We All Have a Reason for Being

What’s the Reason you are in life?

I ask this as casually as I would ask what you ate for lunch, yet I know that the answer isn’t quite that simple.  Yet, the powerful clarity of our Reason is often closer than we think.

My life experiences have led me to genuinely believe that each of us is here for a Reason. In fact, I believe there is a reason for everything. We might not always know what the reason is, but that doesn’t mean the reason doesn’t exist. There is a reason we ate what we ate yesterday; a reason that we live where we live; a reason for every consumptive choice we make.

As I’ve come to see it, Life is a never ending process of connecting ever more deeply with our Reason. Serving others in ways that feel good for both parties has proven itself to me as the very best way to know our reason.

Here is a powerful way of thinking about your journey to better understand your Reason:

We can waste a lot of energy lamenting, berating and judging ourselves. Energy spent in this way takes us away from the reason we are in life. Personal experience has taught me this about 1,000,000 times (give or take a couple). 

One of the most significant ways I have judged myself in the past has been viewing all of the pivots I’ve made in my life as evidence of my stupidity. 

Years ago, I stumbled across some learning about sailing that helped me more successfully integrate my journey. Tacking is a term used in sailing where a boat zig zags into the wind as it heads towards its mark. Observers with no knowledge of sailing are liable to think that those on board a boat that is tacking have had too much to drink. 

Yet, tacking captures an important aspect of our journey. On the surface we might appear to be changing course fairly regularly. New roles, new relationships etc. But underneath we are tracking (however productively) an invisible center line with those choices. 

I recall one day telling an important teacher what I fool I was. He asked why? I shared that I started my career as a mechanical engineer, then pivoted into sales, then decided to get an MBA, then became interested in being a therapist and pursued a masters in psychology, then decided that wasn’t it and began to invest more of my time back in my sales role because of a promotion at work, then quit my sales job to develop a new role as a speaker/facilitator/coach on leadership, and eventually I decided that leadership development really wasn’t exactly it either. 

Whew! On the surface this sounds like someone that is lost right? Yet, when I zoom out on my life and look at it with a sailing lens…I can see I was just tacking. Back and forth across an invisible center line (my Reason). No matter what I have done, I am tracking something similar wherever I go. Every new degree or learning experience has been ultimately something that allows me to serve others even better relative to what my centerline/Reason is. 

I hope this metaphor allows you to look at your experiences differently…to set down some of the judgment you may have about your choices, and to inject curiosity about your journey and the tacking that you regularly do across your centerline/Reason. 

Dig Deeper. Create Connection. Recognize your Reason.

Want another fun way to think about your Reason? Opt in here to download a fast and easy exercise that can radically deepen your understanding of your Reason.