“Somewhere along the line I slipped off track/One step up and two steps back.” Bruce Springsteen, “One Step Up”In my previous blog posts, I’ve talked about how you can know if you’re on the right track to finding your life path. I’ve talked about the importance of doing what matters to you and not just what you’re good at. And I’ve talked about how you can know that something really matters to you.I’ve also talked about some of the obstacles you may confront when you decide you want to do something that matters to you. These include 1) feeling like a failure when you’re doing something that isn’t a good fit for you; 2) feeling that life doesn’t afford you enough opportunities to do something that matters to you; 3) feeling that you won’t be good at what you’ve chosen to do; 4) protecting yourself from taking emotional risks and 5) feeling afraid to feel good.This is not an inclusive list. There are many obstacles that people confront when they’re trying to find their life purpose. But what all of these obstacles have in common is that they involve a sense of emotional danger. All of these dangers, including the fear of feeling glad you’re alive, are really subsets on of one overarching danger--the fear of being passionate, of really caring about something.In my upcoming posts, I’m going to talk about each of these dangers in detail. Here I want to give you a preview of what I’m going to talk about by describing some of the most common emotional obstacles you can face when you’re trying to find your life purpose. Emotional obstacles to finding your life purpose:1. You may be afraid that being passionate about something means that you’re “too big”-- that you’re too ambitious, that you want too much, that you want more than your fair share of what the world has to offer. If you feel this way, you may think that, rather than feeling passionate about something, you need to take yourself down a notch.2. Conversely, you may feel that you‘re too small. You may feel that you’re not important enough to have a life purpose of your own. Or you may feel that you don’t matter enough to other people to be able to get the support you need to be able to pursue your life purpose. You may be very good at taking care of other people’s emotional needs but feel unworthy of having your own. If that’s the case, you may end up convincing yourself to accept your life as it is, even if it’s not what you really want.3. You may have a fear of intolerable disappointment. If you allow yourself to hope for more from life, what will you do when the inevitable disappointments occur? Will you be able to handle them? If you’re convinced that you won’t be able to deal with setbacks, you may convince yourself that it’s not worth trying.4.You might be afraid that really caring about something will make you too anxious. If you or other people become invested in what matters to you, you might worry too much about how you’re doing to be able to actually enjoy it. You might conclude that it’s better to be cool and not let anything matter that much than to run the risk of experiencing what feels like intolerable anxiety.In my upcoming posts, I’ll talk about each of these fears and some strategies for addressing them so that they don’t become overwhelming obstacles to finding your life purpose.