When you get clear on your life mission, you also get clear about how to live to accomplish your mission, making relationship decisions and choices effortless. In this way you can take much of guesswork out of what you need to do to have true love in your life.

No more writing long lists of partner qualities you're not sure you deserve. Once you are in touch with your life mission, you will have a clear picture of kind of partner who will help, not hinder, your efforts. No more wondering if you should tell someone they need to treat you better. You will demand best possible treatment. You will have no time or energy for anything less.

To define what a life mission is, let's first take a look at what a life mission is not:

* It is not what your parents told you your life is for * It is not what society tells your life is for * It is not your career, although it can be expressed through your career * It is not accumulating wealth * It is not some grand plan that is imposed on you * It is not what you think it should be

A life mission is:

* That something you do that makes you feel completely alive while contributing to others * Activities you do naturally, that you have a natural knack for * A part of you that has always been there as long as you remember * A flame that burns deep inside you * Your intrinsic contribution to humanity

Common questions about a life mission: --------------------------------------

Q: What is my life mission? A: Review exercise below to help you discover your life mission.

Q: How do I know I have a life mission? A: A life mission is expressed in your passion. If you have passion, you have a life mission. Every human being has passion, whether he or she is aware of it or not.

Q: Do I need a life mission? A: No one needs a life mission, yet we all have one. When you are in touch with yours, life takes on a new power, new meaning, new ease and much more aliveness and passion.

Will you pass up opportunity to have more aliveness and passion? I doubt you will, so let's get to work and discover your life mission.

The one single, specific memory I have from ninth grade was during a math class. We were being introduced to Geometry for first time. The teacher whose name I can surprisingly not remember, asked "What is intuition?"

I raised my hand (an unusual act for me at 15 years old) and said, "It is having a hunch: sort of knowing or having an idea of something out of blue, like without really knowing you somehow know."

In my mind's eye picture is crystal clear. How teacher was poised, what his sport coat looked like, where in room he was standing, how his head was turned just so. I think his name might have been Mr. Tennaro. I was in his class for one week.

Yet that question and answer still calls out to me more than twenty years later. Forever caught in freeze frame across three thousand miles and countless other classrooms and a huge number of hours and moments and conversations. Intuition. An inkling.

Sharon Franquemont, former professor of Intuition at John F. Kennedy University and author of "You Already Know What to Do" makes an important distinction. Rather than using intuition as one of many tools for living, she suggests that one choose to make practice of intuition a way of living everyday.

Some think, "That is all well and good and I know for a fact I have no clue how to live intuitively. I don't even know for sure if I believe in intuition in first place." Before we discuss that, lets point to some very interesting illustrations.

It may be surprising to learn that some of history's greatest thinkers believed an intuitive lifestyle was very beneficial. Albert Einstein said, "The only real valuable thing is intuition."