A Research Paper By Marianna Rolikova, Transformational Coach, SLOVAKIA
Discover or Attain Hardwired for Purpose
The future belongs to those who learn more skills and combine them in creative ways. Mastery (2012), Robert Greene
According to general knowledge, purpose refers to an intention behind something or a quest to find or achieve something that has a positive meaning to us and those around us. It can be a personal or collective goal, a sense of direction, or motivation. What matters is that each person chooses their definition of what life’s purpose might mean and feel to them. This paper will look at the variety of lenses and how one might look at life’s purpose, with corresponding challenges to some lenses that our clients may encounter.
Academics, researchers, psychologists, and influencers have devised many ways of helping the public decipher life’s purpose. While they all might use different lenses and arguments, we know one thing. There is not one single fingerprint or DNA out there that is identical. This fact makes us all unique individuals, with each of us having a ‘distinctive’ thinking, set of skills, abilities, and interpretation of events that can provide different values to different people and communities.
Could this ‘distinctiveness’ be seen as our only ingredient towards our life purpose, or are other equally essential ingredients adding to the life purpose formula?
From a neuroscience perspective, Edmund T. Rolls (2018) argued that the ‘purpose’ is wired in our genes because our genes are self-replicating for a specific [higher] purpose – to survive. On top of that, our genes influence emotions, which can be either ‘reward-based’ or ‘punishment-based.’ The most critical function of emotion is that it ‘seeks goals and obtains or not-obtains the goals’ (Rolls 2018). Finally, Rolls argued that this game of ‘reward and punishment’ is highly adaptive for our brains (and animal brains) and is de facto “designed by evolution to seek goals” (Rolls 2018), therefore creating an evolutionary merry-go-round process of purpose vs. goal vs. action inside us.
Another way to approach the concept of purpose is from a high-level perspective–our human existence. Many believe there is something we came here (on this planet Earth) to do and be and that each of us has a specific purpose in life. This perspective might lead to coaching conversations where purpose in life is about achieving a higher goal, finding happiness, fulfilling certain moral, social, or religious obligations, advancing the human race by understanding self better, and perhaps finding inner peace. Mark Manson (2015) said it simply: ‘We are here for an undetermined period, and during this period, we do meaningful and unimportant things. The meaningful things give our lives meaning, happiness, sense of fulfillment. The unimportant things just kill time and take our energy away.
Some clients might need a different explanation. An alternative way to approach the concept of purpose, particularly during coaching sessions, is helping the client-first to understand, perhaps more practically, how our values and principles shape our individual goals, aspirations, and desires. These goals can range from short-term, practical objectives (getting a job, buying a house) to long-term objectives (becoming a CEO, owning an island, or eliminating homelessness).
How our values shape our aspirations and goals creates specific themes that often appear during coaching conversations. These themes tend to impact, positively or negatively, the way we go about our purpose in life and interweave together:
One of the key themes is [our adherence to]social and cultural norms and factors. In many ways, these norms place a higher value on material success, which can lead us to prioritize, e.g., financial success over personal fulfillment and purpose in life. What plays a significant role here is the human need to compare to others, materialistically and socially speaking (such as hierarchy, roles, material ownership), to get that constant ‘feeling’ of ‘being significant and recognized.’ When we compare, e.g., roles, finances, and materialistic possessions, we are comparing emotions. It is important to note here that seeking validation from others or validating ourselves against others should not be the primary driver of one’s pursuit of purpose, as it creates a sense of fulfillment and confidence that is dependent on external validation from others.
Closely linked with the social and cultural factors is another theme: clarity and direction and lack thereof. Compounded by some of the abovementioned external pressures, and comparisons, all of it can make defining life’s purpose blurry and challenging. In Mastery, Robert Greene argued that “what we lack most in the modern world is a sense of a larger purpose to our lives” (Greene,2012), referring to, for instance, an unprecedented amount of information, complex working life, social life based on notifications – all this stops us thinking long term, and in the moment, leading to lack of clarity and blurry purpose.
‘Know Thyself’ – knowledge about who we are is imminent to becoming the human we want to be. Whether we like it or not, clarity and direction (or lack thereof) sometimes (not always though) link to a lack of self-awareness, especially regarding our values, morals, strengths, and weaknesses. In Mastery (2012), Robert Greene says this is the main difference between those who can get there (through knowing themselves) and those who get stuck. The ability to reflect, step back, and retrospect is vital, as is the ability to analyze rationally without any emotional attachment(Greene, 2012).
Life events and changes are other key themes, especially when it comes to significant transitions and critical milestones that tend to negatively impact our mental or emotional state (for instance, trauma, death, illness, depression, and abuse). For many, harmful consequences from life events tend to disrupt the sense of purpose and direction. Is it possible to find meaning in traumatic situations as well? In his book ‘Man’s Search for Meaning,’ Viktor Frankl wrote about suffering and personal experience of horrors as a prisoner in Auschwitz, Dachau. Based on his experience, Frankl defines the purpose of life as a ‘quest for meaning’ in life – a constant adaptation of the inner self, no matter how dire or miserable situations are (Frankl, 2011).
The last theme in coaching conversations is fear of failure, as many people are afraid to pursue their passions and interests, which is holding back their action and proactivity (therefore progress), preventing them from discovering and fulfilling their life purpose. Robert Greene argues that if we begin anything – a task, activity, or idea with a feeling of tightness, pressure, and fear, it will stifle the powers of our brain and turn the activity or work into something joyless’ (Greene, 2012); this leads not only to emotional confusion but also emotional misinterpretation – what we feel is joyless, but that often is misinterpreted as a fear of failure.
