3. What Is Your Purpose? Why You're Asking The Wrong Question.

That question, What Is My Purpose, sounds inspiring until you have to really answer it and then it isn't. For a lot of people navigating life transitions, this question becomes a source of shame, a measuring stick for failure.  I discuss this question and help reframe purpose, not as a singular destination you either find or miss, but as a thread running through every season of your life.  Including the ones that look like wrong turns.  

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Better Thinking Better Living.  A Life Transitions Podcast, hosted by Tonya Shankle. Follow the show so you don't miss what's next. 

Transcript

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Hello and welcome to Better Thinking, Better Living, the show for people navigating life transitions who want more clarity, more courage, and more of themselves. I'm your host, Tanya Schenkel. Third episode in, and I'm gonna dive right in to the tough questions. What is your purpose? So right now, I am in a lot of groups, a lot of trainings, a lot of trying to build businesses, doing things like that. And I hear a lot of people talk about purpose and what it means to them and what they're trying to put out there. And it really made me think about, of course, what is my own purpose? And that's something I've thought about for a long time at different times in my life, especially when I'm changing directions or deciding to transition into something different. So if you go ahead and sit with that for a second, what do you think your purpose is? And this isn't like what's the purpose of life. This is more what is your specific purpose? And even if that's changed, what do you think right now that might be? So for most people, this question doesn't feel inspiring. It feels very heavy. It feels like someone has just handed them something, like those surprise tests you used to get in school. I had a teacher that called them opportunities. So it feels sort of like that sometimes. So it's something like we're not prepared for or that we haven't thought about, or when we think about it, there's a feeling of dread with it. Sometimes you get that little knot in your chest, a little of like, oh no, God, why am I being asked this? You're not alone with this. And today I want to talk about what that means and why this happens. I think we are asking the question in the wrong way, or the wrong question entirely. Somewhere along the way, we turned purpose into something enormous, something singular and dramatic, like there's a grand calling out there with your name on it, and your entire job in life is to find it before time runs out. And what if you haven't found it yet? You're behind? If it's not obvious, you must be missing something. So if you're in your forties or fifties or sixties and you're still asking this question, it can often feel like no longer a search, but a failure. So there's a psychoanalyst named Eric Erickson who taught about the stages of life, and working through them, we either complete the stage or we become stuck in the stage, depending on how we go through it. And one of the stages is near the end of life, or as we're getting older, where we look back and feel one of two things about how we spent our time. We either feel integrity or despair. So there's a fork in the road I want to talk about today with this. I've sat across many people in therapy, in coaching, and just in life who genuinely believed that because they didn't have a clear and obvious purpose, their life was somehow less meaningful. That's not a purpose problem, that's a definition problem. And today I want to offer you a different one. Of course, I'm going to tell a story. So I want to tell you a story from high school where I got on the wrong bus. I hadn't been riding the bus for a while because honestly I lived near the, you know, the school that I attended, but I had just gone into high school and the school was cross town, so I started riding the bus again. So I got on the bus thinking I was doing good, found a seat, and as the bus started going through town, then out into the countryside, I realized, oh, I'm on the wrong bus. I didn't panic. I just rode along. I knew the driver would eventually have to go back into town, and that's what happened. So when the driver had dropped off the last student, she turned around, saw me still sitting there, someone she ought and didn't she didn't recognize either. And I walked up to the front of the bus and said, Yes, I am on the wrong bus, and yes, I need to get a ride back to town with you. And then I proceeded to tell her basically everything about my life, which was very out of character for me. I was pretty shy back then, and I don't know why I did, but it was just the two of us. I felt comfortable, she was kind, so I told her about my friends, my dreams, what I wanted to do with my life. I told her I wanted to be a psychiatrist or a counselor, something in mental health, and a photographer. I was going to be a psychiatrist photographer, which is maybe well, absolutely is a very Tanya thing to say, but I had no idea how to get to college, no roadmap, no one who had done it before me to show me the way. So I didn't go straight there. I went into business. I learned its administrative work, I eventually owned a business, I built things, I figured things out, I lived. I lived my life. I was 35 when I finally went back to school to become a therapist, and then I had to go again in my forties because I thought a bachelor's degree would be enough, and it wasn't. So I had to get a master's degree as well. But here's what I want to talk about. I never believed those years before I went back to school were wasted. Not once. Every season had something in it, something I was doing, learning, offering, becoming. The thread was always there. The girl on that wrong bus who knew she wanted to help people, she did become a therapist, just not in the route she imagined. And every stop along the way was part of it. Oh, and by the way, I did make it back to town, right? So do you know that Eagle song Wasted Time? I don't know if you're familiar with the Eagles or that song. There's something about the song that captures a very specific kind of grief. The looking back, the wondering if you took too long, went the wrong direction, should have started sooner, chosen differently, that quiet ache of time you're not sure you used well. I want to speak directly to that feeling for a second, because I think a lot of people carry it, especially in the middle of a transition. You start to ask, what if I had done this differently? What if I had known sooner? What if I didn't spend so many years on the wrong bus? Here's what I believe. Every version of us contributes to the next one. So for me, the business years taught me things about people and resilience and problem solving that I use in my work every day still now. The seasons that looked like detours were shaping me for what came next. None of it was practice for the real thing, it was the real thing. There is no wasted time when you look at it as becoming. That doesn't mean every choice was perfect, or that we always make perfect choices, or that we can't we couldn't have done things a little differently. Of course we could have. We all could have. But the grief of looking back and measuring yourself against some imaginary better timeline, that's not useful, and it's not realistic, and it's not accurate. You were doing something in every season, that is what's important. So let's come back to that question. What is your purpose? I want to offer you a different way to think about it. Yes, we want to have goals. Yes, think about what you want to contribute, what you want to build, what kind of life feels aligned with who you are. Very important. I'm not saying that it isn't, but also don't miss what's already there. Don't miss the purpose that's already showing up in the ordinary times in your life right now. Being present with the people you love, doing your work with care, showing up for a friend who's struggling, making something beautiful or useful or true, asking questions, listening well, being honest when it could be easier not to be. That is purpose. It doesn't need a title, it doesn't need a stage, and it doesn't need to be the big defining thing for your entire legacy or life. We have overcomplicated this, and in the overcomplicated version, a lot of people decide they haven't found it yet, and so they wait. They put their lives in a kind of holding pattern, waiting for the big clear calling to arrive. And while they're waiting, they miss the purpose that's happening all around them. You're already contributing to something. I want you to not underestimate that. The question isn't really what is my purpose? Like it's a thing you have to locate, like things you've misplaced or lost. The better question might be, what is already meaningful to me right now? What am I already doing that matters? That I might be taking for granted because it doesn't look dramatic enough. And if you're in the season of transition, if you're on a bus heading somewhere that doesn't feel quite right, I want you to remember that girl riding peacefully into the countryside. She wasn't lost. She was just taking a longer route. And the whole time she was on the bus, she was exactly who she was going to become. Purpose isn't a destination you either reach or miss. It's the thread running through every version of you, even the ones that look like wrong turns. Thank you for being here. I'll see you in the next episode. Thanks for listening. Be sure to follow Better Thinking, Better Living on your favorite podcast player so you don't miss any future episodes. Until next time, keep thinking better, keep living better.