Let's talk about how to find your “why. ” Your “why” is the spark, the guiding light, the compass pointing you in the right direction. It's your purpose, motivation in life, and ultimately what drives you forward.
Knowing your “why” is incredibly important because everything else flows from there. You don't really need to know how you're gonna get somewhere or even what you're supposed to do. If you start with a solid “why,” the "how" and the "what" will follow.
Your “why” is the foundation to creating a life you love. It's the key to designing your dream life. Without it, life will feel bland and meaningless as you aimlessly wander and don't know what you're living for.
If you're struggling with your “why” and want more clarity on your life path and purpose, I'm excited to share this concept today. I'll cover the basics, but if you wanna dive deeper with an actionable plan, you should check out our new 2023 Artist of Life Workbook. It just launched today and is our top selling guided journal to help you create your most intentional and successful year in 2023.
It guides you through finding your “why”, clarifying your goals, and breaking it all down so that you can achieve them on a quarterly, monthly, and weekly basis. You can check it out at the link down below. Hello, my loves.
Welcome back to Lavendaire. It's Aileen. So as I mentioned, the key to living a fulfilling life is to find your “why” and live align to it.
So how do you find your “why”? Well, it all comes down to reflecting on these questions: “What do you value? ” In other words, what's the most important to you?
What matters to you in life? And then how do you prioritize these values? So, you have to rank your values from the most important to the least important, so you know what's up at the top.
You can also ask yourself, “What do I want out of life? ” “What do I wanna get out of life? ” “What experiences do I wanna collect?
” Ultimately, you want to know yourself and what truly matters to you. In the workbook, we have this full page layout called About Me, where it will guide you through understanding yourself, your values, your passions, your strengths, your motivations. There's even questions like, “What does success mean to you?
” “What does a fulfilling life look like to you? ” So you just start asking these questions, really reflecting and really defining what you think matters to you. And then, like I said, rank them by priority.
For example, in my journey, if I were to reflect on the “why's” that really drove me to create this lifestyle and this career path that I have today, I cared the most about three things. And these were all things that I learned from experience, why I cared about these things. I learned that they were my values.
The first thing was I wanted to do something that I love for a living. I wanted to do something that makes me happy. I wanted to feel love, joy, and passion in my career.
That really mattered to me because I knew what it felt like to work a job that I don't like, and a job that I don't care about. Number 2, I really valued and wanted to live a life where I felt like I was doing something meaningful, something where I was leaving some sort of positive impact on the world. And that is also because I had experiences in internships where I felt like I was doing something dumb, like I wasn't really making an impact.
All this work was insignificant. And yes, I just was really passionate about feeling that inner fulfillment when I was finding what I should do with my life. And number three, I really, really value my freedom in so many different areas.
Freedom #1: time freedom because I hated the structure of school. Waking up at a certain time and blah, blah, blah. I wanted to create a life where I could wake up at any time I wanted.
I wanted to be able to work whenever I wanted. I wanted that freedom and flexibility with time and my schedule. Freedom #2: location freedom.
I wanted to be able to work from wherever I want, to travel as often as I wanted, because I felt how constricting it was, seeing that 9-to-5 corporate lifestyle. And I was like, “No way. I'm not gonna do that.
” I need to be able to have more freedom to be wherever I want, to see the world whenever I want to. Freedom #3: creative freedom, meaning the ability to create whatever I want on my own terms. Because at the heart of it, I am an artist.
I love to create and I love when it just comes from my heart and I do whatever I feel like. And I think I decided that I cared about this because I had experiences in the entertainment industry or pursuing music where people would tell me to sing what they wanted me to sing, or I just felt like sometimes it can be really restricting to be put in a box. Sometimes it is okay to collaborate and when someone gives you guidelines, but I don't know, I just felt like, why not give myself more freedom and find a path that would allow me to be an artist, to create whatever I wanna create.
Freedom #4: financial freedom. I really wanted to create a life where I had financial freedom / abundance. I didn't want to have a cap on the money that I would be making.
I feel like the path that I saw out of graduation if I were to work for an ad agency for example, like there's a certain cap of what you could make in that role. And maybe it grows year by year, but I just didn't like it. I wanted life to be bigger than that.
No offense to people who love that job and love that industry, but this is just an example of what I valued. I wanted the opportunities to be limitless. I didn't want a ceiling on financial freedom and abundance because I knew there was more to life and that I could achieve it.
So these were all the things that I really valued. And once I recognized like these were the three most important things to me, remember it was doing something I love that brings me joy and passion, doing something meaningful, making a positive impact on the world. And then all those freedoms that I ran through, because I love my freedom, right?
So because I had those criteria per se, like they became my “why. ” They were my driving force as I was exploring what I should do with life, what career could give me all those three things. And if I didn't have those “why’s”, if I wasn't clear about all the things that I cared about and valued, I could have easily ended up settling for another path, another career that gave me some of those things, but not all.
Like it's, once you define what you want, then you know how to get it because you know what's not gonna give you what you want. I feel like a lot of people who live life by default on autopilot, they don't take the time to think about their “why”. And so they just kind of meander and they end up on a path in a job that a few years down the line they're like, “Why am I here?
