Coaching From the Inside Out: The Power of Purpose
Part 1 of this 2-part extended article adaptation on how life-coaching clients create and sustain long-term fulfillment by discovering life purpose appears with the kind permission of Dr. Patrick Williams, Founder and CEO, Institute for Life Coach Training http://www.lifecoachtraining.com/index.shtml
Since we started using the phrase “Inside Out,” it has become much more common in the personal and professional development arena. But the concept remains valid, if not unique. This work in the human arena demands that the coach have experience in learning, growing, and living from the Inside Out. As a rule, people are taught instead to live from the Outside In. They are not taught how to examine their own lives through the lens of fulfillment.
Growing up, we’re taught how to fit in, be a good boy or girl, fulfill our parents’ expectations, and make choices that create the fewest waves. In our twenties, we get busy building a career, and sometimes those choices, too, are made to fulfill other people’s purpose for us rather than our purpose for ourselves. In our thirties, most of us continue in career building and often in family building, and we’re often too busy with both of these to take time to ask, “Am I fulfilled? Am I on the right path?”
Then, in our forties and fifties, we may find ourselves burned out or in the midst of a midlife re-examination. In our experience, many clients hire life coaches for exactly this purpose: to re-examine earlier choices and to consider redesigning their life or doing a life makeover.
Pat, for example, had a client who was a lawyer in her mid-forties. She hired him ostensibly to build her legal practice and to become more successful in her three-partner firm. During the third or fourth coaching call, when she was reviewing the Wheel of Life and considering life purpose questions, Pat asked her when she first noticed her passion to become a lawyer. She said, “It was always my father’s dream for me. My brother is a lawyer, and my uncle is a lawyer.” She ended up saying, “I never really wanted to be a lawyer.” She began to examine how her career could begin to reflect her life purpose. She did want to make a difference in people’s lives and be a positive influence. But she said that she would rather be a teacher, trainer, or consultant than a lawyer, and that’s what she began to explore.
The Inside-Out work is critical to coaches. Coaches need to do their own work on life purpose and explore the very same themes they will ask their clients to explore. Coaching is a profession that demands that the coach be living a purposeful, examined life.
Coaches need to be models for their clients. It increases the coach’s authenticity, which is key to life coaching. Coaches ask clients to probe deeply into their lives: their values, priorities, goals, and obstacles to fulfillment. Coaches must have done — and continue to do — the same work themselves.
Great coaches know that coaching is as much an art as it is a skill. They have committed themselves to fully mastering the way of being that they coach their clients to attain. They are models of what it means to fully learn, to be fully effective, and to create a fulfilling life.
In this respect, it is much harder to be a model coach than to be a model therapist. A therapist’s commitment as a model for clients is to be functioning normally, without “dis-ease.”
As a coach, on the other hand, you are committed to modeling how it is to either be living a fulfilling life OR be on the path to creating that for yourself. Your way of being is as critical to the way you coach as are your skills. This is the responsibility you carry: to model what you coach others to do and to be. Living this commitment will stretch you, which is why coaching is inter-developmental. It develops and grows both you and the client.
What Are Your Unconscious Blocks to Learning?
Eric Hoffer, in his first surprise success, True Believer, recognized how easy it is for human beings to get in our own way. We fall in love with our past learning and expertise, and stop growing. As experts, we expect ourselves to know it all. We act as if we are static creatures — as if doing something once or hearing something once makes it old stuff and not worthy of further consideration. We resist going back to the receptivity and openness that characterized us when we were beginners. As beginners, we easily took in new data and practiced doing and thinking things that were unfamiliar. We were willing to get outside of our personal comfort zone in service of learning something interesting and important to us. This beginner’s mind, as some describe it, is essential for coaches and their clients to recognize and cultivate.
Hoffer was a man ahead of his time. Pat’s father gave him a copy of True Believer to read as a young teen. Hoffer said, “Our greatest pretences are built up not to hide the evil and the ugly in us, but our emptiness. The hardest thing to hide is something that is not there.”
That’s why coaching requires us to be curious and work with clients to be curious about everything we believe, feel, and think we understand. Coaches strive to take nothing for granted and to remain nonjudgmental and curious about their clients and about life itself. Coaching requires that we become truly open, flexible learners. We require those characteristics of both ourselves and our clients.