Unpacking through key themes might bring us closer to answering our life purpose. Nevertheless, there is another lens to help us with the direction. Howard Gardner, in his book Frames of Mind, on Theory of Multiple Intelligences (1993), argued that some multiple intelligences and competencies could account for broader human potential: linguistic, musical, logical-mathematical, spatial, body-kinesthetic, naturalist, and personal intelligence (Gardner 1993). We all have limitations but focusing on our affinity to specific competency, together with ‘intensity of hours, quality of the energy and focus, desire, and emotion that goes into whatever we do’ (Greene 2012), might be an exciting combination to test. Furthermore, even if we are still determining which intelligence is the ‘right’ one, then there is a new term on the block: ‘multipotentialite,’ a term coined by Emilie Wapnick, reflecting those with many interests and talents (Wapnick, 2015). One talent or multiple, combined with our uniqueness, can be seen as a powerful pointer and ingredient for life purpose formula.
Set of Realistic Objectives and Actions – Hardwired for Purpose
To summarize, life’s purpose can be a set of practical goals and actions, or high-level aspirations. Being self-aware, reflective, and knowing our strengths, weaknesses, and super talents seem like additional ‘ingredients’ that can help us, and our clients get closer to understanding our life purpose. There is one more critical denominator, though, that has been consistently showing up through all ‘ingredients,’ key one, if not the most important from a coaching perspective – emotions.
According to psychologists Paul Ekman and Wallace Friesen, there are six universal emotions we as humans experience: happiness, sadness, fear, disgust, anger, and surprise (BetterHelp 2022). When it comes to purpose and emotions, what is critical is what emotions accompany our search for purpose or purpose itself.
Edmund T. Rolls called an emotion an essential element of human experience and part of the ‘purpose formula,’ as the emotion either ‘seeks goals and obtains or not-obtains the goals’ (Rolls, 2018), while Tony Robbins calls the emotions ‘the force of our lives’ and argues that even if we decide on a direction, we somehow need to have ‘the right emotion, that helps us find the way through anything we want and need (Robbins, 2020).
Whether one believes in purpose or not, as Tony Robbins argues, our (emotional) attitude towards it can tilt us in two different directions. One either ‘has a destination (for instance, personality, ego, materialistic needs) or destiny (spiritual)’ – that makes up our definition of the purpose (Robbins, 2020).In summary, when it comes to our purpose, what matters is how we react to events and situations, what our ’ attitude towards an event or situation is, and what are the corresponding emotions accompanying our attitude.
Emotions are tricky, though, as feeling the emotion, recognizing it, and accurately naming it are three different activities that can either leave us stuck or help us progress, depending on how mature our emotional language is. Back in 2022, Brené Brown in the ‘Ten Percent Happier Podcast’said that (with regards to emotions) “if we can name something or accurately label it, we are much more likely to be able to ask for what we need, move through it productively, and in case of positive emotion, we can replicate and seek more of those experiences” (ten percent podcast, 2022).
So, whatever we feel (positive or negative), we need to name it, address it, and own it (be responsible for it), or else it will get buried, or we will get stuck. Brené Brown argues that ‘human language not only carries or communicates emotion, but it also changes it, it shapes it [the emotion].’ In turn, language changes our bodies and our neurons, and if we name or mislabel things, this might throw our mind and body into unnecessary confusion(ten percent Podcast 2022), contributing to a lack of clarity and direction, a theme many of our clients do talk about when searching for purpose in life. This means our vocabulary must grow in parallel with our emotional development and vice versa, so “our emotional language (vocabulary) is as expansive as our experiences” (ten percent podcast, 2022).
Whether we think we are far from finding our purpose in life or not, it is essential to remember that ‘our sense of purpose will change a few times in our lifetime’ as we go through different stages and ‘responsibilities of adulthood’ (Greater Good n.d.). Equally, according to the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley, a sense of purpose is defined as a journey and practice, not a destination (Greater Good, n.d.).
Having a sense of our purpose gives us meaning, something to look forward to and towards, almost like an internal compass that helps us deal with situations in life. Knowing what our current definition of purpose is (even if we are not sure about it), how that links to our needs, and how much they align with our current mental, physical, spiritual, and emotional growth, and finally, how all of this aligns with our internal language – how well can we articulate our growth and emotional state in different areas, is critical to finding and cultivating positive emotions and with those, our purpose in life, something we are hardwired for.
References
Better Help (2022). Feelings v. Emotions: Is There a Difference Between Them? [Online] WWW.betterhelp.com. [Accessed: October 25, 2022].
Frankl, E.V. (2011), Man’s Search for Ultimate Meaning, London: Rider
Gardner, H. (1993). Frames of Mind: The Theory of Multiple Intelligences. London: Harper Collins
Greater Good. (N.D.). Purpose Definition | What Is Purpose? [Online] Definition. [Accessed: October 25, 2022].
Greene, R. (2012), the Concise Mastery, London: Profile Books Ltd.
Manson, M. (2015), 7 Strange Questions That Help You Find Your Life Purpose [Accessed: October 25, 2022]
Rolls E.T. (2018), Neuroexistentialism: Meaning, Morals, and Purpose in the Age of Neuroscience (2018), Chapter 5, Oup Academic. Oxford University Press. [Accessed: October 25, 2022].
Tony Robbins Motivation: How to Find Your Way in Life (2020) YOUTUBE. YOUTUBE. [Accessed: October 25, 2022].
Wapnick, E. (2015), ‘Why Some of Us Don’t Have One True Calling.’ [Online] www.ted.com. [Accessed: October 25, 2022].
www.tenpercent.com. (2022), Brené Brown Says You’re Doing Feelings Wrong, Ten Percent Happier Podcast, #436[Online][Accessed: October 25, 2022].