Right as Rain: Discovering our Purpose

Recently I posted a soft announcement of a new service I’m offering. It read:

I found out very quickly that there are a lot of people who are struggling to find their purpose.

That’s great!

I mean, that’s not great for them, but it’s great because those are the people I seek to help.

After years of working to discover my own journey and purpose, I am now in a place where I can help people trying to find the same thing.

But where does one find a purpose? Do they just pull it out of a hat? Or scroll through a list of purposes and Eenie-Meenie-Miney-Moe it?

Several of the people who reached out how an idea of what they wanted to do, they just didn’t know how to start. That’s the “taking the leap” part of it.

But several others simply didn’t know where to begin. That is a huge problem as far as I’m concerned.

What I’ve learned is that our purpose starts with identifying those we seek to impact. To identify those who we seek to impact, we must go to the point where our unique intersections meet.

Last August, I spent a week at the Startingbloc Institute and experienced a breakthrough with the on-site coach Russ Finklestein in finding my own unique intersections of health and happiness, storytelling, and coaching.

Since then, I’ve worked hard to come up with a program or workflow that I could replicate, so that I could help others in the way that I was helped.

To me, the quest of discovering our unique intersections starts with three chambers (let’s picture them as circles) overlapping in a Venn Diagram fashion. One circle is for our Skills, the second is for our Passions, and the last is for our Experiences.

Skills is what we know how to do. All we have to do is think about the things we are good at (some of them will come to our minds easily; others we will have to dig deep to find) to come up with a good list.

Passions are what we care about. What do we love? What lights us on fire or wakes us up in the morning? This is the closest thing to finding our “why.”

But Experiences, in my opinion, is the wild card. This is what can really set us apart from others in similar paths. Experiences are where and who we come from. What makes our approach different from others? How does our upbringing affect what we love to do?

In my quest, the program went something like this:

• Skills: Filmmaking, Storytelling, Writing, Coaching/Teaching, Motivating Others, Leadership
• Passions: Health and Fitness, Sports, Social Movements, Psychology and Neuroscience
• Experiences: Raised in a small town in the south, lived in NYC, traveled the world, come from a small, hard-working family, understand and can relate different cultures of people.

Then, I dropped my ego and allowed any combination of unique intersection to arise, even if I didn’t see that as the one I “wanted.”

What emerged was that I was a filmmaker that cared about health, wellness, and happiness, because I come from an area where many people are suffering due to lack or opportunity, information, or inspiration. Those are my people. Those are the people I want to serve.

So my mission statement became: I want to make the world happier and healthier by sharing stories of change. And I dropped my guard, which once resisted being labeled as a “Health and Fitness Filmmaker.”

But an amazing result of doing the work to find my unique intersections and mission is that I can never been stuck in any label anymore as long as what I do serves the mission. That’s why I can serve my mission writing to you fine folks reading this at Chapelboro.com, making films for people around the world to see, or hosting a live storytelling series where we people share personal stories of health.

My vision became clear and narrow; my opportunities became abundant.

There’s nothing more freeing than that feeling.

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Rain Bennett is a two-time Emmy-nominated filmmaker, writer, and competitive storyteller with over a decade of experience producing documentary films that focus on health and wellness. His mission is simple: to make the world happier and healthier by sharing stories of change.

You can read the rest of “Right as Rain” here, and check back every Wednesday on Chapelboro for a new column!