Now is the Time to Find Your Sweet Spot

AS A TWENTY-SOMETHING, Paul Sohn said his life looked so good on paper. But a growing feeling of disappointment overwhelmed him. He wondered, “Is this all there is?”

He was experiencing a quarter-life crisis.

It can happen at any age especially when you get caught up in these five approaches that he identifies in Quarter-Life Calling: How to Find Your Sweet Spot in Your Twenties:

Fear and Anxiety: Instead of enjoying where you are at you allow the uncertainty of the world around you to overwhelm you with stress and a sense of trepidation.

The Choice Overload: We allow the choice we have to paralyze us. This is brought on “by a recent phenomenon called FOMO (Fear of Missing Out). Twentysomethings live in a 24/7 plugged-in culture. We live in an era where we are accosted by the incessant meals, vacations, parties, and sheer awesomeness people are experiencing—thanks to Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram. According to a new study by Eventbrite, 69 percent of millennials experience FOMO when they can’t attend something that their family or friends are going to.”

Too Busy to Slow Down: Are we doing the things we really should be doing? We are overscheduled, overworked and overcommitted.

The Obsessive Comparison Disorder: We can always find people who are doing better than us and we want what everyone else has. ‘Millennial expert Paul Angone calls this Obsessive Comparison Disorder (OCD). He says, “OCD is the smallpox of our generation.” This is an epidemic that is producing unwanted thoughts and feelings, driving us into depression, consumption, anxiety, and all-around discontent. The grass is not always greener on the other side.

The YOLO/FOMO Generation: You only live once. It’s easy to get stuck in the moment. Social media encourages this thinking and the resulting drift into instant gratification and self-absorption.

Paul Sohn is talking to twenty-somethings but we all can learn from his experience. The context changes but the principles are the same.

The answer is to find your sweet spot—that place where you are living out your calling. Sohn says it is found at the intersection of your personality (who you are wired to be), gifts (that which you are naturally gifted in), passions (that which ignites a fire in your soul), and life story (what doors have opened and closed in your life). It is here that you will find your purpose that will lead you to a meaningful life.

In a noisy world it is hard to slow down enough to know yourself. Finding your sweet-spot begins with getting outside of yourself—seeing yourself from another perspective. A meaningful life comes from something outside yourself. Sohn found that in the Bible. It allowed him to integrate his life around a concept outside of his present. It makes all the difference.

For twenty-somethings, Sohn says the key is to start well. Start early.

As a clinical psychologist who specializes in twentysomethings, Meg Jay [author of Defining Decade] has observed how twentysomethings have considered this time as a throwaway decade, paying the price, professionally, personally, spiritually, and economically later in life. This is the biggest myth out there. No more procrastination. No more wasting away your time, talent, and treasure believing you can make it up later in life.

Keep learning. Find mentors. Life isn’t meant to be a rat-race. You were meant to flourish. Begin today.

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Posted by Michael McKinney at 10:33 PM
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