An easy way to resist this expansion is to say, “I’ve heard this … done this … known this … before!” Human neurobiology predisposes us to be habit focused. The human mind tends to want to conserve energy, so it resists thinking when automatic responses will do. We all know how this works when we find ourselves driving, having noticed nothing about the road or other drivers until we reach our destination. We are on autopilot. It works for driving and many other things. However, the tendency toward habituated action inhibits awareness and doesn’t welcome new learning.
Educated and experienced professionals may find they have erected many barriers to learning.
Live From a Deep Place
Rainer Maria Rilke, the 19th-century German poet, wrote to a young would-be poet to “Live from a deep place.” Only then, Rilke said, would his writing become great.
It’s not easy for clients to find their deep place when their lives are cluttered and busy. It requires becoming still and quiet, focusing on beginning the work that we describe below, and making a commitment to themselves — putting themselves at the top of the to-do list. There are no slogans, no easy short cuts. This is a process of getting to know oneself fully.
Supporting a client to find his deep place begins with discovering his life purpose. When he knows his life purpose, he has access to incredible power to make choices and to act.
That’s what it did for Terry Fox, a young man from Canada. Terry was an athlete who was stricken with cancer, lost one of his legs, and was naturally depressed about his situation. He had lost his sense of a viable future. Some months into his recovery, after being fitted with a wooden leg, Terry did the serious work of reconsidering who he was. He discovered a lively vision: that people in his area would care enough about cancer to contribute money to find a cure for bone cancer. Then he found his own life purpose: he would be the carrier of the message that if communities contributed, a cure could be found. Shortly thereafter, his mission surfaced: he would run across Canada, from coast to coast, bearing personal witness to the strength of the human spirit and the need for a cure.
Terry’s run across Canada was filmed and made visible to many people; however, it doesn’t matter how public a client’s vision, purpose, and mission are. What is important is that he articulate them clearly, commit himself fully, and use them to create meaningful work and a satisfying life. This will serve him in knowing how to live, work, and be “on purpose.”
What Is Life Purpose?
Each of us looks for fulfillment and authentic happiness in our own way. Sometimes the yearning for fulfillment becomes a call so loud and so intense at midlife that we cannot help but step off the path we are on and devote ourselves to the search for fulfillment. As many midlife questers discover, fulfillment often means returning to deep sources of satisfaction that we may have had glimpses of many years ago. At that earlier time, we may have lacked the courage to follow the call, or we may have allowed life’s stresses and serious pursuits to cover up the glimmer of what we knew to be true.
This pattern takes place in the lives of so many people because each of us has a life purpose that has, we believe, been with us since we were very young. At moments when we experienced a profound sense of being in the flow — being in the right place, at the right time, using our gifts — we are likely to be living out our life purpose. Life purpose calls us forth. It may be a calling we answer, something larger than our small selves, that deeply connects us with others, with what is larger than ourselves. Gregg Levoy, in his book Callings,1eloquently illustrates how discovering one's life purpose often begins with a sense of experiencing a calling.
Bookstore shelves are filled with information about our contemporary search for meaning. We know that life purpose has become an important focus for many people: The Purpose Driven Life2 has become the biggest selling self-help book of all time. A common definition of life purpose is a calling, an overall theme for your life or intent that transcends your daily activities.A quick search indicates that the word purpose means many different things to different writers. A variety of spiritual leaders and traditions have said that the ultimate purpose of our lives is to remember who we are and to whom we owe our lives, and to feel joy.
Ancient writers wrote about this topic. An ancient Tibetan text states that a life purpose is “for the benefit of self and for the benefit of others.”
The Importance of Knowing Life Purpose
In industrialized countries, 21st-century culture has become obsessed with accumulating just for the sake of accumulating: information, goods, material objects, and more.
The paradoxes of our time have been summed up well by His Holiness the Dalai Lama:
“We have more conveniences, but less time. We have more degrees, but less sense… more knowledge but less judgment. More experts, but more problems. More medicines, but less healthiness.
We have been all the way to the moon and back but have trouble crossing the street to meet the new neighbor.
We build more computers to hold more information that produce more copies than ever before, but have less communication.
We have become long on quantity, but short on quality.
These are the times of fast foods but weak digestion.
