110: Purpose is Not Something You Find (Part 1)

Download your free guide to Finding Purpose Beyond Parenthood: Getting Through Grief and Triggers to a Life of Meaning and Joy!

Purpose is not some concept that you find.  It's not a destination. It's not singular. And it doesn't come from having kids.  I understand why you believe it does.  I did too. 

It's because society tells us that when you have kids, you'll be flooded with purpose.  Especially as women, becoming a mother is supposed to be our sole (and soul) purpose.  And when we don't get to have kids, we end up feeling lost, unfulfilled, like there's a big open space in front of us that we don't know how to fill.

And I'm here to tell you that it's entirely possible to live a beautiful, exciting, purpose-filled life, even without kids!  I've done.  My clients have done it.  And I'm going to give you the two steps to doing it yourself today.   Tune back in next week to find out how to remove any obstacles to living your purpose.

Discover more about how to live your purpose-filled life by downloading my free PDF guide,  Finding Purpose Beyond Parenthood: Getting Through Grief and Triggers to a Life of Meaning and Joy!

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

If you are a childless woman looking to up-level her life in a major way, join the Love Your Beautiful, Unconventional Life Retreat, coming up at the end of February 2025.  Book a Retreat Call with Sheri here if you have questions or want to know more!

Where to find Sheri:
Instagram: @sherijohnsoncoaching
Website: sherijohnson.ca

Transcript

Today, I wanted to really delve into one of the most popular questions that I get from my childless clients and from my followers.

And that question is, how do I find my purpose now that I know it's not going to be through kids?

That might show up for you as how do I find more meaning, more fulfillment. How do I fill up this empty future or this empty feeling in my stomach?

And the thing is, you don't find your purpose. It doesn't just show up one day as some big epiphany.

Purpose is not a destination. I know why you think it does or I know why you think it is.

I did as well. For most of my 20s. 30s. I searched. I was constantly looking. I was hoping for some big thing to show up and suddenly I would feel like, ah, this is my mission.

This is why I'm on earth. And it never did. And yet, I feel more purposeful, more meaning, more value in my life than I ever have before.

So, on today's episode, I'm going to debunk this myth for you that we find our purpose. It's this singular mission that we must discover.

And instead, I'm going to show you what to do to feel more purposeful. Welcome. Welcome back if you are a...

previous listener or current listener. Today, as I said, I'm talking about the single most common question that I get asked.

And it's also the entire result of my purpose beyond parenthood framework, which is what I use to achieve exactly that inside of my one of ones and my group program.

And that is purpose beyond parenthood. So today, I'm going to give you a little piece of that framework. I've built an entire program around it.

So a half hour episode is just going to give you a step or two. And let's get into it.

So many of my childless clients and my audience are looking for purpose. In fact, I don't think it's just my clients and audience.

It's not just childless people. It's it's everyone. I hear this from so many people. but I think it's it becomes front and foremost for childless people because we don't have children to become our purpose, which is what we're told happens when you have children.

That becomes your purpose. What we do instead, we look for purpose in other ways or we feel lost. Maybe we don't I don't know.

For me, I did look for it. It was almost like scanning through all of the possible careers, hobbies, everything that was out there and just hoping and praying that one of them was going to stand out from the crowd.

And I'll know it when I see it. This is the one. Sort of like love it for sight. And that didn't happen.

If you've been trying to do that, you've probably noticed too that it's not really working. I did it when I was in my

my 20s and 30s. I didn't have kids. I didn't have a partner. So I kept looking for it at work.

I kept moving into different roles, hoping to be happier, hoping to be more fulfilled. And it never happened. I would get a sense of change and excitement around that change, the newness of that.

But then a few weeks in, as I learned a job, I would just get bored. And I'd start to feel again, as though that job was just as meaningless as the one before it, I'd even try, you know, hopping to new companies and think that maybe if I resonate with the company mission, that I'll feel like I'm on board with a mission and feel more purposeful because of that.

