Are You Caught in the Purpose Trap?
Photo by Immo Wegmann
Are you caught in the purpose trap, constantly beating yourself up because you don’t know your life purpose?
Don’t worry – you’re not alone.
As more and more people are seeking to find meaning through work, a growing number are encountering the same dilemma. I believe this is because we often conflate and confuse purpose – your core motivational drivers, the things that get you out of bed in the morning and give you the most satisfaction - with a vocation (a type of work). There are three challenges with doing this.
Some people are able to pursue multiple vocations and can’t be placed in a single box.
Some jobs haven’t been invented yet. For example, who would have imagined 30 years ago that you could make a living by being a gamer or content creator?
There isn’t always a one-on-one relationship between your core motivational drivers and a particular career. For example, say you want to save lives. You become a doctor or a nurse, only to find yourself working in a healthcare system where saving lives is not a priority. Or you want to protect people, so you become a police officer, only to find yourself mired in the first leg of the prison industrial complex.
So, finding yourself involves decoupling your purpose from your vocation and just focusing on understanding your core motivational drivers. However, finding out what they are is not always straight forward.
You can take a test and there are a number on the market, some free, some not. I’m not a major fan of these tests for three reasons. Firstly, different tests are based on different theoretical models which means you get different outcomes depending on which test you take and it’s not always easy to relate one result with another. Second, like most psychological theories, such tests have usually been developed using a validation process based on white, male Western norms, which means they are not culturally inclusive. And third, the results of a test are only as good as the quality of our responses. Given that our sense of self is driven by a combination of our intrinsic characteristics, our experiences, and our socialisation, it’s not always easy to determine whether someone’s responses are based on who they are or who they’ve been taught to be. For example, as a woman, your test results may, inter alia, reveal a deep desire to help people. Yet, how much of this is due to your intrinsic motivation and how much is it due to what you have been taught about the caregiving role of women in society?
Hence, getting to the core of what motivates you often requires a process of deconstruction. A process that involves listening to your head as well as your body.
The first step in this process is surfacing your social conditioning i.e. the things you learnt as a child. These are things you may have been taught or things that you learnt through observation and experience. When you have a quiet moment, grab a pen and a notebook, and try to remember everything that you learnt as a child regarding how you should be i.e. how you should behave, what you should want etc. Record each lesson as a sentence beginning with “I should…”. Try to unpack each sentence so that you capture the full flavour of what you learnt. For example, one lesson may have been “I should be kind.” What does being kind really mean? What behaviours do you associate with being kind?
The second step in the deconstruction process involves separating your social conditioning from what you know in your heart and gut. Read through each sentence you’ve written and its corresponding definition and examples. As you read, try to recall when you exhibited or experienced such behaviour and pay close attention to any feelings and sensations that may arise within your body. Write those sensations and feelings down. No one’s watching so be 100% honest with yourself, even when that goes against the grain of everything you’ve been taught, especially about being a good or bad person. At the end of this process, review your notes and see which learnt behaviours:
a) Evoked no feelings or response;
b) Evoked negative sensations or feelings of discomfort; or
c) Evoked some kind of positive emotion or comfort.
The third step in the deconstruction process is to list the behaviours that you weren’t taught but which give you joy. Write down each of these as a sentence beginning with “I feel joy when…”. Again, try to capture the full flavour of each activity. Review each one of these, casting your mind back to when you exhibited the behaviour and how it made you feel. Pay close attention to the feelings and sensations in your body as you do so and write them down.
When you’re done, read each one and try to describe the feeling giving rise to that joy. Put it in a sentence. “I feel joy when I [do xyz] because it makes me feel [abc]”. For example, “I feel joy when I help others because it makes me feel good about myself”.
Lastly, combine the outcomes of this third exercise with the outcomes of ‘c’ in the second exercise. If done correctly, and you were 100% honest with yourself, the resulting list will comprise your core motivational drivers.
By knowing what really motivates you, you will have taken the first step towards finding happiness and fulfilment.