It is a time when there is much in the window but nothing in the room.”
As we live with these paradoxes, we have lost sight of the importance of being in life. Many people in the United States misguidedly believe that the only way to have what we want is to work hard and long.
There is an alternative: Be who you are first. When you focus on being first, this lets you do what you want to do, which lets you have what you need. We need to allow ourselves to be first; the rest will follow. Discovering our life purpose focuses our attention on the essence of who we are — our be-ing. As some wise person said, if we were designed to be human do-ings, we would have been called that.
Ways to Discover Life Purpose
Create a Lively Vision as the Context for Life Purpose
A client’s vision is a statement about the world in which he wants to live. He doesn’t need to consider the whole planet unless he wants to — just his personal world of friends, community, work colleagues — the world that touches his everyday life.
We suggest using the following process to help clients create their vision.
1. List the top ten things you love to do or have always done and loved. Name several things you have consistently made part of your life, regardless of the circumstances. Examples might include networking with like-minded people, your faith or spirituality, your creativity at work, your heartfelt communications, or your ability to take action under pressure.
2. Identify the characteristics of the context or environment that support your list from step 1 . List the qualities of people you want and need to be around to accomplish your top ten. Draw a series of concentric circles on a blank piece of paper, and write “ME” in the center circle. Each circle represents a group of people who are important to you. Put the names of those closest to you, who affect your life most, in the circle next to you. Then continue to draw your circles outward: family, friends, work colleagues, professional groups, community, and so on. In each circle, write a few words that describe the qualities this group must embody to support you in just the way you need and want.
Then identify other resources that are essential to you: peacefulness, time in nature, other creative people, and so on. Ask yourself, “What are the essential supporting features of the world I want to live in so that I can be at my best?”
3. Using the phrases you generated in #2, write 1-2 sentences that express your vision of the world you want to live in. This is the path of least resistance for you, the world you flourish in and want to create for yourself through purpose-full action. In one or two sentences, crystallize the essence of your vision. For example, “My vision is that all people of the world will be able to live their lives by choice — in a way that matters to them.” This vision expresses the fact that choice is essential for the writer.
Examine Past Experiences to Discover Purpose
Our purpose serves us in many ways. It is our compelling reason for living. It gives meaning to our work and our life. It guides our choices. Some people describe their purpose as their “calling.” Whatever we call it, it profoundly shapes the direction of our life.
Career counselors and coaches have known for quite some time that working with past experience is a way of discovering personal strengths and patterns. Clients who want to change careers make lists of their best successes and then examine these to identify the skills and resources they have learned to use effectively at work. Coaches use this strategy, too, examining past experiences to uncover life purpose. The steps below draw on a client’s past experience to create a grounded sense of life purpose. This is a powerful and effective way for a client to source his life purpose because it is based on the reality of his life — what he has already experienced and what he knows about himself from many years of living — not on what his intellect alone tells him to want.
A client’s purpose statement is unique to that client. Whether or not he is conscious of it, he has already been living out his purpose in some way. Because of this, he can plumb his past to find his purpose. Ask your client to use blank paper to complete the following exercises.
1. List a dozen or more examples of times in your life when you knew you were on purpose.
That is, you had an intuitive sense of being aligned with the exact reasons why you are in the world. Some people recognize they are on purpose because they are “in the flow.”3 Selecting these intuitively is important because you may not be able to articulate rationally why you felt on purpose during this time. Let us give you an example: One of Diane’s experiences of being on purpose occurred during a vacation to Costa Rica with her husband. She was on the side of a hill, looking out over a valley and on to the Osa Peninsula ocean below. As she admired the view, through the valley flew about a hundred blue jeweled macaws. They swooped through the valley and alighted in the tallest trees in the valley to her left. At the time, this was the only experience she identified of this kind — the sole one that occurred outside of work, community service, or friendship. Yet, as she worked through the process below, it had the elements that were common to her life purpose: recognizing the universal divine in the present moment, admiring the sheer beauty of the world, and connecting the two.
Most recently, Pat had an experience of being on purpose while delivering the keynote address in Brisbane, Australia, to 400 delegates in a theater-in-the-round setting at the International Coach Federation Australian conference. He felt in the flow, loving the opportunity to speak to the delegates about his passion for life coaching, the profession of coaching, and the impact that it can have in the world in other ways. And Pat was aware that he was in Australia, clear across the globe from where he lived, getting paid to be in a foreign country speaking to people about the passion and the power of life coaching. He was living his dream of a global village in that moment.
