As Women’s History Month continues to unfold, my topic for this month is especially timely: “Finding Your Purpose.” As women, we often do so much for others that finding the purpose for our own lives often gets shuffled down to the bottom of the priority list. How, you say? I’ve gone to school, gotten my degree. Got a good job—my own business. Raising my family. But are you doing what fuels your soul? What moves your heart every day?
Don’t get me wrong. I realize that we can’t always go for our dreams full force every day. But we can go for our purpose. But first, we must define, authentically, what it is.
As I say in my book, TAP INTO YOUR JUICE, we all have a purpose. God’s given each of us one, just like we each have a fingerprint—we just have to find out what it is. It may be doing something that you love. It may be solving a problem that gets on your last nerve and that of others. Take some time to get still and assess the moments that really move you—get you excited, inspired, angry, encouraged, motivated to DO something, no matter what.
Your purpose is there calling your name.
I know that my purpose involves inspiring others. However, going to the National Museum of African American History and Culture recently crystallized it for me. My purpose is Inspiring Others through Reinvention and Resilience.
You see, my life has been one of several professional and personal reinventions. When I asked my tribe to describe me, reinvention was the word that was consistently used about me; that I can reinvent myself from both set backs and successes. But what does that take? It takes bounce-back-ability. Resilience.
Reinvention requires resilience.
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Going through the museum I couldn’t help but see the resilience that’s in our DNA. It’s in everything we went through and...
...everything we went to! From picking cotton, to our incredible uniqueness in making a way out of no way. Inventing things, creating art, making discoveries that changed the world. When faced with situations we had no control over to situations that we did, we have always found a way to reinvent them to create purposeful pathways. The great thing about reinvention is the surprising journey it takes you on. The wonderful gifts it unveils. Strengths you didn’t know you had become evident.
I’m a storyteller now and I love it. Each time I tell my personal story of professional and personal reinvention and someone is inspired to take a risk to try something new, I get excited! Who knows how they may save a life, create something for millions delicious to eat, toe-tapping to dance to, beautiful to look at, comfortable to rest on, simpler to calculate with, or change the world?
Sometimes, people have to see it before they can believe it can be done. Then they can take it further than they or you thought possible. So, my purpose is to inspire; to tell the authentic truth of reinvention. That it takes faith and faith doesn’t make things easy. Faith makes things possible. Resilience makes things possible, too.
Inspiration is more than cheerleading. It’s more than “you can do it!" More than affirmation. To me, it’s seeing. Reaffirming the possible. When I saw what we have actually gone through as a people and saw in such totality what we have done and FELT our history at the Museum, I came away feeling more powerful than ever.
Finding your purpose gives you power. Embrace it. And never give it away.
Born and raised in Detroit, Amy S. Hilliard is the Principal of The Hilliard Group, founder of The ComfortCake Company and former President of Fashion Fair Cosmetics as well as a senior executive for Gillette, L’Oreal, Pillsbury and Burrell Communications Group. A graduate of Howard University and the Harvard Business School, Amy is known as the “The Mother of Reinvention”. She is an international speaker and author of TAP INTO YOUR JUICE, Find Your Gifts, Lose Your Fears and Build Your Dreams, endorsed by First Lady Michelle Obama. Join Amy’s email list herehttp://eepurl.com/b2S5CD http://eepurl.com/b2S5CD. Visit her website, www.amyshilliard.com, and check her out on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
