039: Creating Purpose

Do you ever sit and daydream about your life’s purpose? I know this topic can be difficult to navigate but I think it’s so important to create your purpose and go after the dreams you have.
In this episode, we’re exploring what purpose is and the formula for discovering your purpose. I even share some advice on why you shouldn’t worry about your purpose.
You’ll learn how to pinpoint interests to help you create your purpose, some realizations I’ve come to in my own life about purpose and how my faith has shaped my own beliefs on purpose.
What you’ll find in this episode:
A mindful moment
The formula for purpose
Why you don’t need to worry about your purpose
What I’ve realized throughout my life about my purpose
How to pinpoint your interests
How my faith has shaped my beliefs on purpose
Read the transcript of the episode below:
 CTC Ep 39 Creating Purpose

While this might not be small talk conversation, to ask each other what our purposes are, I do believe it's something that many of us think about and wonder about. What is our purpose? This is episode 39: Creating Purpose.

Welcome to the Committed to Create Podcast. I'm Lisa Funk, and I am so excited to hang out with you here as we talk about the power of creating with our hands and our minds. I like to keep it real, remind you that you are not alone and share specific ways that creativity and mindfulness can help us live even more meaningful and joyful lives. I am so glad that you're here.

Hello, and welcome back to the podcast. I'm Lisa Funk. I am so glad to be here. I love chatting with you about all of the things and keeping it real. This is, seriously, like a conversation that we would have if we were sitting on my big blue couch or going for a walk together.

I hadn't been going on my regular morning walks for a little while and I went out this morning and it was just amazing. It was so nice out. And it's the best time of year for us here in Arizona. I say that anytime it's not 120 degrees. I probably already told you that this past winter, that it was the best time of year for Arizona, but when it is springtime here, it's hard to beat.

So anyway, before we get started with the podcast topic, I wanted to do a segment called A Mindful Moment.

So speaking of springtime in Arizona, one of my mindful moments recently revolved around the blossoms on our orange trees and the blossoms on our lemon and lime trees. I wish I could have all of you over to my backyard to just breathe in and smell this aroma. It's the best smell in the entire world. I am convinced.

And it's almost like every year I sort of forget that it's going to happen. And it's just the most beautiful and amazing surprise to remember. Oh my gosh, there are the orange blossoms. They are the best. So I just have been taking time to go into the backyard, sit back there, and breathe it in and also go over and smell them.

And I've been getting my kids excited about going out and smelling the blossoms. And now they're getting just as excited about it as I am. And maybe a lot of you are plant people, so you are used to getting really excited about a plant or a flower, but I just was thinking about how nice it is to take a break from running around planning, thinking, stressing, worrying, doing, producing, to stop for these mindful moments and to enjoy the orange blossoms on our trees.

Now, where  you live, it might still be snowing. It might be cold. I don't know where you live or what it's like, might be rainy, but how can we find something maybe about where we live that we just love or that we can take that moment to get in touch with one of our senses and be present and mindful.

And for me, during this season, it's just like a fun little habit to go out every day and take a few minutes to just breathe in those beautiful blossoms. And I don't know, I just was thinking about how nice it is to have something like that. Obviously I don't have orange blossoms all year long, so I can find different things to be a reminder, to kind of stop and smell the roses, pun intended.

So I just want to invite you to think about what is something that you can stop and have a mindful moment with where you live. That was my mindful moment this week, and hopefully will be for the next few weeks as we keep having these beautiful orange blossoms. And if you live nearby, come to my backyard anytime to take a whiff, cause they are amazing.

All right. So now I want to get into the meat of this episode. It is all about purpose and finding purpose, creating purpose. I think there's a difference in just the semantics there. The verbiage.

When we talk about finding our purpose, it feels like we've lost something. We are on the hunt for it, you know, we've lost our keys and we're trying to find them. And we're looking a lot of places and we're just waiting until we see the keys and it feels different to me then creating purpose, which involves a little bit more power on our part or ability to choose, and to be imaginative and think about what we want, what our desires and interests are.

