“If you don’t choose what drives you, it gets chosen for you.”
Once upon a time I would have thought the above statement to be unnecessarily harsh. It’d be the type of thing only bros and bosses say. I mean, I probably would have had a notion to also believe it but just the tone would have bothered me.
But like it or not, the statement is true.
We’re all driven by so many unconscious drivers that unless we develop clarity on what it is we’re looking and moving towards, all those other drivers will completely take over.
We don’t want to be lonely. We don’t want to be exposed. We want to be stable. We live according to the dictates and models we inherited.
One of my big struggles was always feeling like I had to do one thing for money and another as my positive contribution to the world. This “trap” drove me nuts. I would grumble and rail against the “system” as the reason for it all. And while the “system” is definitely unfair, exploitative and inequitable, I also used that as an excuse to not not still do the best I could do from where I was standing to affect change.
Around the middle of last year I started to dedicate a good amount of effort towards finding my purpose or “why” in my life. It’s the type of thing that gets talked about a lot in personal development circles, but it has always been a fuzzy idea to me. Even the first couple books I read on the topic didn’t have me feeling a whole lot more illuminated.
The book and process that did help was Find Your Why, by Simon Sinek. The process involved digging in and exploring some of the most impactful stories of my life. What were they? Why did they stand out? How did they affect me?
From those stories and the extra notes I wrote about them I looked through to find common themes and ideas. What came up the most? Was there a common desire or set of values that tied them all together?
I used what came out of that to craft my own personal why statement:
“To inspire people to create the kind of life they want for themselves and open the doors to create a world that's more equitable, fulfilling, and sustainable for all.”
As soon as I wrote it down it resonated with me. It connected a lot of the interpersonal work I want to do with the broader aspiration I have on how we can change as a society as whole.
This resonated with me because one of my core beliefs is that so many of us are denying ourselves who we really are, and this denial is what leads to a lot of pain in the world. We’re spending our time doing things we don’t want to do or engaged in things that we don't feel are valuable, but we feel trapped because we need the paycheck or the security of a conventional life. But this also keeps us small, frustrated and resentful. We’re kept so preoccupied with our own survival that we don’t have the ability to truly care for others too.
But if we were to take that bold leap for ourselves, step into our true power, and help the world the way we want to help the world, imagine how much impact that could have!
Then it dawned on me…
While I’m sitting here thinking about how great it would be for people to quit doing what they think they HAVE to do and limiting their career imagination to a defined set of conventional yet unfulfilling paths, I’m also spending a good portion of my time fishing for new freelance copywriting clients and writing text for things I don't really care about.
Putting in the energy toward defining my purpose provided me with the clarity I needed to start living it too.
If I say my purpose is one thing–and really feel it in my bones–yet I spend my days doing another, there’s a disconnect there.
It took me a while to realize that this “why” statement was all I needed. If it didn’t fit in here, then it wasn’t what I needed to be doing.
This also took a tremendous leap of faith to believe that what I could do within my “why” was worthy, that I’d be good at it, and that I could make a living out of it. But if I was going to live in integrity with myself, it was a leap I would have to take.
It’s hard to explain, but once I took that leap of faith, it seemed like everything fell into place. I immediately got coaching clients. Other work outside my “why” seemed to all show themselves the door. Clarity in other aspects of my life seemed to fall into place too.
I knew what I had to do and there were no questions left to ask.
Have you defined a purpose or “why” for your life? What sort of process did you use? How did it change things once you figured it out?
On any given day we’ll have a number of tasks and projects set in front of us. These all represent competing priorities in our world that we need to prioritize. What do we focus on first?