Actually this is not what I want. ” Instead of realizing it later, why not figure out what your values are as soon as you can, because life will be so much more clear. Your path will have so much more clarity once you know those things.
I also wanna make a point that each person is entitled to their own “why”. Meaning all of our “why” and our reason for living is different. And that's what makes life beautiful.
There's no right or wrong. And also your “why” can change over time as you age, as you go through different life stages and you realize your values have shifted. That's totally okay.
That's the beauty of life, is you get to decide, at every moment, what matters to you. I say this to remind you to not to have judgment for the way other people are living their lives, the way they choose to live their lives because each person is operating under a different “why”. And you might not be able to understand.
For example, some people might value like “I need to make money first to pay off debt, or support my family or something, before I do something that brings me joy or something that I'm passionate about. ” There's nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with prioritizing money first because you need it or you want it, right?
Someone else could have the priority of, “Oh, I value my family above all else, so I will choose them over money. ” “I will choose them over growing in my career, leveling up, taking that new job that's higher paying or whatever. ” There's nothing wrong with that.
I think it's beautiful if someone knows "My value is family. " and so they prioritize that. Another example would be someone may prioritize service and fulfillment above everything else.
So they don't mind working longer hours, they don't mind making less money because they prioritize that service and they prioritize that feeling of fulfillment they get from what they do. So I hope you can see now how having your “why” will help drive every single decision you make in your life because it's literally the compass. Once you are clear on your “why” and you feel good about it, then everything else will follow.
Everything else will align from there. So because I love putting things to action, let's talk about what you can do once you've found your “why”. What are the next steps?
Once you have defined your “why” and you feel really good about it, then you can start to plan, “Okay, how can I live aligned to this “why”? ” This breaks down into two parts. First, what are the immediate changes you can make now to start living aligned to your “why”?
Secondly, what are your long term goals that you have that you wanna eventually be able to achieve that are aligned to your “why”? With immediate changes, those are more like the way you live your day-to-day: daily habits, morning routine, evening routine. What are some things that you can start to incorporate now that are small but are already taking you in the right direction?
For your long term goals, you kind of wanna start with your grand vision. It doesn't have to be that specific, obviously the more specific the better, but just start putting out things that you think that dream life— living aligned to your “why”—looks like. And then, from that grand vision you kind of work backwards.
“Okay, what does that look like in the next three years? ” “What does that look like in the next year? ” And then in the next month, and then in the next week, like just try to break things down.
And that's actually exactly what the Artist of Life Workbook does. It'll help you plan your entire life and year. So, you start with your dream life vision.
Then, you set your goals for the year in all the different categories of your life, and then it helps you break things down on a quarterly and monthly basis. So, you're planning your goals every quarter, every month, also every week. You're basically breaking things down to the smallest bite so that your goals feel actionable.
Even though your goals are big, you break it down to a bite size, so you're like, “Okay, that's doable. I can do that. ” So it doesn't feel so overwhelming in your head.
If you want more clarity and more guidance on finding your “why”, especially for next year, how to figure out what you want, how to get there, and that process of breaking down your goals until it's very actionable, definitely check out the Artist of Life Workbook. It's linked down below, but basically the workbook asks you to reflect on these questions each year because like I mentioned earlier, your “why” can change, your values can change, your goals can change. It's okay.
I think change is beautiful. Change is the only constant in life. So embrace the fact that you are changing constantly.
And that's why I think it's important to do these reflection exercises every year. It's not like you find your “why” and then you're good forever. It's not like that.
Your values and your needs will change as you grow. It's the natural part of the process. For example, I felt like earlier on in my twenties, I was so much about proving myself, proving that I can succeed.
And you guys know I talked about that journey, like it eventually led me to succeed, but then also to burnout and then to this whole mental, emotional breakdown and healing journey where I realize, “Okay, I don't need to tie my self worth with success and external validation. ” And so, my goals and my values have shifted since my early twenties. I'm not the same person that I used to be.
I don't care that much, or as much, about the things that I used to care about. It's fun to see how I'm changing each year— what I value now. Now, I just value inner peace.
I value my joy. Everything I do, I have to like feel joyful. I wanna put my joy in everything I do.
I wanna feel joy every day, and I still value my freedom. I love all those freedoms I mentioned. I'm so glad that I figured those things out earlier in my career so that I didn't wander off into a path where I didn't have those freedoms, because that type of freedom is something money can't buy.
People can make so much money, but they work in a job that has long hours. They're working 60 hours a week and it's just not worth it to me personally. So again, going back to it's what you value— it's what matters to you.
Find what your “why” is to you. Each person is unique. We're all different.
Don't judge each other for what we decide we want out of life. Don't have a say on how other people live their life. Just focus on your own life and make sure that you approve of yourself and your own life.
All right, my loves. Comment down below on what your “why” is. I hope this video helps you boil it down even more.
But comment down below, even if you're not sure. Just list some bullet points on your values and the things that really matter to you, what kind of life you wanna create, what do you wanna get out of life. All right.
Sending you so much love and I'll see you in the next one.
