeking enlightenment, deepening spiritual awareness, understanding relationships, striving for emotional maturity, and defining our values and integrity — these are the very tools that assist us in the creation of a purposeful life. As we have a better understanding of our own needs and motivations, we can heal and grow in ways that make life an exciting adventure. We can be a better person for those around us, impacting them in deeper, more positive ways.

A life of purpose is what you make of it. Unfortunately, many of us live reactionary lives. We respond to the circumstances life hurls at us rather than creating the life we desire.

The first bold step toward living a purpose filled life.

A purposeful life evolves with the daily awareness and work you do to reveal and refine your authentic self — through relationships, balance, beauty, creativity and personal growth. Today, go create your own life filled with purpose.

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In fact, probably 90% of the deeds you hope to accomplish could be accomplished — if it weren’t for limiting beliefs and the overwhelmingly powerful feelings that fuel these beliefs. The only person getting in your way is you.

These powerful feelings have been reinforced over time by continual negative thinking. When you were a child, perhaps things happened to undermine your confidence or sense of self-worth. Over the years, these thoughts and feelings have been brewing  and penetrating your psyche. They have carved deep grooves in your brain circuitry. The longer you have nourished limiting belief or fear, the more implanted it is in your mind. (Take a look at these books on the science of neuroplasticity that confirms these truths:  The Brain That Changes Itself: Stories of Personal Triumph from the Frontiers of Brain Science (by Norman Doidge, M.D. or Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain: How a New Science Reveals Our Extraordinary Potential to Transform Ourselves)

You can reduce or eliminate your limiting beliefs. And once you do this, your life will turn around 180 degrees.

You will accomplish things you never thought possible.

You will not fear fear.

You will find a purpose and passion in life and find opportunities everywhere.

In fact, you will create opportunities out of thin air and begin to soar.

To kill limiting beliefs, you can’t just address the superficial thoughts. You have to find the root cause and exterminate it.

This isn’t to suggest you need years of counseling and soul searching. You don’t have to delve into every aspect of your unhappy childhood or your horrible marriage.

But you do need to focus on three key areas:

• Focus on one limiting belief at a time. Start with one that really impedes with your growth. It needs to be a biggie.  What’s yours? You don’t feel good enough? You don’t make enough money? You’re not intelligent enough? You aren’t as attractive as others? You don’t feel lovable? We all have one that haunts us and touches every aspect of our lives.

• Why do you have this limiting belief? You should keep asking this question of yourself until you run out of answers. Write down every possible reason you come up with, starting with the primary one that likely occurred when you were a child. Write down these reasons so you can remember them. Keep adding to the list if need be.

• Begin undermining these reasons with contradictory evidence. Because you  feel a certain way about yourself doesn’t make it true. And if there once was truth in the original belief, you have grown and changed since then. It isn’t necessarily true now. There are many reasons now to prove that you are intelligent, lovable, attractive, etc. Write these down next to each of the reasons you listed above.

As you do these exercises, you are spraying poison on the root of your limiting belief.  You can follow these steps for all of your limiting beliefs.

But . . . you can’t stop there. You have to reinforce your new beliefs over and over again. You must rewire your brain to create new neural pathways with a new way of thinking.

If you want to learn to do this, I offer more detailed instructions on a free video that I’ve created on overcoming limiting beliefs.

You can check it out by going to this link and scrolling down near the bottom of the page where you see the free videos. I take you through an exercise to show you how to isolate the belief, attack the root cause, and reinforce the new thinking with some special techniques.

Here’s another assessment tool to help you isolate your limiting beliefs.

• Review the statements below, and check those that really resonate with you.

• After you choose, ask yourself “why” for each statement, repeating this question until you run out of answers.

• Your very last answer is often the root of your belief. But you have to be totally honest with yourself to uncover the root cause.

_____I have not really made the authentic choice to be fully alive and engaged in life for the rest of my life.

_____I need to be right.

_____I have unresolved issues, problems, and difficulties in my life.

_____I am not clear on my personal values or I am not living in alignment with them.

_____I am addicted or attached to substances, people, or behaviors.

_____I am currently living a big lie.

_____I really don’t have anything better to do with my life right now.

_____I have financial problems or other major lifestyle concerns.

_____I am missing key, empowering relationships in my life.

_____My needs are not being met.

_____My life is primarily about me and my problems.

_____I don’t get how life works so well for other people but not for me.

_____I have not experienced very much in life yet. My life is boring.

_____I am under a lot of stress.

_____I don’t take care of myself or my health the way I should.

Uncovering and acknowledging the root cause of a limiting belief allows you to ultimately address it and eliminate it.  To kill these limiting beliefs, practice the techniques I explain in my free video. I hope you will check it out here: Limiting Beliefs Video

When we consider our profound longings, our deepest desires, and our biggest fears, we all seek the answer to one question.