So I believe that we can have many different missions in our life. I don't believe that, you know, we have one purpose and that that purpose is to accomplish a single task. That's just not the belief that I have. You know, and some people may feel that they have a purpose to accomplish a certain task. And that's amazing, but generally there are interests and gifts and talents that accompany those tasks or those actions.

So for me, It really helps to identify what are the things that interest me, what are my gifts and talents and what are the things that I value and all of those three things combined can help me to live my purpose, to create purpose in my life and to create a contribution.

And that contribution may be just for myself. Or it might be just for my family or it could be on a broader scale of my neighborhood or my community or the world, whatever feels like the right contribution for you. And again, like I said, it could just be for yourself. This doesn't mean that you need to find this purpose and that you're going to be on the front page of the newspaper.

You know, this isn't to get a bunch of recognition and to be in the spotlight because all of a sudden you have found your purpose in life and you might be even wondering like, why are we talking about this? You know, this feels it's kind of a serious or kind of deep, and I don't think that you need to worry about it at all, unless you want to, unless maybe you're feeling a little bit lost or kind of just stuck in the monotony of the day to day or you're feeling like you just want some more meaning in your life.

You want to feel more purposeful. And that is a beautiful thing. And I think that we can all continue to find ways to infuse purpose into what we're doing.

So as we are evaluating our own personal purpose, I think that we can apply this, you know, formula that I mentioned gifts plus interest plus values to any experience that we might have had.

And for me, it helps to look back at my life at the things that I have been drawn to, the things that I have been interested in and how those things may have used my natural gifts or the talents that I have worked on cultivating, how those things have involved interests that I've had and also values. Values being, what is important to me, things that I think are important.

So I think about, you know, back in high school, for example, I loved volunteering. I loved service. And one of the service projects, actually, a very long-term service that I did was that I was a candy striper at the hospital. I had that darling like red and white striped Pinafore, seriously. And I volunteered for years at the hospital and I loved it.

My favorite spot that I was able to volunteer was in the maternity ward. We were able to help the new moms, bring them drinks or, you know, help them get something that they needed. We'd make little baby hats. We would help the families in the waiting room. It was so fun. And I look back at that and think, okay. I loved helping people. I love babies that has remained true to this day. I just really enjoy being with people and helping people. And at the time, when I look back, I didn't necessarily understand this concept of what my purpose was or why I felt drawn to what I wanted to do. And that leads into the next thing that I thought was my purpose.

As I went to college, I thought about what I wanted to do with my life. And because I had loved my experience as a candy striper and I love babies and I loved being with the new moms at the hospital, I thought I wanted to be a nurse at the hospital and probably labor and delivery or, you know, some type of neonatal nurse, I wanted to be with those babies and with the moms.

And I just thought that is it. That must be my purpose because they feel drawn to this and I really want to do it. Well, I went to college and I started enrolling in these classes for the nursing program prerequisites before I could apply for the nursing program. And I started right away as a freshman taking zoology and organic chemistry.

And let me tell you, these classes were not a match for me. I, oh my gosh, I worked so hard. I studied my brains out. I just could not connect the dots on so many of these concepts. My brain, I mean, I know that I could do it. I'm not going to say I couldn't do it, but it was really a stressful and overwhelming.

And when I was in those classes, let me tell you, I was not feeling like those classes were my purpose. For sure. Now there definitely can be things along the way to, you know, something that feels like a calling for us. There can be hard, challenging things along the way to get there. But these classes, I was like, oh, this is not happening.

No matter how hard I was trying, it was not jiving. So I had a really hard time letting go of this vision of being a nurse, because I just thought I wanted to serve and help people and do this, do this thing. Well, I went to the counselor at my college and they help you kind of decide on a major and they take some tests and what do they do?

