Although I'm not a "life coach", I get asked by at least one coaching client every month to help them find their life purpose.
This questions seems to be central for (at least) two kinds of clients. The first are people aged 20-30 who keep bouncing from one thing to another trying to figure out what to do for their rest of their lives. One year they are working for corporate America, the next they are in Nepal trekking, and the next they are back in school getting their second degree and working in a cafe. The second kind of client with this issue are people in their 40s (and sometimes older) who have been working in the corporate world for twenty years. They are burned out and suspect they just wasted the last twenty years doing something that wasn't purposeful for them.
Yesterday, one of my clients asked me, "Why do you think it is that so many people have a hard time finding their life's purpose?" Here was my response.
People have a hard time answering the question "What is the purpose of my life?" because of how they hold the question. In the Western world (and maybe the Eastern too, I don't know), we are taught to value the answer not the question. Once we get the answer, we toss the question away. That may work fine for questions like "Where are my car keys?" or "How do I get to San Francisco?" But when we are confronting the big questions of life, tossing the question away is tossing away our means of opening to life. Tossing away the question doesn't work because life is creative and full of surprises. And these surprises invalidate or obsolete any answer that we hold onto.
When confronting the big questions of life, we have to hold onto the questions and carry any answers that show up lightly. It is the question that brings meaning and purpose to our lives more than the answers.
When we live our lives amid good questions, the questions have a way of opening up a space and shaping our lives in ways that are meaningful to us. When people want to find their life's purpose they are usually looking for something meaningful to do with their lives. The practice of "living questions" generates a meaningful life inherently.
So what are good questions? First, the question "what is the purpose of my life?" is not a good question. It is framed as if there is one and only one answer. And this question lends itself to being tossed aside when an answer first appears.
Good questions engage us in personal paradoxes that are central in our lives. An example of this that arose in a coaching conversation yesterday is "How can I follow my own curiosity to explore life while still feeling that I belong?"
We must engage good questions with our minds, hearts and bodies not just our minds. Good questions aren't academic exercises. We have to feel our way through them. We have to sense our way through them.
To fully engage the question, we must live the question instead of waiting for the answer. By doing this, we participate in the creativity of life.
When we listen to music, read a book, look at art, watch a movie, eat a meal, talk to a friend, watch TV ... we can do so from the question "What question
Here are the questions that I'm living these days ...
- How can one person to make a big difference in this big world?
- What does it take inside me to create healthy relationships with the people I love?
- How can I follow my passion to create a viable life?
What questions are you living?
Take care,
-Steve
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