5 Ways Change Can Usher You Into Your Purpose- Part 2

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urpose is paramount to life. Everything you see around you has purpose. I always challenge people to look around their immediate environments and fish out for me any 5 things that are “useless” and purposeless. Try and do that exercise for a minute and see what you will find out. I can tell you that the exercise is not an easy or a simple one. That is why I say purpose is paramount. So paramount is purpose that at times we have to go through change in order to attain it. If anything, no one is ever born smack in the middle of their purpose, even if they were born royalty. It is something that we seek, pursue, find and then pursue it some more.

Recap

In the previous post, we saw how important change is in helping you connect to your purpose. At times, change forces you to look at the only thing that you have left in your hands–and that is your potential. When all is well and cozy, it is at times easy to drop the ball on matters related to your gifts and talents. It is easy to bury them and keep on making merry and having a blast. Then change comes and strips you off of that utopia and all of a sudden, you realize how important your potential is and you start developing it. Later on, you will always be grateful for the change that you went through. Of course you will not want to go through it again, but you will never trade the lessons that you learnt in it for anything.

Change Increases Your Mental Toughness

The second thing that change forces on your is your mental toughness. When all is well again, it is possible that you become mentally lazy. Mental toughness is a coefficient of thinking, patience, and a dare. You do not get those things without change. I always give several examples from my own life. When I retreated back to the village after dropping out of College for lack of school fees, that was a forced change on my life.

I started that season with absolute horror and belief that my life had come to a close and that I would never amount t anything. It is at that season that I refused to do anything or even be involved in leadership because my acceptance would, in my mind, cement the fact that I had accepted my fate. However, at that moment in time,it was the most frustrating thing to fight the change by doing nothing and at the end of the day expecting to come out of the season.

Put  Your Roots Down

Finally, I accepted my fate with some revelation that came to my mind: Wherever you go, put your roots down as if you will never leave. All of a sudden I was my productive self. I got involved in leadership and revolutionized things in that short period of time. I became a happy soul and before you know it, the call to get out of the village came and guess what? I have never ever gone back there. That moment of change introduced me to who I was and helped me build some mental toughness. It helped me identify some leadership qualities that I did possess.

How Mental Toughness Connects You To Your Purpose

So we have seen that change forces you to be mentally tough. But how that does mental toughness connect you in anyway to your purpose?

You see, in living out your purpose, you will have to make very tough decisions from the word go. This world has not fully matured to the dispensation of purpose. I know that I have predicted that the next revolution this world will see is the revolution of purpose. If anything, it is already happening in organizations. You will have to be mentally tough to make a decision to do your purpose then be identified with the crowds. It is not easy to stick out like a sour thumb. The following are the ways I believe mental toughness will help you get connected to your purpose:

1. You Realize That You have to Monetize Your Passion

There is a time I was going through a forced change in my life. It was so tough that I knew from the bottom of my heart that I ought to be selling something. I used to look at vendors on the streets and feel that they were at least fending for themselves, doing something. I realized that I needed mental toughness not to be ashamed to sell what I have. Do you know what I had? I had my potential, gifts and talents. From those, I had products that I could build and some that I had already built.

2. Mental Toughness Helps You Stick it out

The nature of your purpose is that there will be a time that it will not make sense even to yourself. “Why don’t you just get a job and leave all these dreams alone? You are scaring people and stressing the family”. Many a visionary have been told these things. Only those who are mentally tough stick it out to the full and reap a great reward. Finally the very family and friends that were encouraging you to quit will start saying, “You see, we knew you would make it”. They will tell you sheepishly. But come to think about it. What if you quit like they asked you to? What if you did not have that mental toughness? Chances are that you would not have made it to your purpose.

Therefore, let us take a different look at how we embrace change. It has a potential to usher us directly into our purpose.