They start evaluating. What are your gifts and talents? What are your interests? What things do you value? Really? Those are the things that helped me align with my purpose. And I realized, I wasn't necessarily interested in the science or the nursing aspect, you know, the scientific aspect of nursing, the technical aspect of nursing.

That was not something I felt drawn to. What I felt drawn to was helping people and being around people. And I did love babies and children. So I ended up majoring in marriage, family, and human development, and it was the perfect fit for me. I love learning about child development. I loved learning about families and parenting and people.

You know, in the psychology of it, it was just like a match made in heaven. And I felt so good about it, even though it was hard for me to let go of that vision that I had had of being a nurse. I had to realize that my calling in life or my purpose in life wasn't to be a nurse. My purpose in life was made up of my gifts and interests and values, which involved child development and understanding human development.

And as I went throughout my life, now I can look back and see how that really played into the other roles that I had. And again, I don't think that the roles that we have or the actions we take are necessarily our actual purpose, but that our purpose plays into them.

They're definitely connected, but there are multiple different things that we can do in our life. And we can use our gifts and talents, and we can be drawn to certain interests and that all encompasses our purpose.

So after I graduated from college, I got a job as a pediatric literacy and child development specialist at the Venice Family Clinic in LA. They, at the time, were one of the largest free medical clinics for low-income families. And it was such an incredible opportunity. I was able to work with the pediatricians on the pediatric literacy program, where we had endowments for books, and we were able to give away a free book at every visit to these families with a prescription to read.

And we were able to work with these families in so many other ways. Teaching parenting classes, teaching about child development, having resources available for them. We had special family play areas in our waiting rooms where they could do crafts and story time and get education and resources and support. And it was an incredible experience.

As part of that role. I was also able to go back to Boston and get trained in the touch points model of development, and also be trained as a trainer so that I could teach all of the staff at our clinic, over 200 staff members, about how to create better partnerships with our families and help to improve and strengthen the parent child relationships as well.

It was such an incredible experience. And looking back, I can see that, yes, I may not have been one of the nurses at the clinic because my gift wasn't the nursing part of it, but I was able to still work with these families and with these providers. And I could see the gifts that I had of compassion and encouragement and teaching.

I've always loved teaching and sharing. And then I could see my interests. That I was drawn to kids and drawn to child development and drawn to these families. And it was incredible for me to see that even though I thought it was going to be a certain path that was going to be my purpose, that all of those things were able to be used in a different experience and through many other experiences throughout my life.

Obviously our lives are always changing and our experiences are changing. So does that mean, oh my gosh, I completed my purpose because I had that one job title and that was my purpose. And now I'm done. So I'm going to check that off. No, to me, purpose is infusing yourself into whatever you are doing. So infusing your interests and your gifts and talents and values into whatever it is that you were doing. And sometimes that guides what you choose to do. And sometimes it changes how you do the things that you're doing.

So after I had that role as the pediatric literacy and child development specialist, I ended up having kids and deciding to stay home with them for awhile. And it was wonderful and I loved motherhood.

And, for those of you who know my story, you know, that I believed that motherhood was going to be all they ever needed. Cause I wanted to be a mom for so long before I was able to. And so then once I was, I just thought this is it, but I also had to learn how to infuse myself into my motherhood and how to make it my own and how to not just look at the people around me and see how they were doing it and try to do it just like them, because the truth is that they have their own interests.

They have things that they're drawn to doing as a mother, they have their own gifts and talents that are different than mine. And I am not supposed to be a mother the exact same way that they are. I am supposed to be my own self.

I am not supposed to all of a sudden change and have all these skills that are on some list. I had like had this imaginary list that like when you're a good mom, You have chore charts and you do the family economy. And guess what? I don't do chore charts and I don't have a family economy. Okay. And you might think the chore charts are amazing and a family economy's amazing. That's great. I'm not saying that they're bad. I think they're awesome. It just isn't natural for me. It's not something that I can keep up with. I

do have my kids. Do chores. And I do help my kids learn about money, but it's not in the same way that other people do. And that's O K. So as I continued to focus on my interests, which included creativity and self-help, I found avenues to combine those things and to continue to love my motherhood and love it even more because I was infusing creativity and my interests into my life. And that was a way for me to focus in on my purpose. And it felt really good for me.