We advise you to start your list of examples very quickly; don’t stop to analyze why you are choosing them. The examples may be from any part of your life, even as early as childhood. Many people have amazing childhood experiences related to purpose, perhaps because they occur prior to the time when analytical thought is possible. The experience makes a keen impression, and only later can the adult reflect upon why. Make sure that the examples span the entirety of your life, including two or three from each decade and, if possible, more from the past 5 to 10 years.
2. Write briefly about each of these examples.
For each of the experiences you listed, write a few bullet points, phrases, or sentences about the experience. Include what you did, where you were, what the outcome was, and how you felt. Your writing should also answer these questions:
What was essential to my sense of being “on purpose”?
What about this experience was richly satisfying?
What was of value here for me?
3. Highlight key words and phrases.
Once you’ve written your paragraphs, highlight the key words from each experience. Copy all of the underlined words onto a separate page. Examine them to identify the commonalities and themes among them. You will use these words and phrases to build your statement of purpose.
4. Draft a brief statement of your life purpose in two to four sentences using the key words and phrases of your life purpose.
Because every person has a unique purpose, no one else’s statement will fit yours. How does a purpose statement sound? Here are a couple of examples:
“My purpose is to support and partner personally and professionally with leaders to create organizations where the human spirit thrives.”
“My purpose is to work generously and to live in service; to manifest love through connecting and caring for self and others; and to support the development of inner wisdom and inner peace in myself, my colleagues, my clients, and my community.”
“My purpose is to build and lead organizations that model the best practices in our industry, are profitable financially and viable long-term, and offer dedicated workers meaningful work and sustained employment.”
“The purpose of my life is to proclaim the Good News that married couples live very holy lives, and that all of Life is holy.”
“The purpose of my life is to create a world of love and empowerment, by loving and empowering myself and others.”
Don’t expect yourself to get it just right in one hour. Let your draft incubate for several days. Getting it 85% right is enough for now. Read it to others and get feedback.
To refine your purpose statement, read it aloud a number of times very slowly. As you do, listen for the particular words that resonate with you as you read them — as if you and the purpose are tuning forks that resonate together when you are in sync with each other.
5. Test your purpose.
A good purpose statement pulls you toward it. It engenders energy — like the wind in your sails. You know where you are headed when your purpose is clear. Does your statement help you clarify what you’ll do in your work and in your life?
Here are some clues that you’ve connected with your purpose:
- You feel a strong connection with the purpose you’ve described.
- You have a desire to fulfill it.
- You feel deep pleasure when you act in concert with it.
- Your interests naturally gravitate toward fulfilling it.
Whatever a client’s unique life purpose, however big or small it may look to others, it’s his true path and the one that gives his life meaning. When a client identifies his life purpose, he has taken a powerful step toward manifesting it and creating a fulfilling life for himself.
Encourage your clients to refine their life purpose statement until they feel an internal yes that lets them know they’ve captured the essence of their life purpose. They might also benefit from taking time to journal about how this work on life purpose has impacted them.
Refining the statement may occur over several coaching sessions or a longer period of time. It is important that the client realize that this statement is only for him. It is not a promotional statement and needs to speak and inspire only him. He will never have to share it with anyone else. As the coach, your role is to help the client clarify the statement until it is succinct enough for him to remember it and, when the client speaks it to himself, he has the intuitive sense that he is resonating with it. We often use this metaphor of resonating, as if the client and the purpose statement were responding like a tuning fork does. On several coaching sessions, Diane has actually used a tuning fork, demonstrating how it vibrates when struck. This helps clients understand the relationship they have with their purpose statement, once it has been refined.
Stay tuned for part 2 of this article in the September issue of the HKICC E-newsletter
References
1. Gregg Levoy, Callings: Finding and Following an Authentic Life (New York: Random House, 2003?)
2. Rick Warren, The Purpose Driven Life (New York: Zondervan, 2002).
3. Psychologist Mikhail Csikszentmihalyi has written eloquently about the satisfaction that comes when people are in a flow state, in his book Flow.
