The Role Purpose Plays in My Life Right Now
It’s not everyday you get crystal clear on your purpose in life. But it just happened to me and I want to share it with you. I’m sure you’re expecting me to declare a job or career title in relation to finding my purpose, but you’d be disappointed. In fact, I’ve found myself feeling more free than ever when it comes to identifying myself in relation to how I earn a living.
I’ve come to the conclusion that my purpose in life is not to chase some dream, or create some product, or even check items off my bucket list. Much to my surprise, let me tell you. What I’ve come to find, and I will tell you how I landed on this realization, is that my purpose is self-actualization. AKA: Living MY best life.
Purpose as Self-Actualization
Let me start by saying that self-actualization is not a fancy term for goal setting. It’s not even a term for goal achievement. Self-actualization is about living in your full potential. Notice it doesn’t mean, “achieving your full potential.” I love this distinction.
I’ve read more than my fair share of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs references (I have a Master’s Degree in Adult Education), but what I’ve neglected to account for is the complexity of striving for something just for the sake of striving for it without actually needing to reach the end result.
In the past, I’ve been all about getting a result. These days, I’m much more interested in why I’m doing something than whether or not I’m doing a good job at it. And as much as I’ve been focused on self-study and self-reflection, I’ve left out a really important part: identifying your purpose isn’t about the end result. You don’t “arrive” once you’ve been able to put your finger on the pulse of what makes you tick. In fact, you may have more questions when you can articulate your “why” than when you started searching for it in the first place.
The slow burn of discovering our purpose means that many people give up the pursuit of identifying what compels them to do something long before they ever get to do it. I’m not saying we should get wrapped up in searching for the “one thing” that makes our lives more meaningful. I’m saying that meaning, in itself, makes life more meaningful. And that’s where the purpose enters the chat for me.
How I Paid Attention to Get Clarity on My Purpose
One of the things I’ve been doing during my creative sabbatical is paying attention to the feelings in my body. A few weeks ago, I was thinking about life coaching. Actually, that’s not entirely true. I think about life coaching all the time. I coach myself on many things. I am also a certified life coach. I’ve worked as a coach in several areas of my business, but I never really give it the spotlight it deserves.
So I was thinking about life coaching as a way to help make meaning of what was happening in my body. Every time I thought of “coaching” as something I could do in my career, my stomach would flop. I don’t mean, I’d get a little tickle in my belly. I mean, it would full on sink into something that felt like shame or fear.
Of course, I pulled out my self-reflection tools: the things that help me figure myself out on the regular, and I started asking questions.
What Came Up
What’s so triggering about the thought of life coaching?
Is it a warning from my body?
It is a fear manifesting in my stomach?
What else comes up when I think about people who offer life coaching?
It was so strange. I kept telling myself I didn’t know. And that, I can say with 100% honesty, was a lie. The truth is that I’ve always been interested in life coaching as a career, but when I walked away from it a fear years ago, I just assumed I was done with it.
When I launched Coach Week recently as a way to test drive being a coach again, I didn’t just get excited about helping people sort through their questions, I was better able to sort through my own. For instance, the reason that life coaching as a career option made my stomach flip like that is because I was excited about returning to myself in this way. But it was so much more than that.
It’s Not a Return to Self. It’s a Confirmation.
For me, returning to life coaching wasn’t about a return to self. It was a digging into self-expression. It’s confirmation of self. When I’m helping other people improve any area of their lives, or answer a question that kept them stuck, or solve a problem they had, or just allow an idea to have space they are hiding away, I am living a self-actualized life. And it’s not about the people I’m helping; although, obviously it is in many ways. For me, I feel like I’m living into my potential because I’m digging into self-expression.
When I can fully express myself, without filters, without worrying about the consequences of my thoughts, feelings or actions, I am living my best life. When I get to be fully me and have that mean something, not only to myself, but to others through coaching, I’m self-actualizing in real time.
How I Got From Coaching to Purpose
What I love about self-reflection, whether it’s through formal or informal coaching, or quiet thought work in my own head is this: something always comes up. The clarity around purpose that has come up for me as of late was not an accident. I’ve been asking the right questions and sitting with the information that’s come up for me. I’ve been honest, like I’ve been trying to do for many years now, even more so these days, let me tell you. And I’ve been trying to accept the truths that I discover as well.
But more importantly, I have accepted the responsibility of having chosen the purpose. The recognition of choice in relation to purpose has been groundbreaking in my life as of late.
Choosing Purpose, Not Finding It
Purpose is not something that finds us. It does not, in fact, reveal itself to us. It’s not something that can be assigned to us. There is no “we should do this with our lives” that is predetermined. I think we believe that because then it removes the responsibility of having to choose for ourselves. I’ve accepted the responsibility of this choice. But I was only able to do that when I realized my purpose was, in fact, a choice.
