We are living in a world that is getting more competitive daily. We are all trying to develop soft skills in order to catch up with the needs of the modern society and businesses that are more and more requiring qualified employees, with the aim to place themselves at the top of the rankings. Developing soft skills is not always an easy process, it requires commitment and many individuals tend to give up in the middle of the journey cause they do not hold closely their purpose. I am not saying this just because I am in AIESEC, but because while surfing the internet, I found a report on Workplace Status Index of 2016, a study about the  differences between purpose driven workers and those driven otherwise, estimates that only the 30% of workers are actually involved in what they do and it represents the people that have cleared their “why.” In fact, we do not need just good engineers, doctors or teachers… but people with a good purpose that allows them to excel in what they do. Read on to find out about the fringe benefits of being with purpose.

People who have found purpose, have found a lot more. They now capitalize on it to achieve their goals, to pursue their dreams and are so involved in their activities that they always give their best.  The value of purpose is often underestimated but it is what can make the difference in your life and in your career, and these are just some of the benefits you can get:

1. It helps you stay in power: consistency and routine in the achievement of results are key factors of your performances, in any field. Not all days are the same, some can be with low energy and we start working with low commitment and a negative mood.

In these cases, a clear purpose can bring your original mood back and boost your actions in order to not waste your time despairing and feeling guilty for not being at the top of your performance. You will not have any days to regret or a sense of not being productive.

2. Reminds you to strive for excellence: who is the one who is satisfied with the minimum of what is possible to get? The minimum salary, the lowest mark, a low-quality brand, a low level of security, a small competence. For sure not a purposed person, because this one knows why everyday things need to happen and that is important to take care of every detail because “doing a thing in a right way or in a wrong one will take the same time.”

Only if you stand out from the common standards you can really arrive at the end of the day with the sense of satisfaction that will make you feel fulfilled and encourage you that all the efforts made to get there trained you in being and doing better.

3. Models your behavior: have you ever asked yourself why some of us act in a certain way and others don’t? There are definitely various causes for that, but certainly one of them is that we are all moved by different reasons. Some people, for example, decide to go to work by bike because they want to contribute to pollution reduction, some go to the gym every day because they want to build their muscles, some practice Yoga because it helps them reduce the stress and increase their productivity at work. Despite the kind of field you think of, the actions you constantly do are always driven by the purpose to achieve a specific mission.

4. It connects people to achieve common goals: it encourages teamwork and raises commitments into a team. Considering the diversity of working style and ideas that can come up, we all know how challenging it can be to make more people work together in an efficient way and get to an agreement upon a decision to take; but when people share the same reasons why they are there, they will open up more towards new tasks and decisions so that their acceptance of them would be higher.

5. It helps you in making decisions: achieving a high goal requires for you to implement the achievements of smaller objectives in the middle. Being with purpose is a sort of starting point in your life that shows you the direction of where you want to go, it helps you in choosing the middle steps to take. It will guide you in choosing  faster if to go left or right, or in understanding if you are on the adequate direction and eventually to make the appropriate corrections, which would mean avoiding your favourite slide of cake if you have decided to lose weight.

6. It makes disciplines easier: being auto disciplined is not easy. Many times people are not willing to follow the plan they set previously, because of many reasons that most of the time are just in their mind. Ensuring ourselves to be committed to respect our promises every day can be so hard.

One way to stick your own promises would be to wake up every day knowing why you have planned what you have planned certain things to do and you know these will bring you closer to your goals.

7. It makes you overcome any limit: every day, we all face new, different challenges that we do not always feel confident to overcome. Especially it happens when we have in mind that a certain thing is too hard or it is not for us, we do not even try to accomplish it; our mind creates a series of walls with “stop here, you are not able” written on them.

We just turn around or take another path, thinking we do not deserve a certain thing. This would not happen if we have the right purpose that instead of making us stop, it would teach us how to overcome that limit and raise our awareness that we can always learn new competencies or attitudes that can increase our self-confidence and capacity of feeling limitless. There are no paths without obstacles that would not ask you to dare your limits.

It can be true that a skilled person might have more chances to get a job, to solve a problem but the ones with a strong aim and purpose are able to commit to acquire any skill necessary to get to a goal, while a skilled person faces a high risk to get lost in life among many of its crossroads and obstacles.

The best thing to do is to keep working on your abilities and in the meanwhile, clarify your “why.” Defining it can be a very long process of self-reflection and self-discovery. For some people, it might be shorter or easier or harder; some others might ask for the support of someone they trust or of a personal growth expert. Many people choose to reinvent themselves, to try something different or to spend some time alone and start some meditation processes.

With all said and done, find your purpose and stick to it.