But the companies that I joined, they weren't ever my mission. Their one day, I finally realized that purpose is

not a destination. The industry, even, that tells us that it is, I think, is wrong. All these books on how to find your purpose.

You know, I don't know if you're close to my age, you'll remember the book, What Colors Your Parachute. And that book is so logical.

Everything is, you know, it's very intellectual. It's, try different things until you find it, that, that one thing. So you've got to do something different.

And the first thing is defining purpose as something different. When you define purpose as something that you find, that singular mission, that's a fit like planning a grand tour of Europe, and then fixating solely on reaching the final city.

If you did that, you'd miss out on all the experiences, the cultures, all the moments, of awe and wonder in each place that you visit along the way.

And gosh, wouldn't that be a shame? So as I looked back, I realized that that isn't the answer. There's no one purpose that I was going to find, but it was only in hindsight when I started doing something different.

And I tell you what that is. But first, I realized that there is so much rhetoric within our society and culture that supports this belief that purpose is this one singular lifelong mission.

And our culture gives the impression that once you have kids, that is the mission. You can sort of let go of the career or at least you can let go of the focus on it.

And then kids become your purpose. I've even heard women talk about this like female colleagues. I don't hear it quite as much from men.

But the women that I worked with, once they had babies, they were a little less focused. This isn't everybody, of course.

But many of them would say to me, yeah, I'm not as, you know, my kids are more important. And part of me now wonders whether that was them speaking or them just reiterating what society was telling them.

Because what I also noticed is that kids don't actually bring people purpose. There's plenty of mothers out there who have much bigger missions.

You can probably think of some of them, climate change, orphans in Africa, poverty, whatever. There's so many other causes out there that mothers have bored themselves into.

What I noticed as I looked back over my late 30s and my 40s, this is when I really started to realize that finding my purpose wasn't a singular thing, and it also wasn't some grand epiphany, and it also didn't have to be this big thing just because I didn't have kids.

I'm not even sure that I'm fully there, and yet I feel a deep sense of purpose every single day.

So let me share with you how that happened. In hindsight, it was actually quite simple, but not easy. All I did was I took baby steps toward what felt aligned, what felt exciting.

expansive to me, what felt good. And it wasn't even every day, although now I practice that every day. The first step I took was to just simply identify something that made me feel good.

Something that I love to do, something that interested me, something I was curious about. And you might have heard this story before, but I'm going to tell it again.

For me, that was Reading Health Magazines. I loved to read how to get healthier through food, supplements, exercise, meditation, whatever that was.

It just inspired me in so many ways. First, it was just really to improve how I looked. That was the initial goal I admit.

But ultimately, I also wanted to feel more energy. wanted to have more focus at work. I wanted to avoid the afternoon slump.

wanted to sleep better, all of those other things that felt secondary when I was in my 20s and 30s trying to attract a partner, but after sort of becoming healthier than I realized it was all these other things as well.

Anyway, that reading all of those magazines, it also kept me learning new things, which is something that I really loved to do.

I loved to learn I'm a continuous learner, I still do it. And so then I asked myself, is there a course, is there a program that I could do that that focused on health, dietitian?

That wasn't for me, that required another degree, and more importantly, dietitian, I knew a little bit about what dietitians do and that didn't quite resonate.

So I eventually found a holistic nutritionist diploma program. And that felt right. It felt right. want to stress that.

It wasn't a logical analytical decision. It just felt like something that would be interesting. It felt good. And the reason this program felt good for me was that it wasn't just about nutrition.

There was this emotional and spiritual component to it as well. And how those two things also affect our health.

So I signed up for the program. It was correspondence. This was now back in 2011. And even then, I think it was bit They like sent me books and assignments through the mail.

And I did them all. I had no idea what I was going to do with it. I was still working in human resources at a big company.

And I didn't know, but I just knew that it was inspiring. I enjoyed the coursework. And I kept going.