Imagine the self-acceptance and clarity that comes from letting go of the belief that you’re in the wrong lane. If purpose is a choice, if I get to choose what my life’s purpose is, then I get to change it. I get to reassign the role I play in my life in a new way. I get to decide if what yesterday’s purpose was is still today’s purpose. And I get to weave whatever remains into the next iteration of myself as I continue to self-actualize. It’s not a journey or a process. It’s a way of living, of being.
Asking the Wrong Questions and Getting the Right Answers
You may read this and fully disagree with me about how I choose to see purpose in my life. That’s your choice. But I can tell you that accepting responsibility for it, instead of washing your hands of it, gets you to clarity a lot faster. Those tingles in my stomach I was feeling dried up and they were replaced with certainty.
The questions of whether or not I need to be a life coach or a consultant or an accountant or a writer or an artist or anything else that’s come up over the last four months have been replaced with a calm knowing that I’m not longer trying to answer that question. It doesn’t matter what I do for a living. It matters how I feel doing that work.
Following the Feelings
I’m not saying that I’m not going to choose a new direction to go in at the end of this creative sabbatical. I am asking those questions of myself as part of this process. That’s why I launched Writer’s Week and Coach Week and who knows what else I’ll launch as I continue to explore how I want to feel in my work. But the important thing to pay attention to for me is how I feel. I want to follow the feelings I have to my next opportunity. I want to see how I feel before, during and after doing a job well done.
Instead of rushing to the answer and worrying about the next thing, the urge to answer that question has been replaced with knowing anything I choose will be the right answer for right now. It’s not a “I’ll do this until I die” situation. It never was. I’m very glad I figured that out a long time ago. What I choose today doesn’t have to be the thing I choose tomorrow. But knowing my purpose is to live fully into my potential, means that I can follow the feelings I get from exploring my potential.
My Potential (And Yours) is Whatever We Want it to Be
Could I be a novel writer? Sure. I already am. Could I do it as a career? Sure. But do I want to? Probably not. Does that mean I don’t want to write novels anymore? No way. I just don’t want to feel pressure to write the kind of novels people want to read. I want to write the kind of novels I want to read. So my purpose is to write what feels good to me. In doing that, I don’t need writing to be my career, but it is contributing to my purpose. I am living into my purpose when I write books I want to read.
We get a lot of feedback from the people around us. I light up with keen interest when someone says to me, “You should be xyz…you’re really good at that.” I’ve always loved when someone points out a strength that I may not have considered and of course, I love it even more when the thing I’ve been contemplating gets validated by someone else. But there’s another angle that has recently come up and created some conflict for me that has been telling: when someone tries to talk you out of doing something.
Your Ideas are Valid, Even if They are Misunderstood
Have you ever had an idea and shopped it around to a friend or family member, or maybe even your network and you get some feedback that makes you question whether or not you’re going in the right direction? I seem to get this kind of feedback whether I’m looking for it or not. People love to just offer their opinions about other people’s lives on the regular. And as I was considering coaching in my life and the role it may play now and later, a conversation about the validity of coaching came up and I found myself defending it.
As I leapt to save the reputation of coaching as a career, I realized that I had already made up my mind about offering Coach Week. I didn’t need someone to tell me it was okay to do this. I’ve created space to make this kind of thing okay for me to do within this creative sabbatical. And of course, I didn’t need this sabbatical to try this on for size. But since the purpose of this sabbatical is to do what I want in the interest of learning more about myself (my literal purpose in life as it turns out) then it makes it all the more easier to commit to wearing a specific hat for a while.
Making Meaning and Creating Purpose
Until recently, I have told my career story from the perspective of adult education. I’ve always looked to trace the line between when I started teaching medical lectures in the army when I was just 18 all the way to the most recent instalment of my career, instructional design consulting. I can follow the invisible thread that ties every job I’ve ever had to the next one so that I go from being an 18-year-old solider with no work experience to a successful business owner in my 40s. Each step gets me closer to where I am today, and in some way or another, every step had to do with adult education.
In exploring my life and engaging in a self-study in real time, I’m finding that it’s not actually the through line of adult education that has gotten me to where I am today. It’s been an important pillar of adult education, to be sure, but adult education isn’t the star of the show that I once thought it was. I can see now, as I continue to make meaning of where I’ve been and where I’m going, that it is the meaning making itself that has been the binding agent in my career.
What’s Next? Or What’s For Right Now?
When we ask ourselves what’s next, we tend to circle around things we done, or skills we have. Maybe there’s room for new skills to develop or new ways to apply old skills in different settings.
At one point, I got really good at helping college students re-imagine their resumes to focus on their skills, not their jobs titles, so they could understand their careers in a different way. I was helping them make meaning of their experiences. I was helping them find the next thing they could do, and for some, they would end up going in a different direction than they one they had set for themselves because they had new ways of understanding themselves. I used to do this long before I knew there was a term for it: self-reflection.
The lens with which we view our lives is often biased. We start with the things we think we know and try to look for similarities or sameness. We look for places where we think we’ll be welcomed because of our experiences, especially when it comes to jobs and careers. But when you step back and remove the bias and instead replace it with a different lens, you get different information.
