Choosing not to inherit your purpose

Is your purpose really your purpose? Or did you inherit it from somebody?

If your get-up-and-go has got up and went - and you’re having a hard time generating the initiative to do the activities that lead to success in the work or hobbies you’re doing - these questions are for you. This has nothing to do with the aging process. Do you really want to be doing what you’re doing, or are you trying to please someone else?

I listened for a long time the other day to a mom whose family just decided they’d let their child quit a sport they’ve been doing for 8 years. The family as a whole has been involved with the sponsoring organization for 25 years. It’s been a way of life, with somebody being there almost every day of the week. But now for weeks their 13-year-old has been telling her parents, “This isn’t for me and I don’t want to do it any more.”

This girl is quite a diversified kid. She has a lot of interests, plays a lot of sports (more than one of them pretty seriously,) and works hard at school. She’s one of those old souls who seem to be operating at an adult level from a pretty young age. And from her mom’s perspective the daughter’s arguments against continuing were pretty sound. There have been a lot of changes in the team in which she’s been involved for all these years, and she doesn’t like them. It's been stressing her out because she thinks a number of them are downright wrong. And she makes no bones about talking about them in just that way.

“Mom, you always told me to stick up for what I think is right,” she told her mother during the Big Talk. “I don’t want my whole life to revolve around doing just that sport, and that’s what they’re expecting now. I like to do a lot of different things. I don’t think that it’s right for them to ridicule someone who does this without wanting to go to the Olympics. Maybe I’ll change my mind in a couple of years, but right now there’s more to my life than just that.”

I have to send kudos to the daughter for having the guts to speak up and also to the mom for taking her daughter seriously, and to differentiate a simple “I don’t feel like it” from “This doesn’t fit my values.” I’ve worked with many adults who have found themselves in, for instance, law careers because their whole family is in the legal field and who hate it. They followed the expectation to go to a certain college, or to marry for certain reasons because outside forces said they should, despite their inner voices. It’s great that this young teen has the self-awareness to know what it is she really wants and doesn’t want, so she can prevent herself from investing in an undesired future.

How many of your reasons for doing what you do every day come from inside you, from your individual sense of purpose? If you’re out of the world of “should” and in the world of “want to” you will feel energy. You will have the tendency to get absorbed in your activities, into flow. You will do your work with a mindset that feels more akin to play than to drudgery. You will probably find that your purpose aligns with your strengths, so you naturally will do it better, and thus will gain greater rewards from doing it.

It’s not too late to throw off your inherited purpose if it doesn’t fit. Your optimal contribution to the world relies on you becoming your best self, and that can only happen when you’re not trying to wear somebody else’s shoes.