Finding Your Sense of Purpose
Living with uncertainity
It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room’ warns an old proverb. ‘Especially when there is no cat.
In my last post, I wrote about cultivating negative capability- the ability to embrace uncertainty, live with mystery and make peace with ambiguity.
How does one go about cultivating negative capability? By clarifying one's sense of purpose.
For most people, the notion of purpose in life is probably a little familiar and unfamiliar.
It's familiar because we often use the phrase in everyday conversation and generally believe we can recognize it if we saw it in ourselves or other people. Yet, purpose in life might also seem unfamiliar given the substantial differences that exist in how one person defines it to the next.
Having a sense of purpose is essential to our well-being and buffers against the challenges we face in various stages of our lives, especially in this pandemic. A sense of purpose is a measure of stability in our lives.
We tend to, however, conflate goals and purposes. Goals are intentions to be accomplished, and your purpose will guide you to which goals to pursue. As the man asked,
Without a purpose, what will become of you when you achieve your goal.?
Andre Agassi.
One of the legends of tennis in the '90s and mid-2000s was Andre Agassi. He was one of the most gifted men ever to step onto a tennis court with his 'compact, bludgeoning groundstrokes, the lethal service return, the lightning reflexes'. On his comeback, he was also the oldest man ever ranked number one.
Andre Agassi hated tennis since he was a child. In his book Open, Agassi's refrain is that the game he mastered was a prison he spent 30 years trying to escape.
Agassi knows more about winning and losing than most. In his interview with the Guardian on life after tennis,
The real tragedy in my decline was happening during my success – it was the disconnect I felt from the game. Despite being good at it, I had a deep resentment and even hatred of tennis. That disconnect after getting to No1 was even worse because you believe it is the best will fill the void. I felt nothing. Every day is Groundhog Day, and what's the point?
Agassi was very successful, he had achieved his goals, yet the lack of a sense of purpose left a void. He found his sense of purpose only when he retired from tennis. His efforts to educate underprivileged children through the Andre Agassi Foundation are remarkable.
Paths to Purpose
Many executives whom I work with seem to be afflicted by the 'Agassi' malaise. They are still on the court, playing with the same intensity, but their hearts are not in the game. They wonder why they are still playing and wonder how long they can continue playing at this level. Self-doubt only increases anxiety.
Ironically, goals can become obstacles to things you most want to do.
This observation is especially true when you derive your goals from external expectations like Andre Agassi. Family expectations drove a friend of mine to set high achievement goals for himself as he came from a family of high achievers. The head of a division of a large organization, what he wants to do is to study history and teach if possible. He is a scholar at heart.
Purpose helps restore a sense of perspective and clarify the general direction of your life. Many leaders whom I coach are very successful. These executives appear to be in control, self-possessed and very focussed from the outside. However, on the inside, they are languishing - unclear on the direction they are heading.
Lack of purpose can affect us at many stages of our lives. According to journalist Shankar Vedatam, young people experience confusion and uncertainty, working-age adults suffer from ennui, tedious routines, and older people face loneliness and isolation.
According to Anthony Burrow of Cornell's Purpose and Identity Process lab, purpose needs to be cultivated. Very few are born with a sense of purpose, and there are three paths to cultivating purpose.
Organic: You find your sense of purpose by engaging in the topic in a sustained. Way rather like a hobby. Over time our interest increases and grows through gradual exploration or cultivation, like a snowball, and we realize that is the direction we want to go. I never planned to be an executive coach. I spend so much time working with teams and groups, consulting and facilitating, that I naturally gravitated to group, team and individual coaching. It's my purpose.
Reactive: something happened, and now you know what you exactly want to do. Like this pandemic which has turned out to be a life event for many. So many people are leaving their current jobs after working from home that organizations face a crisis of attrition in search of more meaningful and purposeful work.
Observe someone else: We get clues to our purpose through social learning, role models, and adopting our purpose from other people.
Purpose and Presence
We are drawn to people who are truly engaged and who seem have a clear sense of purpose.
When you are pursuing something meaningful to you, there is an attractiveness to that. People find you because you are heading in a direction and do not appear to be lost. There is an energy about someone who is going somewhere that accentuates one's presence.
It seems difficult for the world around you to connect with you if you are lost.
In his series of poems, Horae Canonicae, W.H. Auden, one of the most influential poets of the 20th century, captures this desirable condition:
You need not see what someone is doing to know if it is his vocation,
you have only to watch his eyes: a cook mixing a sauce, a surgeon
making a primary incision, a clerk completing a bill of lading, wear the same rapt expression,
forgetting themselves in a function. How beautiful it is, that eye-on-the-object look.
WH Auden