About this Book

1.1 Purpose of this Book

As human beings we grow up with a natural desire to be successful in life thereby driving us to go to school, get an academic certificate, get a professional qualification and hopefully climb up the corporate ladder in the work place. This has been the trend that is assumed to bring in money, wealth, confidence in life and perhaps success in general. When we look at the world at large we notice that there is quite a good number of people who have followed this trend successfully, and made it to the top especially in developed countries. However there is still a large number of our black brothers and sisters in Africa, still trailing behind this chain of success. A few of these blacks end up employed at middle management levels in most companies or even remain unemployed. It may therefore be concluded that black Africans still have to master the art of creating success in life especially given the levels of indigence in the continent.

The purpose of this book is to bring awareness to the black citizens of Africa about the crucial link between success and the unique life purpose of a person.

There has been much talk, much motivational encouragement and much preaching around the importance of people having to know their purpose in life. But there has not been detail or instruction on how people can practically discover their life purpose or achieve the success they want by discovering their life purpose.

This book has been written to assist people in Africa with a practical approach to discover their distinctive purpose in life, which in turn is a lever to making their lives successful. Unlike motivational talk-shows where people are advised to find their purpose in life, this book actually provides details on methods, tools, techniques and processes that people can use in order to find out what their purpose in life is. The book provides a formula to both the identification and fulfilment of life purpose which are the key ingredients to successful lives.

This book will stimulate one's mind, exhorts and helps to dispel fear from people who have a will to achieve success in life but continue to experience bottlenecks, roadblocks, and various other limiting challenges in life.

The book provides a roadmap about the journey of life and it aims to:

- Create order in lives of people

- Bring clarity of purpose in lives of people

- Encourage people to do what they were created to do

- Inspire people to become what they were created to be

- Unleash the power inside of people by understanding that we have all the power that we need inside of us to create the lives that we dream of "The one who is in you is greater than the one who is in the world", 1 John 4 verse 4

- Give hope to people who are facing trials and challenging moments in life

- Bring success to mankind, predominantly my black Brothers and Sisters in Africa

Discovery of life purpose forms the central theme of this book based on the premise that, life purpose is the lever to success in life. The book goes to demonstrate how you can use a combination of tools and techniques to discover or identify your life purpose. The book also clarifies how you can fulfil your own life purpose by following the process of combining a vision, mission and life strategy for your own life leading to an orderly, successful and fulfilling lifestyle. The book further shows you how to formulate a plan for your life in a similar way to a plan for a business, remembering that life of a business has a similar life-cycle to that of a human being as both go through stages of concept, birth, growth, stability, decline and eventually death.

This book guides you in walking the journey of discovering your unique life purpose which will then enable you to achieve tremendous success based on the simple logic that there is no way a human being, or any other being for that matter, can fail when operating in their area of purpose. This book is about what makes people become great and successful. The book is about human uniqueness, self-discovery, self-actualization and the book acts as a source of inspiration to those who want to get to their unique destiny in life by discovering and fulfilling their unique purpose on Earth.

This book simplifies the process of life purpose discovery as it makes reference to practical guidance in the use of tools, techniques, processes and motivational quotes that people can use to assist them to discover their unique purpose in life. The book also contains examples of exceptional people who went further to demonstrate their human uniqueness by fulfilling the purpose of their lives.

KJV

Scripture quotations marked KJV are from the Holy Bible, King James Version (Authorized Version). First published in 1611. Quoted from the KJV Classic Reference Bible, Copyright © 1983 by The Zondervan Corporation.

NIV Scripture quotations marked NIV are taken from the Holy Bible, New International Version®. NIV®. Copyright © 1973, 1978, 1984 by International Bible Society. Used by permission of Zondervan. All rights reserved. [Biblica]

1.2 Targeted Audience

This book targets mostly emerging Entrepreneurs, Business Leaders and adult people in Africa that may fall into the lost, the perishing and disillusioned, also referred to as LPD sector.

LPD largely comprises of people with typically the following kinds of self-limiting characteristics:

- Those gripped with fear and are afraid to make the next move in life e.g. fear to start a business which in turn could be a platform for success

- People who pity themselves, who have no confidence and who prioritize on self-doubt

- People who are not satisfied with their achievements despite putting in reams of effort into their business or personal undertakings

- Those who feel trapped in employment and have no idea how to break out into a free life

- Those who struggle to come up with concepts or ideas to grow their businesses

- Those who are generally tired and have become hopeless about life but cannot figure out how to think out of the box to reach the next level

- People who have not yet fully developed spiritual awareness

- Deep soul searchers

- Those who need to know the reason for their being

- People experiencing chaos in life

- Those who need motivation to succeed in life

- Entrepreneurs who seek success and breakthrough in their businesses

- Those who generally want to set themselves free from bondages in life

The list is endless and is all based on lack of clarity of purpose. The above groups of people will strongly benefit from this book.

Christians will find it easier to apply lessons learnt in this book given that the book also makes reference to biblical scriptures.

Enjoy your reading.

Introduction

2.1 Preface by the Author

Life Coaching fascinates because it involves dealing with human lives, human souls and human minds, which is the highest level of creation in this world. When I was a child I never dreamt of becoming a Life Coach but due to challenges in life I found myself in a situation where I spent more than eight years researching, studying and trying to understand the purpose of my life.