Then, when I started to do that, other things started to open up. My company let me go, let our entire group go, and so I started practicing nutrition, and then someone introduced me to essential oils, and that felt good.

loved using essential oils. It felt like a really good compliment to nutrition, so it was an easy decision for me to join doTERRA, and then I discovered the essential oil blends for emotions, and I used those on myself, and I felt I found that they helped me to get through my miscarriages and infertility, both physically and emotionally, and so I put together a little program for miscarriage recovery that was based on emotions and mindset tools, and oils.

had been adding in, you know, got my Reiki certification, and I took spiritual coaching programs. And I added all this in.

I followed those nudges. And I just kept following those nudges. I kept doing what made me feel good. And that wasn't always easy.

There are often fears and worries that get in the way and they tell you to stop. So for instance, it took me a while to transition to helping childless women, which is what I do now.

My own ego didn't want to let go of that miscarriage program. My ego wanted to make it work. And if I didn't, that would mean that I failed, wouldn't it?

So I really hesitated and I held myself back from really taking that next step. And I felt it. I knew that I was meant for this other thing.

And yet those fears, those Those fears are what people would think, the worries, the ego, all of that held me back.

But once I leaned into that feeling, the nudges from my soul is what I call them. I realized that it was the women who never got to have another pregnancy or never even got to try in the first place.

That was my next baby step. It wasn't really baby step, it was actually a big step. But that's where I am now.

And even now within that, I've transformed a few times. I became afraid again and I started doing something different.

I jumped back into nutrition and did something that felt easier. And then my soul nudged me back. So this is where I am now.

This is who I help. I help childless women. I sometimes man as well. It's probably not where I'm going to stay.

I will continue to evolve and keep following those nudges. But when I do, as long as I do, there's no end goal.

I don't have the end vision in my head. I just keep following the nudges and that gives me that sense of purpose each and every day.

So really, it's an inner voice. The nudges, as I call them, call them the feeling inside. That's what I kept following.

And I just made choices that reflected what felt that way, what felt aligned, what felt expansive, what felt good, what made me curious, what inspired me.

And I want you to know, by the way, that it's not just in my business that I was doing this.

So, Yes, I just told you kind of the story of how I came to do what I do, but I also used this same one step at a time to discover that I loved hiking.

And I started with, you know, walks, a few, like I got a dog, and I started taking him on a couple of easy walks instead of going to the dog park.

And then I discovered this trail that I liked, and it was kind of scary at first because I didn't go my way, and I thought I was going to get lost.

And, you know, I even went to that place a couple of times before I actually headed down the trail.

I sort of walked around outside of it, first in the, outside of the forest for bit, and then I finally ventured down the trail in the forest, and ultimately now I hike every single day, and I have hiked all over the states, and I've hiked in South America.

And I feel so fortunate that we have so much wilderness around where I live, so that I can do this every day, because even that, to me, feels aligned and purposeful and fulfilling.

So to summarize, I just basically gave you the first step of the process that I use, which is to just identify what makes you feel good, what makes you feel inspired, what interests you, what gets you curious, and then just keep doing that over and over, keep identifying what makes you feel good, take one step towards that, even if it's not a giant step, a micro step is all it takes.

So, that sense of purpose will come just from following that. And again, they can be tiny, tiny things that you do, each day, and over time, over six months, a year, five years, you will make progress.

You will continue to feel more purposeful every day. There's some challenges with us, and one of the key challenges is that we face so much societal pressure and also patriarchal conditioning that has taught us to use logic and analysis to make decisions.

And if I had done that, you know, taking that first nutrition program, that didn't really, like, that was not logical for me.

I was in a human resources career, I was on the up and up I was taking, I had finished taking courses towards my HR certification, and I should have been taking courses to kind of

of, I forget what they're called, like, point to earn points to keep that certification. And instead of doing something entirely different, that had nothing to do with it.

So it wasn't logical. It was just, it was following my intuition, really. Women he used their intuition, historically, were labeled as witches and burned at the stake or other tortures.

