Find your soul purpose

Find your soul purpose

How do you know what your true life is? Or what your soul's purpose
is? How do you know how to live this purpose? The answers to these
questions are yours for the taking, but you must seize the answers and
not wait to be given them. No one will give you the answers.

One good clue as to whether you are living your true life is how much
you fear death. Do you fear death a lot, just a little, or not at all?
"When you say you fear death," wrote David Viscott, "you are really
saying that you fear you have not lived your true life. This fear cloaks
the world in silent suffering."

When mythologist Joseph Campbell recommended that we "follow our
bliss," many people misunderstood him. They thought he meant to
become a pleasure-seeker, a selfish hedonist from the "me generation."
Instead, he meant that in order to find out what your true life could be,
you should look for clues in whatever makes you happy.

What gets you excited? In the answer to that question, you'll discover
where you can be of most service. You can't live your true life if you're
not serving people, and you can't serve people very well if you are not
excited about what you're doing.
What makes you happy? (I know I already asked, but the fear that
"cloaks the world in silent suffering" comes from not asking that
question enough times.)

In my own professional life I have finally found that teaching makes me
happy, writing makes me happy, and performing makes me happy. It
took me many years of unhappiness to finally reach the point of despair
necessary to ask the question: What makes me happy?
I was the creative director for an ad agency and I was making a good
deal of money producing commercials, meeting with clients, and
designing marketing strategies. I could have done this type of work
forever, but my horrible fear of death was my clue that I was not living
my true life.

"People living deeply," wrote Anaïs Nin, "have no fear of death." I was
not living deeply. And it took me a long time to get clear answers to my
question: What makes me happy? But any question we ask ourselves
often enough will eventually yield the right answer. The problem is, we
quit asking.

Fortunately for me, in this rare instance of persistence in the face of
extreme discomfort, I didn't quit asking. The answer came to me in the
form of a memory—so colorful it was almost like a movie scene. I was
driving at night in my car 10 years earlier, and I was as happy as I had
ever been. In fact, I was driving around aimlessly so that I could keep
my feeling of happiness preserved and contained within that car—I
didn't want anything to interrupt it. It was so profound that it lasted for
hours.
The occasion had been a speech I had just given. The subject of it was
my recovery from an addiction, and the night that I spoke I was running
such a high fever, and I had such a fear of speaking in public that I tried
to call the talk off. My hosts wouldn't hear of it.
Somehow I made it to the podium and, probably because my fever and
flu were so intense, I spoke freely, without caution or
self-consciousness. The more I spoke about freedom from addiction, the
more excited I got. My creativity just soared. I remember the audience
laughing as I spoke. I remember them jumping to their feet and cheering
when I was finished. It was the most remarkable night of my life.
Somehow I had reached people in a way I'd never reached people
before, and their own expressions of joy lifted me higher than I had ever
been.
It was that memory of that moonlit night, driving in my car, that came
back to me 10 years later after I'd

spent weeks repeating to myself the question, "What makes me happy?"
Now I had the picture, but I had no idea how to act on it. But at least I
knew what my true life was, and I knew that I wasn't living it.
Then one day one of my major advertising clients asked me to hire a
motivational speaker for a big breakfast meeting they were having for
their sales staff. I didn't know of anyone in Arizona who was any
good—the only motivational speakers I was familiar with were the
national ones whose tapes I'd listened to so often in my car, people such
as Wayne Dyer, Tom Peters, Anthony Robbins, Alan Watts, and
Nathaniel Branden. But Alan Watts was dead—and the rest were
probably far too expensive for our little breakfast.
So I called Kirk Nelson, a friend of mine who was sales manager at
KTAR in Phoenix, and asked his advice. "The only person in Arizona
worth hiring is Dennis Deaton," he said. "He speaks all over the
country, and he's usually booked, but if you can get him, do, because
he's great."

I finally reached Deaton in Utah, where he was giving seminars on time
management. He agreed to come back to Phoenix in time for our
breakfast and give a 45-minute motivational talk.

Kirk Nelson was right. Deaton was impressive. He held the audience
spellbound as he told stories that illustrated his ideas about the power
that people have over their thoughts, and the mastery that they can
achieve over their thinking. When he finished speaking and came back
to the table where we had been sitting, I shook his hand and thanked
him, and I found myself making a silent vow that someday soon I would
be working with this man.

It wasn't long after that that he and I were indeed working together. It
was at a company called Quma

Learning, Deaton's corporate training facility based in Phoenix,
Arizona. Although I began with Quma as its marketing director
—creating advertisements, video scripts, and direct-mail pieces—I soon
worked my way up to the position of seminar presenter.

My first big thrill came when Deaton and I were both invited to speak at
a national convention of carpet-cleaning companies. It was the first time
I had ever shared the stage with him, and I was to go on first. He was in
the audience when I spoke, and I have to admit I had worked harder
than I'd ever worked in my life in preparation for this event.

The participants had heard Deaton before at previous conventions and
loved him, but they'd never heard me. After my presentation was over,
they clapped enthusiastically and as Deaton passed me on his way to
the stage he was beaming with pride as he shook my hand. (Unlike
myself, Dennis Deaton has very little professional jealousy of other
speakers. He was happy for my success. I have to admit that my
favorite moment occurred when, after he was introduced, someone in
the audience teasingly shouted out, "Dennis who?")

Many people get confused and believe that living their true life means
getting lucky and finding a suitable job with an appreciative boss
somewhere. What I have come to realize is that you can live your true
life anywhere, in any job, with any boss.

First find out what makes you happy, and then start doing it. If writing
makes you happy, and you're not writing for a living, start up a
company newsletter or your own Web site. When I first realized that
speaking and teaching made me happy, I started a free weekly
workshop. I didn't wait until something was offered to me.

Whatever goal you want to reach, you can reach it 10 times faster if
you are happy. In my sales training and consulting, I notice that happy
salespeople sell at least twice as much as unhappy salespeople. Most
people think that the successful salespeople are happy because they are
selling more and making more money. Not true. They are selling more
and making more money because they are happy.

As J.D. Salinger's character Seymour says in Fanny and Zooey, "This
happiness is strong stuff!" Happiness is the strongest stuff in the world.
It is more energizing than a cup of hot espresso on a cold morning. It is
more mind-expanding than a dose of acid. It is more intoxicating than a
glass of champagne under the stars.

If you refuse to cultivate happiness in yourself, you will not be of
extraordinary service to others, and you will not have the energy to
create who you want to be. There is no goal better than this one: to
know as you lie on your deathbed that you lived your true life because
you did what made you happy.

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