“Find your purpose!”

“Know your WHY!”

Since Simon Sinek’s seminal work “Start with Why”, life purpose has become even more of a hot topic for career coaches and business coaches than it was before.

But if you’re a career changer, trying to design a more fulfilling work-life, are you paying it the attention it deserves?

This article explores two of the major places you can be derailed when seeking to find your purpose, and offers some alternative ways to find your “why”.

Knowing your ‘why’ isn’t just for businesses

Sinek talks about how business success or failure depends on companies understanding and communicating why they do what they do, and why they’re in the business they’re in. And that this is more important than what they do or and how they do it.

What you may not know is that there is also a wealth of research supporting the idea that:

• knowing why you do what you do, and
• achieving something that matters to you

– are key for fulfillment at work for everyone.

But, then the question is: how do you go about answering these two imperatives?

Finding your purpose so you can be both fulfilled at work and successful in business

As a life purpose coach and career coach, I’ve been helping clients get clear on their “why” for a long time. (In fact my very first coaching client, back in 2005, brought this exact issue!)

Armed with this knowledge, clients have gone on to have successful and fulfilling careers because they’ve started with clarity about this central issue: what is important to me and why.

Before working with me, my clients often spent ages trying to figure out their life purpose and/or career purpose by themselves.

Because, when it comes to finding your purpose, there are a couple of rabbit holes where people often get lost. And where you could be left wandering around forever, in a maze of vagueness, confusion, and stuck-icity.

I know because I’ve also been down those rabbit holes, got the t-shirt, and drawn the map.

In this article I show you how to identify and avoid these traps. (And what to do instead).

You don’t have years to figure this out. So let’s get on with it.

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Rabbit Hole No 1:

Trying to find your purpose from what the world needs. 

The central problem with this approach is that the world needs so many things. And it’s tempting to try to meet all of these needs. 

I often notice this in new coaches or consultants who want to help everyone with everything. They get so excited about the possibilities of their new skills that they get lost in a maze full of dead ends (been there too).

Purpose seeking that is about chasing possibilities will drain and disappoint you

The multiplicity of need in the world is discouraging. You may find yourself wondering how you can possibly make a difference at all when the issues are so big, so complex, and so weighty.

It’s easy to feel overwhelmed. To feel small and insignificant in the face of so much need. 

We ask ourselves: not just,

“How can I possibly make a difference?” but also:

“Who am I to even think I can make a difference here”

If you’re already inclined to doubt your capabilities, this approach to finding your purpose is more likely to send you straight back to corporate life. But don’t despair.

What you need to know

You don’t have to save the whole world through your work. You are part of a worldwide network of millions of people trying to do good, make positive change, and create solutions, in all kinds of different ways. You’re not alone.

And you have a part to play.

The underlying issue of this particular maze of trying to fulfil whatever the world needs is this:

You don’t really know what YOU stand for, what’s YOUR challenge, and what isn’t.

The resolution for this is to become clear about who you are, and why you care. (More about this in a minute.)

Caveat: What the world needs can drive early career choices 

Of course career moves are often driven by what the world needs. That’s because careers, especially at first, tend to follow what the market wants.

I didn’t really choose to work for the Crown Prosecution Service, nor yet to move into investment banking, those were the opportunities that came along.

It was only later when I came to a point of 

1. Attending to my sense of being planted in the wrong place (like a sapling wilting in the desert I longed for deep-rooted-ness)
2. Knowing in my bones that whatever was next, it wasn’t going to be more of the same, 

That I began to think about what I actually wanted to do.

Even then I didn’t yet think in terms of purpose, in fact when I went from IT project management to psychotherapy and coaching, I was following what interested me, without having any kind of plan.

Which I absolutely do NOT recommend for you, unless you want to take as long as I did to figure it out!

I’m not saying don’t follow what interests you – I’m saying be mindful, and ‘plan-full’ about how you do it.

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Rabbit Hole No 2:

Trying to find your purpose purely through what “makes you come alive”

“Don’t ask yourself what the world needs, ask yourself what makes you come alive and go and do that. Because what the world needs is people who have come alive.”

^{~ Howard Thurman}

For someone trying to find their purpose, this sounds SO good

Like – just go and do what you love. Follow your passion. It’ll all work out.

No. No. NO.