"What is the purpose of my life?" is a question I would hear people in general and some churches talk about, but it did not mean much to me at all. The more I researched into this subject, the more I felt a deeper hole or emptiness inside of me. I came up with more questions than answers, questions like; Who am I really? What is the meaning of life? What is my meaning in life? Why am I struggling to achieve my goals? Why does it seem like some people have it easier to create success in their lives than others? Are some people created with better gifts than me? Is this because of my African race or is my race cursed? I could hardly find any satisfactory answers to all of these questions.

Over my professional career that spans more than twenty five years to this date of writing this book, I developed skills in computer systems and electrical engineering. Despite using these skills to make a living I still felt incomplete in many ways. The money I was getting out of using my computer and engineering skills proved to be inadequate on many occasions. Yes the money could provide basic necessities such as food and entertainment, but it never even came close to helping in addressing any of the life questions above.

A time also came in my life when I envied a lot of other people. These are people who sounded very wise when discussing in groups, people who displayed lots of charisma based on their confidence and success in life, people who seemed to naturally take leading roles in work places, in business and so on. I thought that by imitating these people I would also be able to build on my own fascinating and successful character and be able to perform and be as attractive in groups as them, but my, was I wrong ... nothing worked. The outcome was acute ups and downs in life, in business and even in relationships, causing severe rising and falling in my life.

This is what then prompted me to embark on a journey, a journey of deep soul searching, a journey of self-discovery, a journey of self-mastery, a journey of self-actualisation, a journey that eliminates a masked character, a journey that confirms what it means to me when the Lord says in Genesis 1 verse 26, "Let us make man in our own image, after our likeness" [2], a journey that eliminates fear in life, a journey of seeking and confirming my purpose and a journey that guarantees success in life.

As I walked this journey, conducting all sorts of research about my life and careful not to make many assumptions and hasty conclusions about the purpose of my life, a pattern gradually emerged, and this was a pattern of a number of characteristic attributes that all pointed out to one thing, one purpose. I discovered and confirmed seven key characteristic attributes about my life that are also applicable to every other human being's life. Attribute

Step 1 – My natural gift

Through tools and techniques explained in Section 7 of this book I learnt that the natural gift given to me by the Creator is that of "administration" or "management" or "governance". In other words the purpose that I have in this life and all the things that I effectively do for other humans are based on this gift of administration/management. This is the free gift that God gave to me when I was born. In later sections of this book you will notice how this gift is consistently applied to all the things that I do in this life as I carry out the purpose of my life. I would say that knowing the natural gift given by God is the key success factor in determining one's life purpose. Please refer to Section 7.2 for more detail on how to discover your own natural gift and how the gift applies to all the activities you carry out in helping mankind.

Step 2 – My unique Personality

There are innumerable things that different managers/ administrators do and there are millions of people who have this natural gift of administration/ management however there is always distinguishing factors for each of us who have this gift. In my case my distinguishing factor is that I am very good with planning. I want my activities well planned ahead of time. I cannot effectively function without a plan. Plans bring sanity into my life. I have been doing this all the time in my career as a management consultant. I confirmed this on numerous occasions by using a technique called DISC profiling [4]. DISC profiling is (Dominance, Influence, Steadiness and Compliance), as detailed in sub-Section 7.3 of this book and it confirmed to me that I am a planner, a theorist and a designer of things yet to come. This is what separates me from other people who also have a natural gift of management or administration.

Step 3 – My natural habit

It also came to my realisation that all the while in my life I have had this natural tendency or habit of putting things in order, be it in managing project teams in my workplace, the setup in the office, arrangements in my car, organisation of my clothes in the bedroom, structure of my work on the computer, the way I dress, and almost in all things around me. It seems I cannot tolerate chaos. Chaos automatically triggers me into taking action to create order. This has been the case since my childhood even though I was not conscious of it. I can safely conclude that I have a natural habit of creating order.

There is no one way scientific formula to analyse one's habits. This part is based on self-observation. Information can also come based on comments from other people who can tell what your habit is.

I then safely came to a conclusion that, broadly stated, my life purpose is centred on creating order.

After analysing and confirming the above three attributes I came up with a formula that can assist in broadly stating what life purpose is. To get a broad understanding of my own life purpose at this stage I analysed the common thread on the three items described above, thus giving a formula which is:

{Natural habit + DISC profile + natural gift} = broad life purpose statement. This formula can be applied by anyone.

For me, the common thread here is "creating order". Creating order is my habit. Creating order is part of my "planning attribute" of my DISC profile. Creating order is part of my managerial/administrative gift.

This is how I arrived at a conclusion that the purpose of my life is broadly centred on "creating order". Since life purpose always has to do with serving other people then it means that my life purpose is broadly centred around "creating order in lives of people" Writing this book for example is based on my quest to create order where there is chaos in the life of the reader of this book.

Please note that I keep using the term "broadly" above because the purpose statement still needs to be narrowed down further for more effectiveness.

Step 4 – My Passion

To take it a step further I considered the fact that the world has more than seven billion people and it is not feasible for my purpose to be of use to this entire population. So I segmented my target population into a group of people who are specifically linked to my area of passion. This group of people comprises of entrepreneurs. I define entrepreneurs as people who have a will to start doing business, those who are already in business and those that generally want to experience self-actualisation in their lives. Almost everyone has the potential to be an entrepreneur, with creative abilities, only that the majority of people would not have reached that level of self-actualisation to realise their entrepreneurship potential. My strong and burning passion is towards entrepreneurship. This has been the case since I was in primary school where I would build toys and sell them. This passion has never left me since and has seen me starting multiple business ventures, in different parts of the African continent. In social circles my discussions are mostly business related topics. I used an online questionnaire to confirm my passion of entrepreneurship. The approach is more detailed in sub-Section 7.4 of this book.