North Star Self-Assessment
Discover your orientation
What is a North Star?
There are moments when you wonder what your purpose is. You ask yourself, "What am I supposed to be doing with my life? Am I on track? Am I fulfilled?" You think about traveling, having children, changing relationships, getting a different job, finding your passions, deepening your hobbies. Some part of you knows that those things, while good, are not quite the answer you are looking for.
Changes sometimes do need to be made. It can feel deeply fulfilling to deepen into your hobbies or relationships or career. But without orientation on why you are doing it and who you are becoming while you are doing it, those things become like everything else: goals that were reached, but without a map for how to know if you are on track.
That is what the North Star is for.
It is a way to calibrate if you are on track with your own evolution of consciousness, the development of your heart and your mind, which is what fulfillment is about. With a North Star, you can enjoy the things you are doing because of who you are while you are doing them.
A North Star is the directionality that your system evolves throughout the levels of your fulfillment. A North Star is one orientation with as many qualities as you want. Those qualities are not nouns like "happy" or "confident." They are ongoing living processes. For example: "I want my heart to be stable and calm during chaotic moments with people." That is a process. It is not a one-time goal where you finally get to say, "My heart is always this way." You calibrate toward a stable heart in chaotic situations. You set yourself to that process during moments when it is not happening. It is a way to orient. As you get better at it, your North Star quality does not go away. It becomes how you know you are on track.
This self-assessment is designed to give you a sense of your own North Star orientation and how to continue building it. You are vastly more nuanced and complex than any one assessment could ever cover. This is a starting point.
The Assessment
For each question, rate every statement from 1 (not like me at all) to 5 (highly like me). There are no right or wrong answers.
Your North Star Orientation
The Five Orientations
Read all five descriptions below. Your scores indicate which orientations resonate most strongly, but every person carries elements of each.
Continue Discovering Your North Star
If you want to keep going and discover more of your North Star, here is another way of doing it.
What makes a North Star real and not a vague wish is most easily found when a person reflects on ordinary moments in their life that did not go very well. Using hindsight and introspection, combined with metacognition, they can study themselves in the situation and ask:
What could I have done differently?
What could I have done better?
What kind of person do I want to be in that situation?