Release the Bias
When I was measuring my career success using the through line of adult education, it looks like I’ve created quite a career path for myself. And I have. But if I remove the “teaching as a career” in its many forms in my life and focus instead on meaning making, I can see an even greater through line.
I have told the story of how I ended up as an English major in university: it was my highest mark after my first year in school. That’s one version of the story. Another version of the story is that I’ve been interested in writing and literature my entire life and if it hadn’t been my highest mark, I might have been as surprised as anyone. Of course it was going to be my highest mark. It’s the thing I do with the most ease.
I tell the story of how I fell into a college teaching job while doing data entry for a private college in the city. But that wasn’t what happened at all. I had created space for myself in that company by being someone worth keeping around and it’s not my boss’ fault that he didn’t know I could teach college courses. I told him I was looking for a data entry job. When I let him in on my secret, he offered me a job on the spot. That’s not a coincidence. It’s changing lens.
I changed the way he saw me and he gave me a different job on the spot. But if I had kept telling myself the story that I was just there to make some money while I look for a “real job” then I wouldn’t have gotten that chance. Except, that’s exactly how I’ve been telling that story for years.
Clarity Comes From Curiosity
It’s only been over the last few months that I’ve really become clear on the role I’ve played in defining and creating my purpose. I thought it was adult education. I have been defining my life through the lens of being an adult educator, always followed by the phrase, “of some form or another” as a way to avoid having to describe to people just how many jobs I’ve actually had and how many things I’ve done.
But I’m not ashamed of the work I’ve done. I have become even more proud of myself in these last few months as I’ve written new stories for myself about my life and my experiences. And it’s allowed me to find the common thread beyond adult education: meaning making.
Self-Reflection as a Tool for Meaning Making
Someone recently asked me why people are drawn to coaching as a career. What makes it so special? Of course, it was followed by the question, “Isn’t it just an MLM?” I get it. To people who don’t buy into coaching as a thing that can help them improve their lives, it seems strange. But I buy into it. And I remember the moment it clicked for me that coaching was something that could help me change all kinds of things about my life. Long before I found therapy as a way to heal myself, coaching was helping me develop myself and get to know myself. To become the person I wanted to be.
Coaching can keep up with my wayward ways and it becomes the container to hold all of my thoughts and aspirations without judgement. But before I was introduced to the world of coaching, I was already practicing and leveraging the power of self-reflection. I was already making meaning in my life, without even realizing it most of the time.
Change the Lens, Change the Outcome
And when I enrolled in the Master of Adult Education degree program in 2013, I was focused on career development, not self-development. By the time I graduated in 2018, however, my focus had shifted from external to internal, and I completed a self-study of my career and life. It was game-changing information. It created a platform for me to return to again and again to make meaning of the life I’m living and it’s helped inform my coaching practice both as a practitioner and as a client.
Self-reflection as a tool for meaning making came up during my time as a Master’s student because I almost quit the program several times. My career focus has shifted and I didn’t think I was going to stay in the education world. I was tired of thinking about it, to be honest. I just wanted to be done. So instead of finishing, I’d thought it better to quit. Hilarious, I know. But when I found something that made sense to apply to my life as it was, not as I thought it was going to be, I was able to not only finish the program, but I started the entire thing over again and finished it in 6 months.
Making Meaning of My Meaning Making
What was the thing I could apply to my life regardless of what path I chose to walk? Self-reflection. Making meaning of my life. Finding purpose in the things I was doing so they could serve me in the future.
I didn’t know it at the time, and yes, I can see how meta this entire conversation about meaning making actually is, as I engage in making meaning of my meaning making! Phew. That’s a mouthful. But stay with me. I didn’t know it at the time, but that shift toward myself was going to change everything about my life.
It didn’t just empower me to be in the driver’s seat, it helped me build the car. I’ve always said business is the vehicle I’ve chosen to become the person I want to become. It’s the way I create purpose in my life. Being a business owner has been the way I’ve been able to live a good life. But that’s not true. Not entirely anyway. It’s been the meaning I’ve assigned to being a business owner and being entrepreneurial that has created this life.
Creating Purpose and Choosing a New Story
And all of this is to say that the more I learn about myself, the clearer it becomes to me that my life hasn’t been about adult education or colleges or start-ups. It’s been about exploring who I am in those situations. My life has been about creating purpose through finding meaning and creating meaning in my purpose. And that’s how I landed on Coach Week. And that’s why I’ll continue to create room for things I believe will light me up. Because if I’m doing nothing else right now, it’s continuing to make meaning from my experiences.
This platform is real-time evidence of how profound and important self-reflection and meaning making is in our lives, even when we make things mean something we don’t want. More and more though, I’m getting better at creating meaning that moves me forward, instead of holding me back.
I no longer feel like someone who is resourceful and scrappy. I feel like someone who is resourced and ready.
If you’re interested in creating meaning in your life, join my 5-Day Journal Challenge. It’s a small step you can take today to start to see yourself and your life in a different way. Who knows what you might find if you ask the question, “What’s my purpose?”