What is my life purpose?

This may not be something we consider daily, but it’s part of our everyday actions nevertheless. In everything we do and in every decision we make,  we are seeking the answer to this unspoken question. Even the most spiritual, the most positive, and the happiest among us has occasionally wondered if the bumper sticker, “Life is hard and then we die,” has a modicum of truth to it.

We work for survival, but we also work to for a myriad of other reasons — to express our creativity, to serve others, to create a lifestyle, to gain wealth, to find fulfillment, to have power, to impress others, to purchase things. And thus we seek to live a life filled with purpose.

We have romantic relationships to procreate, but we also have relationships for stability, love, affection, intimacy, obligation sex, companionship, prestige, happiness. And thus we seek purpose.

We embrace our faith because our parents guided us, but also because of longing, hope, connection, comfort, faith,  peace, obligation, fear, desperation, love, confusion. And thus we seek purpose.

In all that we do, whether we are conscious of it or not, we seek to carve out a purposeful existence in a world of confusion.

The awareness of death’s certainty, the confusion about a possible afterlife, the reality of human pain and suffering, the hypocrisies of world religions, the randomness of life and its tragedies — these all conspire to shake us and undermine our faith in mankind’s dignity and divine intelligence. What separates us from the lowly worm? We are born. We live. We die.

Have you been thinking about these things for much of your life? Are you a seeker?

I am. I continue to seek my life purpose. I have had faith, but it has been frequently shaken. I have sought the truth, only to discover that my truth isn’t always The Truth. I have hammered my stake in the hard ground of absolute knowledge, only to watch the earth quake and rumble and the stake fall away into the abyss.

I now recognize that I “know” nothing, but I can never give up on seeking.  I no longer seek for The Answer. I seek for the pleasure of seeking. I have learned to embrace mystery, ambiguity, uncertainty. I accept that it may be, it may not be. It is real, it is an illusion. There are nuggets of truth and beauty even in allegories and fairy tales. I can be happy with that. In fact, I think I like it.

So I come back to the question — what is my life purpose?

My purpose is to use this very moment, this “right now”  –

to serve

to grow

to create

to learn

to love

to connect

to seek

to explore

to sow peace

to simply be

My purpose is to love this moment now so much that everything I do and everything I am is an expression of that love.

If we can do this most of the time, if we can just remember — “this is my moment, this is my purpose right now, so don’t let it slip by,” then we will have lived a life of passion and purpose. I invite you to examine your own life right now and define your purpose. Who do you want to be? What do you want to do? How do you want to live? If you live in accordance with your purpose, you will no longer live in quiet desperation. You will live from passion.

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• Could you be an over-thinker?

• Do you come up with never-ending to-do lists?

• Do you commit lots of time watching TV or surfing the net?

• Do you work too much or too long?

Since I have gotten a little older and the inescapable fact of life’s fleeting nature has become more real, I’ve begun to see each day, each moment as an amazing opportunity for joy, contentment, and love. Oh how I wish I had felt this way in my younger years.

If we all live to age 90, from birth to death most of us have 32,850 days of living. Our Earth has existed 4.55 billion years. Our existence here is merely a blip of time.

This realization has provoked plenty of soul searching for me. (Some might call it a mid-life crisis!) I have thought, read and studied a lot about what comprises a purposeful life.

1. Living in integrity. This is something you must define yourself by creating your individual operating system. But in general it includes living in alignment with your values and your personal/spiritual beliefs; being authentic and honest with yourself and others; and moving into balance financially.

2. Creating a contribution. Whether through our work or elsewhere, we all need to feel we’ve got a purpose and have made some mark on the world. Our everyday life should be infused with some intrinsic meaning. Developing a passion and sharing it with the world provides tremendous joy and fulfillment.

3. Having good relationships. We need loving, supportive, and healthy relationships with romantic partners, family, friends, and co-workers. We certainly know the impact of bad relationships. Good ones offer us joy, contentment, and connectedness.

4. Being healthy. When we feel great physically, we are bound to feel good mentally and emotionally. We we feel bad physically, we feel bad all over. It is hard to enjoy life if your physical health is poor.

5. Having pleasure. There are a myriad of things to enjoy in our amazing world — more than we’re able to ever experience in one lifetime. As long as we are living in the framework of our integrity, then pleasurable experiences should be pursued and enjoyed regularly — without guilt. Having fun is critical to savoring life.