This may be good advice for some people, but for the women I work with, it’s a trap!

That’s because many things make them come alive.

They’re passionate about a wide variety of topics and practices and causes. They can talk at length about what’s alive in them in relation to any of these topics.

So the advice to “look for what makes you come alive and then go do that” doesn’t help. In fact all that happens is you spend ages going off in all directions. And second guessing yourself. And starting again.

If you’re already inclined to this self-doubt and second guessing, if you tend to find it hard to stick to things because of feeling not good enough, looking for purpose in this way is only going to make things worse.

How do I know this?

Because I was that woman, looking for my purpose in the things I’m passionate about. Let’s take a look shall we?

A quick scan of my bookshelves reveals topics as diverse as: 

The Silk Roads, WW2 codebreakers, inner child work, Zen Buddhism, archeology, client-centred therapy, Native American mythology, quantum physics, systems thinking, knitwear design, and the Great Goddess.

Good luck trying to find a purpose with that! So let’s not do it that way.

This isn’t the only reason though.

A dangerous myth: “you must feed the purpose monster”

This idea that our purpose should come from what makes us come alive is also a dangerous one.

Because it leads to being drained.

This is because there’s a sense that everything you love has to be combined, and fed into your purpose. Often to the point where there’s nothing left to feed you.

This is purpose conceived as a devouring monster that rules your life.

You do NOT have to bend all of your passions and all of what makes you come alive into your work. A good test for whether you are serving your purpose is whether you are becoming more passionate about what you do, rather than less – feeling energised rather than burnt out.

So to recap – avoid these traps when seeking your purpose:

Stop trying to find your purpose in either:

• the vastness of “what the world needs”
• the rich variety of “what makes you come alive”

Because that is likely to end in discouragement and confusion.

So what DO you do to find your purpose?

Here’s an idea that might surprise you:

Purpose isn’t something you find, exactly. It’s something you synthesise from:

• your values
• your life experiences
• what you know about the world
• what you know is missing from the world
• the things that frustrate and inspire you
• who you are.

Your purpose is something meaningful that is trying to come through you, into the world.

And the central point about finding your purpose that most people miss?

Purpose is just for you.

Don’t worry about what’s possible, what marketable, or what’s in demand. (Yes for successful career change you’ll need to know these too, but these are about choosing your mission, not finding your purpose. Check back for my upcoming article about the difference between Purpose and Mission.)

A more helpful question to answer than “why am I here” or “what is my purpose” is: What is wanting to come through me into the world?

Here are some of the areas my clients explore when working on their purpose:

• Their vision of how the world could be made better – the “change they want to see in the world”
• The times in the past they’ve felt fulfilled and that they’re making a difference that matters
• Where their strengths lie (a place to start with this is the VIA character strengths survey)
• What their deepest need is – what is the experience, or quality of being, that they have most deeply missed in their life? (because our purpose is most often aligned with what we ourselves most need)
• The common thread that runs through all of their best, most fulfilling work
• What is the best, highest good that can be served by the work they’re interested in doing (“And why is that important? …And why is that important? …”)

When you source your purpose through these kinds of “inner enquiry” questions, and through using the power of your inner compass, you can claim it with a lot more confidence.

“Purpose is an accelerator that fuels success and growth.”

That’s according to the Harvard Business Review report into “entrepreneurs’ purpose”.

You may not be interested in becoming an entrepreneur. My career change clients are often leaving corporate careers because they feel unfulfilled at work. They feel stymied in their ability to do work that matters to them. They don’t experience a connection between their vision and values, and those of their companies.

So they are changing career in order to have the power to define their own work, through becoming their own boss. And hence be more fullfilled at work. (Not necessarily through any sense of “entrepreneurship” as such.)

But, of course, they want to be successful in business.

So when we work on what they want from starting their own business – i.e. fulfilment and success – finding their purpose or their “WHY” is a necessary step.

Finding Your Purpose is stage 4 of 6 stages in my signature programme for women who want to be their own boss, and find career fulfilment through doing meaningful work. This stage is called “Sourcing True North” because finding and knowing your purpose gives you a star to steer by in your business.

You can see full details of this programme “Finding Yourself and Career Fulfilment after Redundancy” here…

Have you found your “Why” – your life purpose?

Tell me about it and how you are expressing it in the comments below…