Being Purpose-Full: Working with Life Purpose
Highlights from Part 2 of this extended article adaptation include examples of how the use of life purpose work helped two coaching clients, and a list of additional resources on discovering one’s life purpose. The article appears here with the kind permission of Dr. Patrick Williams, Founder and CEO, Institute for Life Coach Training ( http://www.lifecoachtraining.com/index.shtml )
A favorite quote about the power of life purpose comes from a well-known U.S. president, Woodrow Wilson, who said:
“You are not here merely to make a living. You are here in order to enable the world to live more amply, with greater vision, with a finer spirit of hope and achievement. You are here to enrich the world, and you impoverish yourself if you forget the errand.”
Wilson’s quote reinforces the value of life purpose work: When our purpose, our power, and our passion intersect, we find personal fulfillment and enrich the world. As you work with clients on life purpose, you’ll find that sometimes they confuse life purpose, vision, and mission.
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Life purpose is our calling — the underlying reason for being that gives meaning to our life. It is the purpose an individual enacts throughout a lifetime.
Missionis the particular way or ways we choose to fulfill our purpose at a particular point in our life. For example, an individual whose life purpose is to “honor and evoke the highest and best in myself and others” might fulfill that purpose through many different kinds of work and actions over the course of his life.
Vision refers to a specific, compelling image of the future that an individual holds.
When you work with a client, you want to assist him in distinguishing between life purpose, vision, and mission. Most clients will need to examine all three. A client’s purpose is not necessarily something he discovers in midlife. In fact, it probably has been with him for quite some time, even though he may never have articulated it. That is why he will benefit from going back into his past and working with some real experiences of being “on purpose.”
When we are on purpose, we live from our being, or our core self. When we have lost track and are living “off purpose,” our life feels less fulfilling. Many clients discover that when they have chosen work or a way of life that does not feel fulfilling, it is because they have lost sight of their purpose. They have become a human doing instead of a human being.
When Do We Use Life Purpose with Clients?
Almost all clients can benefit from life purpose work if they have adequate willingness and a capacity for self-reflection. Sometimes clients need to be taught the value of reflection in order to benefit from life purpose work. Some clients come to us with a strong need to re-examine life purpose. A client may seem to have lost his way, to be “off purpose” in his life. If he were a boat, we’d say that he lacked a rudder and was adrift in a sea of circumstances. The client may feel as if he is surviving, but only with a struggle, or he may be striving to achieve but doesn’t feel much satisfaction in his accomplishments.
Sometimes in the natural cycle of life, clues emerge that suggest life purpose work may be called for:
- A client in midlife feels listless, fatigued, and disenchanted.
- The client has experienced losses — deaths, job losses, or health issues — that make the old way of living no longer possible.
- The client is overwhelmed with life and is asking, “Is this the life I really want to lead?”
- The client has undergone significant life transitions — children have left, retirement is near, divorce has occurred, and so on.
- The client feels a serious mismatch between current work and/or roles and the deep desires of the self.
Notice that these situations might also prompt a client to seek the services of a psychotherapist, if clinical depression or extensive anxiety is present. On the other hand, life purpose work can be very therapeutic. It can be done using a coach approach either by you or by referring to a coach who specializes in life purpose coaching.
Life Purpose Work Can Bring About Deep Change
In our private lives, as well as in our professional lives, getting back “on purpose” may require some startling changes. Living from a deep place is not easy to maintain in 21st-century life in the United States — or in Hong Kong — where speed, multi-tasking, and constant noise make lack of depth a fact of life. Living from a deep place may require a client to undergo deep change. As Robert E. Quinn, the organizational behavior and human resource management expert and consultant, writes:
“Ultimately, deep change... is a spiritual process. Loss of alignment occurs when, for whatever reason, we begin to pursue the wrong end. This process begins innocently enough. In pursuing some justifiable end, we make a trade-off of some kind. We know it is wrong, but we rationalize our choice. We use the end to justify the means. As time passes, something inside us starts to wither. We are forced to live at the cognitive level, the rational, goal-seeking level. We lose our vitality and begin to work from sheer discipline. Our energy is not naturally replenished, and we experience no joy in what we do. We are experiencing slow death.... We must recognize the lies we have been telling ourselves. We must acknowledge our own weakness, greed, insensitivity and lack of vision and courage. If we do so, we begin to understand the clear need for a course correction, and we slowly begin to reinvent our self.”