And we were molded instead into, we were taught to quash that intuition, first of all, and molded into a nine to five workweek in a man's working world.

We disconnect from our cycles, we disconnected from the earth, from our intuition, from our healing modalities. And instead, we were told that our purpose is to have and raise children at first.

It would have been to stay home. and take care of the household and raise the children and there was no room for questioning that and then that evolved as we moved through the ages and then ultimately became closer to today where we have mothers in the workforce and carrying the load at home and having and raising children.

And something else that came with that, that societal conditioning is that any other purpose isn't worthy. You are not worthy.

you don't follow the protocol, if you don't raise children, you're not with the program and so you can't possibly have purpose the way that someone who raises children does.

And that's, that's societal conditioning. That's prenatalism. It's part of the patriarchy. And we all have been very ingrained and programmed in that medium.

I actually wonder how many women would actually choose not to have kids if this programming wasn't so deeply ingrained in us.

Like how many women might choose to write a book or become a healer or create art or become a game changer, become a leader.

If we didn't set aside our intuition and follow the protocol that society has set out for us, what might happen?

What would have happened? What might happen instead? Can you begin to imagine the opportunities and freedom that would come with that from not being bound to those traditional rules?

especially for us who don't even have an opportunity to follow those traditional roles. Imagine how just allowing for a more personalized journey towards fulfillment might feel.

How would it feel if you followed your curiosity and your intuition? That's what I want you to do. Just one tiny step at a time.

Okay, what I'm finding is that more and more learning how to tap into your intuition, those nudges, those soul nudges, is becoming a bigger and bigger part of my my Women of Worth program.

The more that I realize this is a huge part of aligning with your purpose is following that intuition. So

That's becoming a bigger part of my program. The second big piece is actually feeling worthy of doing those things.

If you've been with me for a bit, you've listened to some other podcasts, you'll know that I always tie this back to self-worth because you won't follow your intuition.

You won't do the things that make you feel good. You won't do the things that make you feel inspired if you don't feel worthy of those things.

If you don't feel like you deserve to do those, if you don't feel like you deserve to do what your true self-desires, you won't do those.

Even if you will ignore your intuition. That's when the ego kicks in. That's when those little voices from society kick in and tell you that what you're leaning towards is not worthy and so you stop and you do what you're supposed to do.

follow the protocol. That's actually another, that's a whole huge topic for another day and represents an entire pillar within my three pillar purpose beyond parent head framework.

It's all interconnected. And as I said earlier, it is a journey purpose is not a destination. So you I gave you example of my journey and I had to slowly practice allowing myself to do those things to ignore what society was telling me to do to ignore what everybody around me said wasn't going to work to, you know, I had to really cut through some of those self worth issues and practice being worthy practice tapping into my intuition.

and following the steps following the journey. It does sound a bit cliche. It's a journey, not a destination. We hear that a lot, but it's so true in this case.

Just take one baby step toward what makes you feel good and let the journey evolve. You don't have to have, you know, going back to my metaphor, you don't have to have the whole grand tour of Europe created.

You don't have to know all the cities you're going to visit, and you definitely don't need to know the end, the final city.

Just visit one. And then when you're there, make plans for the next. You don't have to find that singular mission.

Just let it evolve and grow. Okay, I'm going end here for today. This is part one of this episode, so I hope that you'll come back for part two, where I'm going to get into self-worth and how that is connected to your purpose.

In the meantime, if you are curious about how to get started on the path, on the journey to finding purpose, to find feeling purpose so that you can feel more fulfilled and more meaning in your life.

Just go and download my free PDF guide, find your purpose beyond parenthood, getting through grief and triggers to a life of meaning and joy.

That is my free guide. You'll find that in the show notes. You will also find it at sherryjohnson.ca slash purpose.

So that's it for today. Thank you so much. I'm so grateful for you. you did find some value in this episode, I would so appreciate it if you hit the follow or the like or the subscribe or even the five star rating and I hope that you'll do that.

Bye for now.