Today you will learn what interests are, why discovering your interests is crucial for developing a purpose, and the how to process for uncovering your interests.
Summary
What are Interests?
Interests are the activities you have always enjoyed doing, motives that drive you to take action in the world for the pleasure of doing so.
These motives comprise the emotional core of your individuality, what you desire and what you do not desire, defines who you are in a unique and deeply personal manner.
When you engage in activities that are congruent with your true motives, your journey's going to be compelling and satisfying.
If you misjudge or ignore your motives, your progress will be slow or you may abandon the road altogether.
Why are Interests important to purpose?
Understanding the genuine nature of your motivation is essential for you to attain fulfillment.
Only by tapping your unique motives, will you feel a sense of authenticity, meaning and completeness.
Striving to connect to and cultivate this uniqueness provides us a path to follow an internal guidance system for our life.
The journey to developing and fulfilling your purpose will be challenging and difficult but the reward is a fulfilling life.
You will face many obstacles in your path over time: the voices of others infecting you fighting over limited resources, choosing false paths, getting stuck in the past and losing your way.
In order to sustain the motivation to overcome challenges, to master skills, to create solutions, you must love the thing you are working on and feel a profound connection to it.
The key to developing a passion is leveraging as many different motives and interests as possible to create a greater engagement with your life.
When you know your motives and interests, passion becomes infinitely flexible since different opportunities will activate different interests in different sets of motives creating sustainability over time.
So in order to keep on this long and strenuous journey, the source of your purpose must come from you and your interests.
How to discover your Interests
Use the following three exercises to help uncover your interests
First exercise: Observe Others with The Game of Judgement
Your interests and motives are composed of strong feelings that are deep rooted within your unconscious self including subtle preferences, desires, and private longings. Your goal in playing the game of judgment is to use your reaction to the others to zero in on these interests and motives that are within us.
First, become aware of the moment when you're judging someone else.
Then, identify the strong feelings, positive or negative, that emerge as you reflexively judge someone.
Finally, ask yourself why you are experiencing those feelings.
Second Exercise: Observe Yourself
As you become aware of your own emotions, start judging experiences in your daily life and question the feelings revealed during those activities
Use meditation to observe thoughts and ask why they are coming up in your mind.
Use journaling to get thoughts out of your mind, on paper, and observe them with greater objectivity.
Third Exercise: Create a List
Write a list of 25 things you're curious about, things that maybe you would spend a spare weekend reading a few books, listening to some podcasts, attending a lecture, or just having a conversation with experts about.
For once in your life, take the freedom to write down whatever comes to mind. Don't think about how others are gonna judge you for this interest or if they're even possible yet. Just get them out.
Activity
Spend half your day in the first exercise to begin building the muscle of observation.
Then in the second half of the day, use this new observation skill to observe yourself.
At the end of the day, create a list of 25 interests or motives you observed or can think of now.
Skill Lesson Mastered
Demonstrate mastery of the knowledge and skills presented in this lesson by applying it to the above activity. If, and only if, you have a full understanding and have masteredthe knowledge and skills presented in this lesson, select the next lesson in the navigation.
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