How to Find Your Mission in Life

I chose to review this slim book about finding your mission in life because I knew that the author is a leading career counselor, judged by sales of his book, What Color Is Your Parachute? and the numerous editions it has gone through.

It is written from the Christian viewpoint, which boils down to doing God’s will. Bolles offers his own (very good) criteria for making choices no matter what we are confronted with in each moment. He advises that to ensure we are doing God’s will we must resolve, in any given situation, to be conscious of the presence of God and to choose the way that "will lead to more gratitude, more kindness, more forgiveness, more honesty, or more love in the world" (p. 34). This, as he points out, is about learning what to be rather than learning what to do. It also is good training in taking one step at a time, for moments of mountaintop vision are rare. We need to learn to walk in the valleys where sometimes visibility is poor. Then we are ready to search for our mission: the one thing we were born to do. He proposes that "it is a searching to recover the memory of something we ourselves had a hand in designing" (p. 47), but forgot when we were born. (The basis of many EHEs is the occasion of rediscovering what our mission is.) To prepare for it, he advises practicing the first two general missions that are everyone’s to do. A career counselor may be needed to find your specific mission. (I think paying attention to exceptional experiences would also serve us well.)