Three Patterns of Increasing Life Purpose
How do we increase the amount of purpose in our lives?
One of the big ah-ha moments of our research in the Life Purpose Lab is that there isn’t one single process for finding purpose. Different people go through different processes, and the same person will go through different processes at different times. These processes fall, roughly, into three categories.
1. Building Purpose
Sometimes, we increase purpose in our lives by making ongoing refinements to how we live. While any one change is probably small, they accumulate over time. We slowly and steadily create a life of greater purpose.
There are various ways of doing this.
We look at our lives, identify what’s already purposeful, and we do more of it
We look at our lives, identify what’s not purposeful, and we do less of it.
We look at what we’re doing and figure out how to do it more purposefully–changing our activities, our perspectives, or our relationships. (Note: This is the logic of job crafting).
This approach to purpose is like constructing a wall or house out of bricks. Any single brick doesn’t make much of a difference, but putting enough of them in the right places creates something new. In our research, we call this pattern “building” purpose.
2. Finding Purpose
Sometimes, we increase purpose by making a big–sometimes dramatic–change in our lives. We go along in our lives, and somehow we get a vision for how some aspect of our lives could be substantially improved. We then change our lives to bring about this new vision.
This type of big, new purpose usually requires a lot of work. We reimagine our future and then start working to make it happen.
This pattern is like following a treasure map. It tells where something very valuable is, and then we go to the work of acquiring it. We call this pattern “finding” purpose.
3. Riding Purpose
Sometimes, we don’t intentionally create purpose, rather it seems to happen to us. Something arises in our lives that promises great purpose. This new thing could be outside of ourselves. Perhaps we get a new job, a different relationship, a change in circumstances. It could also be inside ourselves. We might feel a compunction to do something new, or maybe our understanding of our life shifts dramatically. Regardless, something happens that we did not plan, and it might significantly increase our sense of life purpose.
The key is how we respond to this new possibility. We can ignore it, pretending that it hasn’t happened. We can not appreciate or recognize its significance. We can choose not to act on it. Or, we can lean into it and see where it takes us.
In this way, increasing purpose is like catching a wave on a surfboard or with bodysurfing. We encounter something that has both power and direction (i.e., the wave), and we align ourselves with it so that it takes us someplace new. We call this “riding” purpose.
Making Sense of These Patterns
Which of these three patterns is most important? All three interweave in our lives, having different impacts at different times.
The tricky part is that each pattern requires something different from us. Building purpose involves constantly examining our lives and making many small changes. Finding purpose requires deep discernment and risky changes as we explore new directions in life. Riding purpose requires awareness of our world and a willingness to surrender to where life seems to be leading us.
People vary in which pattern comes easiest to them. Me? Building purpose is my go-to approach. I constantly think about how to make each day more purposeful, fiddling with what I do and why I do it. Finding purpose frightens me. Its big, uncertain changes make me feel completely out of control. Riding purpose often goes unnoticed, and it’s only after the fact that I realize how meaningful a change in my life has been (or could have been).
How about you? What do you do now? What could you do more of?
Knowing these conceptual categories helps us to engage what’s possible in our lives.
Miscellany
Thank you to Eran Peterson for reading an early draft of this essay.
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