Much of my coaching work and life philosophy is built around the notion of purpose. In fact, my new program and the associated online network will likely be called “Purpose Project.” Suffice to say, purpose is something I’ve found meaningful for my path and something I think can serve and guide others.
And it’s for that reason that I want to ground myself and anyone reading in the limitations of and possible shadows lurking around our ideas of purpose. Peter Limberg lays them out well here. Too often, purpose becomes a prison that stifles our authentic creative impulse or drives us further toward cycles of shame and striving.
I believe our notion of purpose gets less helpful as soon as we start talking about the elusive “life purpose.” Life purpose, in my mind, is the idea that you are or are supposed to have one major theme of your life or one primary thing you are supposed to accomplish in your lifetime. Through this notion of life purpose, we can easily feel obligated to or trapped by some project we no longer truly desire, or we find ourselves in a constant state of deficit, striving to achieve a distant goal.
So let me be clear on how I hold it: Your life does not have a purpose. There is no life purpose.
At best, you can have a clear, powerful purpose for this chapter of your life and career. And that chapter might end five years from now, and it might end tomorrow. In the next chapter, that purpose might shift into something similar but with a slightly different focus or expression. And it might transform into something entirely new.
Purpose is not static. It shifts. It grows. It evolves. Just like you.
Purpose should never limit your sense of possibility. It should never feel like a prison, expectation, or obligation. It should never feel like it pushes you further from what we actually want to be doing with your life.
Purpose is simply our way of clarifying to ourselves what’s truly most important, inspiring, and authentic to who and where we are right now. And who and where we are are constantly changing.
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Peter Schulte
I help aspiring changemakers do good in the world and feel good in the process.