Have you been diligently determining your purpose so you can manifest what you’ve been asking for? How well has that been working?

Best selling author, world-wide seminar leader, and Access Consciousness™ founder Gary Douglas says purpose rarely gives us the results we think it will.

How so? The very fixed quality of purpose installs it in your being as a constant source of judging you. All judgments limit everything you can receive—including money and even your own success at achieving your very purpose. Cute, eh?

So is there a better way? Douglas suggests using the word and concept of priority instead of purpose. It doesn’t mean you have to change what your targets are in life, it simply means giving it a different energy. A purpose is a standard against which you must always judge yourself. Like all judgments, it is not true, and that’s just one reason why you can’t even accomplish it. A priority has an openness and flexibility that allows you to use and act by it, or change it as you choose.

Douglas’s business partner and frequent co-author, Dr. Dain Heer, felt like throwing in the towel in the middle of one of his seminars. He was doing what he normally loved to do, but was so disheartened he felt like cancelling the seminar and giving everyone their money back. “I was stuck up to my ears in purpose,” he recalls.

Douglas recognized what was happening and asked Heer what his purpose was. “To bring people to consciousness,” he replied.

The judgment this created was constant—Heer recognized he was constantly judging himself based on whether people in his classes chose consciousness.

“What if consciousness were your priority instead?” Douglas continued.

Heer’s world immediately expanded. “If it were my priority, it would be like a lighthouse shining a light anywhere there was something valuable for me. It would be a guiding light but I wouldn’t have to judge myself if it didn’t happen.”

Having a purpose is about everything we’re taught in this reality. It’s also a mainstay of many self-improvement and spiritual approaches. Sometimes these go even further into the limiting land of judgment by looking for “higher purpose.” How is that possible without further judgment of which purpose is higher than another?

Untangling ourselves from this sticky web of the limitations of purpose can take time. Heer, a changeaholic, worked on it for weeks. We buy the lie that our choices, for example, can only be based on our purpose. It’s a trap we cannot get out of, like all lies. If you find yourself feeling responsibility for someone else, that too is based on your having bought that’s your purpose.

There are many ways we can get trapped further into purpose. We might start out with the priority, that flexible light that allows us change, question, possibility, contribution, and choice, but that very priority can get twisted into a purpose, which instantly limits us.

We may be doing something from priority and be great at it—only to be acknowledged for it. That very acknowledgment can slam us back into the limitations of purpose; the judgment that accompanies that can destroy the very ability to create phenomenally that we were acknowledged for in the first place!

If we’re looking for motivation—an outside source to make us do what we think we should do—we’re functioning from purpose. In fact, whenever there’s a “should” attached to anything, that’s a surefire indicator that there’s purpose lurking not very far in the background of what you’re struggling to get free of.

Yet another way to stick ourselves with purpose is to align and agree with our priorities, or make them significant—that instantly locks us into purpose instead of priority.

In many ways, the difference between purpose and priority is analogous to the difference between goals and targets. Douglas and Heer advise against setting goals, because they like purposes lock you into judgment. The difficulty with a goal is that it locks you into that goal forever.

This jail-like quality of goals is responsible for many a lost fortune. What occurs is that somewhere in some lifetime, people set a certain amount of money as a goal. If they reach that goal but fail to acknowledge it, they will be compelled to lose the money, only to work again over and over again to attain it again because they were locked into that goal forever. Ironically, in some countries like Scotland and Australia, jail is still often spelled “gaol,” remarkably similar to goal.

Instead of setting goals, Douglas and Heer recommend setting targets. Like a priority, a target can be changed and moved, and you can shoot at it again and again while always being free to change it.

That very willingness and ability to change can actually contribute to your achieving your targets—and your New Year’s resolutions. Douglas and Heer recommend making choices in “ten second increments.” The value of this is that it frees you from the burden of making “the right choice.” When a choice is only good for 10 seconds, you are free to change it if you don’t like what it creates in your life.

The very act of choosing creates awareness, Douglas and Heer point out. “Choice creates awareness, awareness does not create choice,” they say. It makes a mockery of our usual tendency to analyze (anal-ise?) endlessly trying to get “the right choice.” Douglas calls this the “Lord of the Rings choice—one choice to end them all.”

If a choice is only good for 10 seconds, the burden of making the right choice—and judging ourselves endlessly to determine the right choice—vanishes. Doesn’t that feel lighter?

What if you were to approach those New Year’s resolutions with the lightness of priorities, the freedom of choice in 10 seconds, the flexibility of a target instead of a goal? Would creating your life in 2012 be a lot more fun?

Now having fun just could be a purpose you could get behind!

Gary Douglas recently did a class on Purpose of Life, check it out on Access Consciousness Shop. “What if purpose of life was to have fun?”