Finding our purpose or calling for every season of our lives and fulfilling it is the best way to contribute our greatest life, work, and leadership to the world. That’s also crucial for our personal growth and development. That’s why one of the major emphases of my calling is to teach people to find their purpose and live it out. Living one’s purpose enables a person to do both meaningful and gainful work. It brings joy and fulfillment to their lives; it enhances their relationships and improves their lives.
Key elements of our stories help us find meaning in life. According to the famed neurologist and psychiatrist Victor Frankl, we can discover meaning in life in three different ways:
- Work: by creating a work or doing a deed;
- Relationships: by experiencing something or encountering someone;
- Suffering: by the attitude that we take toward unavoidable suffering.
Frankl has said, “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing: the last of the human freedoms—to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.” When we choose our way to respond to suffering, we create and find meaning in life.
When I help people find their purpose and calling, I use my DESIGN inventory to help people write down the key areas of their lives they need to consider. Part of the DESIGN inventory is writing our life stories.
In this post, I will give you seven elements that you should cover when you are doing an inventory of your life stories. These will uncover and create meaning in your life. I created the acronym, STORIES, to help people remember that. Looking back on our history and writing our life stories is a powerful tool. Those who know where they are coming from are more apt to make the right decision about which path to take when they find themselves at a fork.
How to Inventory your Life STORIES
To write compelling life stories as an individual or community, look back in time, and write key experiences down. For example, to write your life stories, go through your life in stages from before you were born. Examine the circumstances surrounding your birth. Look at your childhood experiences, teenage experiences, young adult experiences until you get to your current age. If you were doing this for a community, you would follow the same approach. As you do that, consider the following five experiences.
S – Suffering and Painful Experiences
Dr. Rick Warren has famously said, “God doesn’t waste a hurt.” According to Dr. Viktor Frankl, mentioned above, suffering is one of the ways we find meaning in life.
The pain we go through in our lives shapes us in surprising ways. When you study the lives of successful people, you come out seeing how the pain they went through helped shape and prepare them for success. They are the people they became not in spite of the pain but because of it. After years of intentionally studying success, I believe that life is so sacred that it’s very reasonable to assume that there are no coincidences.
Times of suffering crucial moments to inventory and study to understand the course your life has taken thus far.
What have you suffered, and how has that shaped you?
What trials have you gone through?
T – Training & Educational Experiences
What topics/subjects have been the focus of your training/education? What are the things you learn in your stories? For example, numbers, plants, machinery, money, a team, a language, an audience, etc. By training and education, I don’t merely mean school and college degrees and certificates. Those things are important, too, and you should note them as part of the inventory. But equally important is training and education that doesn’t happen within formal institutions or relationships but which has impacted your life. Bill Gates didn’t learn to program in a classroom; he took advantage of his access to a computing terminal at the time when other teenagers around the country didn’t have and spent hours upon hours teaching himself. That’s what gave him the edge to start Microsoft and became the richest man in the world. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg and Apple’s Steve Jobs have similar stories.
In your training and educational history, what things come easily to you?
O – Occupational and Service Experiences
What topics/subjects and causes did you find yourself working on in your stories? How did you occupy yourself or spend your time? What environments have you enjoyed working it? For example, projects, structure, crises, potential goals.
Address:
- The type of work you have done
- How did you feel doing it?
- The work environments. Note the ones you liked and the ones you didn’t like. In what settings do you thrive?
- The role you had in the work/service. What relationship with others do you usually take on in your stories? For example, the person in charge, follower, collaborator, team member, lone ranger? The roles you tend to play in your stories (without pain/difficulty), or relationships you have are an indicator of the roles you are designed to take.
- Your areas of greatest fruitfulness. What areas/subjects have you yielded the most fruit in the work you’ve done in your stories? In what areas do you thrive? The most fruit doesn’t have to mean enormous productivity. Don’t compare yourself with others, just with yourself. Of all the work you have done, in what areas have you been most fruitful? In what environments do you thrive? Besides listing major areas, break it down into small portions of the work. For example, if it’s something like Orphan Care, what aspects of orphan care did you produce the most fruit it? Was working on projects, structure, crises, coming up with vision?
R – Relationships, choices, and moments that defined us.
Redefining moments, relationships, and choices
Moments, relationships, and choices that defined you.
Inventory the following three categories:
-Defining moments
-Pivotal people/relationships
-Critical choices
How many should you list? I recommend listing your top 10 in each category. Then describe them in specific details, including how you felt, how they impacted your life at the time, and how you think that influenced the course of your life. For further exploration of these things and similar concepts, I recommend reading Dr. Philip McGraw’s excellent book titled Self Matters. I’ve found that enumerating and discussing in specific details our defining moments, pivotal people, and critical choices can help serve as a catalyst that highlights crucial moments in our lives so that we can think about them as we discover our DESIGN.
*Include your genealogy among your pivotal people/relationships. However, there should be key people that were not part of your immediate family that played a huge part in defining who you are and why you are here today.
I – Inspiring Experiences
What inspires you? As you look through your experiences, what things inspired you? Write these down.
E – Errors and Mistakes
When we handle a mess well, it can often turn into a message for our lives. What are some areas where you have erred in significant ways? What did you learn from that?
S – Satisfying and Joyful Experiences
At what moments in the past have you felt satisfied, fulfilled, and thoroughly loved what you did? These are critical times to note.
What is the satisfaction in the stories? What outcomes gave you the most enjoyment? What made your activity worth doing?
When have you been all smiles, and how have those moments shaped you?
When you look at your life experiences and consider these seven elements, you will come up with an excellent portrait of your life that has the key elements that are necessary to help you determine your DESIGN or calling.
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