The truth is that almost any moment offers us an opportunity to live out our life purpose. By choosing work, relationships, avocations, creative pursuits and other life elements consciously, we can find the most fulfilling ways to experience our purpose. Life purpose work can also help a client begin to sense and/or to live out a higher level of consciousness. As you consider working with life purpose, consider the level of consciousness that the client seems to be embedded in or moving to.
- What level of consciousness does this person seem to be at?
- Is there a transitional stage, an urge toward transformation of consciousness that is at work in his or her life?
- How might life purpose work be of assistance?
An Example of Life Purpose Work
Consider the case of Andy, a 38-year-old coaching client, who is a teacher and workshop leader. Andy is happily married, has two children, and is considering whether or not to start his own business. He has been a high school teacher and counselor during his entire career and says he finds himself “sort of itching to make a big change in my work.”
Andy’s Life Experiences of Being “On Purpose”
Andy turns in the following random list to you as fieldwork:
- Staying with my grandmother for two months after her husband of 63 years died unexpectedly
- Being the only child in a blue-collar family to graduate from college
- The birth of my two sons
- Adopting two babies from China
- Committing to completing a master’s degree in counseling to enrich my work as a high school counselor
- Working successfully as a counselor at the high school
- Creating a special support group program for young unmarried fathers at the high school
- Moving in to care for my father, a widower, for the six months before he died
Andy’s Life Purpose Themes
As Andy shares the experiences with you, you note the following words and phrases recurring time and time again throughout his stories. These become his purpose themes.
- Connecting to self, others, and the whole
- Fun, different every day
- Friends and connections
- Peace
- Creativity
- Challenges
- Persistence
- Learning
- Believing in myself and my capabilities
- Coming into my own
- In the right place, doing the right thing
- Committed, conscious, courageous
A Life Purpose Statement for Andy
The life purpose statement Andy drafted after this work was the following:
My life purpose is to create connection between myself, my clients, and all those I contact to the universal whole of life, through joyfully living and transforming our life challenges into sources of creativity and learning.
Using Life Purpose as a Guide
The real benefit of knowing one’s life purpose comes when clients use it as a guide to make choices and decisions that lead to greater, more authentic happiness and fulfillment. Life purpose work leads clients to discover new choices, as well as to become clear about directions to pursue and choices to release.
Helping professionals regularly encounter clients who have been living out roles, values, and commitments that were assigned them early on by their family of origin. Clients often seek coaching because those old ways don’t work for them anymore. Once they discover their individual life purpose, they may discover, with sadness or with elation, that the roles they have chosen to play and the line of work they have chosen have never fit them well. This discovery often leads to a realization that they feel called to live out a different purpose — one that is uniquely their own and which may have nothing to do with their family’s desires or agenda.
This happened to a client who had spent 20 years working as a divorce lawyer, never feeling a sense of fulfillment from the work. When he did the life purpose work, he chose only one of his 25 on-purpose examples from his legal career. Most of the examples he chose came from his church work, his volunteer work as a Big Brother, and his 10 years of service to the board of education in his township. Recognizing what these choices meant to him about his fulfillment at work, he felt deeply sad about this situation and needed to do some grief work before moving forward with his life work. He gave himself time for grieving, and then was able to articulate his life purpose in this way:
Through intuitively catalyzing people and ideas, I create understanding, awareness, and connections that enhance people’s lives.
Imagine that he asks you this question: “Is there any way that I could live out my life purpose in my work as an attorney?” What changes might he consider that would create better fit between his purpose and his current professional role?
Other Written Resources
As coaches, we often suggest our clients read something about life purpose. Other resources on how people have discovered and lived their purpose include:
Carol Adrienne, The Purpose of Your Life,
Teri-E Belf, Simply Live It Up: Brief Solutions
Laurie Beth Jones, The Path
Barbara Braham, Finding Your Purpose
Richard Leider The Power of Purpose
Fredric M. Hudson and Pamela D. McLean, Life Launch: A Passionate Guide to the Rest of Your Life (Hudson also has published a short pamphlet for clients called Planning on Purpose: Discovery Guide. Order from http://www.hudsoninstitute.com)
References
- Spiritual traditions often describe what the tradition sees to be a universal life purpose, for all human beings. For example, when asked what he believed to be the meaning of life, the Dalai Lama said, “to be happy and to make others happy.” Within the universal life purpose for all human beings, an individual still must find his own unique life purpose.
- Using inquiries with clients, powerful questions that guide their focused attention and lead to introspection, can be helpful in developing the ability to self-reflect, as can meditation practices, journaling, and many of the other tools we use in our role as helping professionals.
- Robert Quinn, Deep Change, Jossey-Bass, 1996.
