The ILEAD Company® welcomes you to Truth Training Thursday. On Thursdays, I will educate you on becoming a competent speaker beyond the stage so that your success sticks. Competency will be established through learning essential problems speaker truths.

The primary goal is to help speakers rise to the call of being a winning leader, where you are consistently growing your influence, impact and income. Growing your impact also means that you are certain of yourself and who you are as a leader. We must be completely convinced that we have a meaningful life. Let’s discuss this today!

Leadership Tip: How to Create a Meaningful Life

What makes life meaningful?

It’s a trick question of course. Everyone will have a different answer and there is no one way to live your life. Any answer would be just as valid and it’s up to you how you choose to make your way in the world.

But there are certainly some things that don’t make life meaningful. And there are certainly some things you can do to help you find your own meaning. In this guide, we’re going to look at how you can discover meaning in your life and why that is such a powerful and important thing.

IS YOUR LIFE MEANINGFUL?

Perhaps a good place to start is by looking at the state of our lives right now. Where do you get the meaning from right now?

There’s a good choice that you will give some of the following answers:

• Career

• Family

• Friends

• Partner

• Children

• Travel

Very few of us will answer that the thing that gives life meaning is ‘food’ or ‘computer games’. Somehow, our relationships and our careers take on greater importance and the same is true of our travel.

This roughly adheres to Maslow’s theory of the ‘Hierarchy of Needs’. Maslow was a psychologist and according to his theories, our needs can be plotted in a kind of pyramid with the most important at the top and the most urgent down the bottom.

Our urgent, basal needs include our physiological needs such as food, oxygen and perhaps sex, while things become a little more abstract and inspiring as we move nearer the top.

His pyramid looks something like the following, from bottom to top:

• Physiological needs – food, oxygen, water, sex
• Safety – shelter, health, avoidance of predators/aggressors
• Love/belonging – community, friends, family, partner
• Esteem – self acceptance, self-worth, confidence
• Self actualization – So the first thing we might note as being surprising from this list, is that love and belonging are not near the top – in fact they are around the middle. It is as though Maslow is telling us that love is not what gives life meaning.

Poets and song-writers might disagree but this is in fact accurate. At the end of the day, you can’t rely purely on other people for your sense of happiness, meaning and accomplishment.

For starters, this is a recipe for disaster in your relationships. If all your meaning comes from another person and you need them for your sense of self-worth, you might well become possessive, jealous, clingy or otherwise toxic in that relationship.

Likewise, this leaves you incredibly vulnerable. If your meaning comes from another person and they should leave, your whole world will come crashing down.

You get people who have amazing, perfect, happy families and yet they don’t have a sense of purpose of direction. They’re stuck in a rut and they’re unhappy because they don’t have a sense of purpose.

In fact, this is incredibly common and it’s something that a lot of us have to deal with. This is pretty much where the mid-life-crisis comes from!

Higher on the ladder we have esteem. That is to say that in order to be happy and fulfilled, in order for life to have meaning, you need to discover how to live with yourself and how to like yourself. Otherwise, you will be unhappy in everything you do and you won’t have the tools necessary to take your life to the next step.

But that’s still not number one. So just what is self-actualization? We shall discuss this further within a Guide #7 of my personal development mastery series. Want access to this guide? Reply in the comments area below.

Once again, thank you for choosing ILEAD to develop as a speaker-preneur!