Now, this doesn't mean that you need to figure out how to start a business or have a fancy career, or be in the spotlight. This is creating purpose and meaning in your every day current life. What brings you satisfaction?

Sometimes it's the simplest things, the things that you're interested in and that you love. So I find purpose and creativity. I identify as a creator. So I'm looking for those opportunities to create. And I can do that in my motherhood. I can do that in my marriage. I can do that in my life.

And I love to create with my kids. I am okay with having a really messy house because I really value creativity and art and those experiences. And I know that that often times comes with a messy kitchen, and I'm okay with that because it's something that I value. But that's not right or wrong. That's just right for me. But like I said, finding your purpose might just mean figuring out the ways that you can make life more meaningful and fun for you.

So if you value contribution, then your purpose might include the ways that you want to contribute to your community or to the world. And one of my purposes is to help people know that they're not alone. And their struggles that they have great worth and importance, even when they don't feel like it, that they are created to create.

That's a contribution that I personally feel called to make. And that is sometimes with one friend at the park. And sometimes it's to you, through this podcast. I'm finding ways to do the things I feel called to do, and that changes throughout my life. And that's okay.

I also just want to add in there that I am a spiritual person. I'm a religious person. I believe in God, maybe you believe in God, maybe you believe in a greater power or in the power of the universe or something that guides you and calls you to things. And I think that that is a beautiful thing. I believe that I was created for a purpose. And I think that sometimes this belief can derail us in a way, if we are waiting for God to continue to tell us exactly what we are supposed to do and to lay it out for us and show us exactly what our purpose is, what actions we're supposed to take.

Now don't get me wrong, I do believe that God can help us understand what our gifts are and what our talents are. I believe that we were created with our interests, with our gifts, for a reason, because I personally believe that we are meant to choose. We're meant to create our purpose, to choose the things that interest us, to follow our passions and what we want to do. We don't have to sit around and wait for something to be placed in our lap or to be revealed to us that we are supposed to do.

We can choose. I believe that we, you know, have this beautiful gift of agency to be able to create in our lives, to be able to make choices and to follow things. So it doesn't always have to be this big revelation that I am supposed to do this one thing. It can be, I want to do this. Because if there's something inside of us, that's pulling us towards something, I believe that there's a reason for that and that we don't necessarily need to have this big answer or someone telling us step-by-step and laying it out for us of what we're supposed to do.

So when I talk about this, you know, sort of formula of looking at our gifts and our interests and our values, I believe those things are put into us and were planted in us so that we could then follow them. And that, that is how we can create more purpose and meaning in our lives and in the world. And that that's okay, it's okay to do things because you want to. It's okay to follow and pursue something because you want to. You don't need to have, you know, this angel come down and from heaven and tell you exactly what it is that you're supposed to do.

Now, I'm not trying to mock that if you know, you have these really special experiences where you feel like you've been guided and that a path has been shown to you.

Oh my gosh, what a gift. That's amazing. And I, you know, have had a few moments where I've definitely felt blessed to have a vision like that, but I don't think that it necessarily happens on a day-to-day basis. And I don't think we should feel bad if that doesn't happen for us. And most importantly, I don't think that we should wait for those things to happen before we follow our passions and our interests and what we want to do. So

I hope that today's podcast has been helpful in just kind of laying out how you can follow what you are interested in and that you have permission to do that. And if it's tricky for you to pinpoint, what are your interests? Like I said, it can be helpful to go back and look at the different things you've chosen to do throughout your life.

What are the connecting points? You know, what are the things you loved about them? Did you love that it was working with people or did you love that it was learning more? You know, I used to think, oh, well, everybody likes helping people. So it's not really it, but the truth is not everybody does love interacting with people and, you know, being around people and helping people, some people are more introverted and they're very much drawn to research and discovery and learning. And I think that's amazing.