As you examine these five areas in your own life, keep in mind that first defining your integrity and creating your own personal operating system will make it much easier to define the other four areas. When we live outside of our integrity, it casts a shadow over all other areas of our lives.

Allow me to share 26 ideas for savoring life and living it to the fullest in these five critical areas:

1. Define or refine your values and personal operating system. Understand what is essential to you, and aim to live in accordance with this.

2. Restore your integrity wherever you have stepped out of it. Make amends, correct the situation, shift the balance. This will likely reduce agitation and guilt.

3. Be true to yourself. Be authentic. Look for ways in which you are pretending, acting to impress, or living out some other person’s expectations instead of your own.

4. Examine your job. You spend many hours a day in this job. If you don’t adore it, or at best like it, you’re frittering away a good portion of your life. This really is imperative for a happy life. Take control of your career.

5. Know your passions. If you do not really know what you’re passionate about, learn. Invest time to make this happen, then find a way to regularly incorporate your passion into your daily life. Take time to discover your passion.

6. Give to others daily. Share your knowledge, passions, skills, and time with another person on a regular basis. This doesn’t demand a grand gesture. Impacting one life can make a huge ripple around the world. It feels good.

7. Show kindness. In the smallest interactions, be kind. Choose kindness over being right, indignant, smarter, richer, or too busy. Kindness feels good to you and also to the recipient. And it’s really infectious.

8. Release some stuff. When you have lots of material things that you do not use, release them. Give them away to someone who can use them.This really is tremendously satisfying.

9. Release some money. If you have plenty of money, use it for good. Contribute it in a manner that makes a person person or the whole world an even better place.

10. Just listen. Pay attention to someone’s story, their pain, their joyful event, their boring anecdote, their fears. Give someone the gift of really hearing them.

11. Nurture your friendships. Become the initiator. Express your feelings for them. Learn more about your friends. Be there for good and bad times.

12. Be the person you want in others. Define what you want in a relationship, then be that person yourself. Like attracts like.

13. Let it go. Be quick to forgive and quick to forget. Holding grudges and nurturing old wounds is unhealthy and makes you unhappy.

14. Know when to let go. However, some relationships can pull you down. Examine those in your life. Is it time to let go? Just how much energy are you giving away to them?

15. Expand your network. Actively make new friends. They can improve your life, introduce you to new ideas, pleasures, and other new friends.

16. Love yourself. A healthy love for yourself with healthy self-confidence creates healthy relationships.

17. Communicate often. We so often misunderstand and misinterpret each other. Or we say things we don’t really mean. Learn healthy communication skills and use them often, particularly in your primary relationship.

18. Get educated on nutrition. Read books, blogs, or magazines about proper eating for good health. Then eat that way. If you’re unhealthy, it will undermine your happiness in every areas of your life.

19. Go outside every day. Sunlight boosts your mood and supplies vitamin D. Being in nature enlivens your soul and enables you to feel connected to the world surrounding you.

20. Get moving. You already know this. Get some exercise. Walk, bike, run, swim, dance, stretch, use resistance training. You can also make it fun. Care for this remarkable house for your soul.

21. Cut back, simplify, reduce stress. Find balance in your life allowing some things go. You can’t do or be everything. Choose a few things, and enjoy them fully. Identify where you are stressed, and deal with it.

22. Find an outlet. You will find difficult times in each and every life. Find someone, a coach, counselor, minister, or friend, who can help you through them. Discussing your problems with someone trusted can help you heal and cope and stay mentally and emotionally healthy.

23. Play often. Play shouldn’t end at childhood. Have fun regularly. Define what exactly is fun for you personally and go do it weekly.

24. Increase your travel. The whole world truly is your oyster. There’s so much to explore and see and revel in. Pick many places that intrigue you. Save your money. Plan some trips.

25. Unplug. Television and computer have pulled us far from real living. Actively decrease the length of time you spend in front of them. Fill this time with pleasurable activities instead. Read, cook, play a sports activity, meet up with friends, do something creative, make love, meditate, go to the theater, look at the stars, chop wood, carry water.

26. Think less. Be more. Act more. Negative thoughts create negative feelings. Actively seek to stop negative thinking, and simply be in the moment. If negative thoughts and feelings are getting intrusive, do something distracting. Select one of the activities above and savor it.

It requires thought, planning, and a dose of wisdom to create a happy and passionate life — a life you can savor. Experience teaches us these lessons, and wisdom helps us to embrace them.