And so we don't need to compare our purpose and our interests to other people's. Neither one is better or worse. Nothing needs to be on this, you know, spectrum of more noble, less noble. We can follow those little hints of things that are calling to us and they can change over time.

It doesn't mean that we got it wrong or that we were misguided. They are all connected and they're all beautiful and it can all be part of our journey. And I believe that we're here to enjoy our lives. I believe that we're here to learn. I believe that we're here to help and love each other and bless and serve each other.

I believe that there are lots of aspects to our purpose and what we're doing here and that it's okay for us to follow what we feel that we want to do and not be embarrassed about it and not worry so much about what other people think. That is a huge topic. And you can definitely go back and listen to my episode, what other people think if that is a struggle for you. Because I know that as we try to follow the things we want to do, or that we're interested in, we can get really caught up and really stalled in that waiting because we're worried about what anyone else around us may think of what we're going to do.

Anyway. I love talking to you about this. I hope that this is helpful and I am doing lettering right now. I am sharing, you know, my experience, like I said, I'm called to help people know that they're not alone and to talk about my mental health, but I also love creativity and self care and that, and I love teaching and I love human development.

I have these gifts of having compassion for people. And I love to encourage people. Those are some of my gifts and I'm able to use them now in this podcast. And as I share mindful lettering, and I hope that that can come through. And later in my life, I might have something that's different that I'm involved in and focused on, but that can still infuse my purpose and it's okay if it changes.

And I hope that you will be open to following what your desires are and your interests are, and know that you have incredible gifts and talents that are meant to be shared with the world. Don't feel embarrassed about that. Don't feel like you're bragging or being showy because you want to use your gifts to bless your life and your family's life and your community's life. It's what we are meant to do here. That's what I really believe.

So I hope that this inspires you to follow what you feel called to do.

I love connecting with you over on Instagram. I am at hand letter design. I am so grateful for all of your reviews of the podcast. I read every single one and I love them.

And also, if you are interested in trying out some lettering, getting creative or taking your lettering to the next level, head over to handlettereddesign.com and check out our lettering books.

I am getting closer on the new edition of Daily Mindful Lettering. You guys yesterday, I went to work on it, and, the updated file, I couldn't find it anywhere. I was freaking out. I had to do a whole bunch of Googling to figure out how to find this lost Illustrator file. I had thought that I had lost hours and hours and hours and hours of work. And, I may have been on the verge of tears. It was really devastating, but after a really long time of working and trying to find it, I FOUND IT.

So I am just so grateful for that. It seems like such a small thing, but man, I am just pouring my heart into this new book. And I was freaking out thinking that I had lost it, but I didn't. So that is amazing news.

I'm going to be continuing to work on it, and I hope to have it to you in the next few weeks so that you can have it in time for Mother's Day and for spring time. And so that you can just have it as a blessing in your life.

Thank you for being here. I love you. And I will talk to you again next week.
Links:
Daily Mindful Lettering Book
Lettering Books
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I hope that my podcast has left you feeling inspired and excited to create the life that you want. If you’ve enjoyed listening to this podcast, I’d love for you to subscribe so you can continue to hear more. Want to get to know me better? Connect with me on my website or on Instagram to keep up with everything that is going on with me and my business.
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Jennifer L. IN LOVE!! What a perfect idea! I am a plant mama too, like Lisa. I also manage a great deal of anxiety. I got into lettering a couple years ago as a creative outlet and discovered a multitude of treasures in the lettering community! This book that Lisa created with her daughter is just perfection! It's all the feels for me! Thank you both!!!
Cinthanie C. EXCELLENT BOOK! I really enjoy taking a minute each day to slow down and apply my hand to something that is not only emotionally supportive but relaxing and fun to do!! The mantras for everyday are very helpful for me. Thank you for your work and bringing such a high quality product into my life!
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