Don’t seek purpose, seek alignment and purpose will follow

Many of us are trying to find a purpose for our life and career. But maybe we shouldn’t.

I’m going to tell you something many of you might disagree with. Trying to find your purpose might be a waste of time. 

Let me elaborate. 

Many of us are on a personal journey to find a purpose that would make the work we do and the choices we make seem meaningful. There’s a lot of self-help out there offering different strategies to find your purpose. Usually, these strategies employ a combination of identifying your passions, values and strengths and setting goals that feel meaningful to you. This type of personal exploration and reflection is important and as a coach, I use these methods too. 

Understanding our strengths, passions and goals is important for our personal growth and helps us navigate in the right direction. But this work does not necessarily lead us to our purpose. 

Through my coaching practice, I’ve learned that people don’t always know what they mean when they use the words meaning, meaningful and purpose. All of these words are subject to interpretation.

I believe meaning is easier to find than purpose. Meaning can come from filling our days with meaningful activities, ie. things that create some type of value for us.

We can say something is meaningful because it’s important for the general functioning of the world. We can also say something is meaningful if it gives us a sense of connection or fulfillment. There are several ways to evaluate meaning as an external and internal experience. 

Professor of Psychology Michael Sterger has created an assessment called The Work and Meaning Inventory, which is used to help people determine how meaningful their jobs are. The assessment invites the respondent to analyse their work according to the following statements: 

• I have found a meaningful career.  

• I view my work as contributing to my personal growth.  

• My work really makes no difference to the world. 

• I understand how my work contributes to my life’s meaning. 

• I have a good sense of what makes my job meaningful. 

• I know my work makes a positive difference in the world.  

• My work helps me better understand myself. 

• I have discovered work that has a satisfying purpose. 

• My work helps me make sense of the world around me.  

• The work I do serves a greater purpose. 

The struggle with some of these statements is that they require a wealth of self-reflection to begin with. Stating that “I have found a meaningful career” supposes that we have a previous determination of meaningful. Stating that “I understand how my work contributes to my life´s meaning” suggests that we understand what our life’s meaning is. 

Researchers Marjolein Lips-Wiersma and Sarah Wright have taken the meaningfulness assessment further and created a multidimensional model to analyse the complexity of how people experience meaningful work. The authors conclude that meaningful work has four dimensions: developing the inner self, unity with others, service to others, and expressing full potential.

These models offer a great opportunity to understand the intellectual and emotional aspects of meaning-making but as scientific models, they can get quite complicated and tangled up in too much detail.

I argue that finding a sense of purpose goes beyond the intellectual Likert-scale-like approaches. 

One might find themselves in a job where they help others, such as a nurse or kindergarten teacher, but they might still lack a sense of purpose. Or one might be an established non-profit leader but still struggle to feel like they’re on the right path. Purpose isn’t necessarily found in the same place as meaning is.

How is purpose different from meaningful work?

When I was working as a consultant and creative director in science and sustainability communications, I had great clients ranging from large nonprofit organisations to academic institutions, from government bodies to companies with a sustainable mission. Most of the projects I was working on felt meaningful: helping climate and medical scientists communicate their work, raising awareness about volunteers who work in social and welfare organisations, and helping a public healthcare provider to re-establish their image with the citizens. 

I was spending eight hours of my day doing work that had a meaningful impact on society. I also had amazing colleagues, a good salary, a respectful work environment and full support to cherish my wellbeing at work. However, I didn’t feel like I had found a purpose for my career. 

Purpose is a reflection of an internal commitment that feels true to us. My problem was that the meaning I was experiencing with my work was more externally than internally driven. I had full faith in what I was doing and that it was a good thing to be doing but I wasn’t sure it was what I should be doing. Something inside me wasn’t clicking. But the problem was also that I didn’t have a clear view of a better path.

Purpose is by nature something that doesn’t follow command. Purpose is poetic, it’s random, it’s creative and unpredictable. Purpose doesn’t fit into, questionnaires, Excel sheets and SWOT analyses. In fact, I believe that it’s allergic to them. It shies away from people and situations that try to force it or claim it. 

The thing is, purpose finds you. 

✨ Purpose follows the timing of your life.
✨ Purpose is not singular but plural, meaning that there can be several purposes throughout your life. 
✨ Purpose is an alignment within yourself. 
✨ Purpose is an alignment between you and the world around you. 
✨ Purpose will speak when the time is right. 

The purpose we’re looking for, the one that gives us a sense of contentment, the one that makes us feel like we are exactly where we’re supposed to be, is the one that finds us. 

It makes itself known in moments when we are not expecting it. It’s a feeling of purposeful alignment – a moment where you click with yourself and the world around you. A moment where who you are, where you are and what you’re doing all come together and feel right. 

Purpose is often found when we’re not actively seeking it. In the in-between of jobs, relationships and big decisions. Purpose is the responsibility that appears out of nowhere and asks you to take care of it. Purpose is the problem you end up solving over and over again and accidentally build the capacity to help others too. 

Purpose doesn’t care about your CV. It doesn’t ask if you’re qualified. It gives you challenges and opportunities it knows you can handle and sees whether you rise to the occasion. Adn those challenges might not look like much to the grand audience but they might be very purposeful to you.

I’ll give you an example. I recently met a guy who told me that some years ago, he found a litter of puppies abandoned by their mother underneath his car. Instead of giving them away to someone else to deal with, he rose to the challenge and brought up eight puppies himself. Every day, he made them a huge pot of porridge for food, nurtured the puppies and sought homes for them. This experience taught him what it really means to take care of someone else over yourself and gave him insight into motherhood that he might not have never experienced in another scenario. It was a purposeful experience, a coincidence between who he was and what the puppies needed from him. 

He didn’t go looking out for this kind of purpose. The purpose found him. 

I’ll give you another example. Another guy I interviewed a while back told me how he became a community manager at a coworking, coliving community. After getting robbed and assaulted on the street in Vienna, he ended up quitting his job at an IT startup and started a search for a more fulfilling life. He volunteered at a meditation centre for a while until he injured his doing gardening work. Whilst lying in bed, recovering from the injury, he made a spontaneous choice to book a flight to Portugal and live off of his savings until he figured out what to do next. After living in an Airbnb for a while, he started missing a community. He wrote a message to a Facebook group that he was looking for a coliving arrangement and asked people to contact him if they knew of anything. He was contacted by a lady who ran a guest house on the Algarve coast and offered him the chance to start running a coliving and coworking community at the premises during the wintertime. This was exactly what the guy needed and was looking for at the moment. A moment where who he was, what he could offer and what the world around him needed came together. A moment of alignment. 

Finding the moments where you click with yourself and the world around you

All of us are given moments of alignment in life. 

I had one of those moments in 2022 when I first arrived in Portugal. It was as if some bigger force took over my life. I started meeting the people I felt I was supposed to meet, and all my worries and unresolved issues in life started to resolve themselves in ways that I had never imagined. Looking back, I still can’t quite explain what happened but throughout that period, I felt completely calm and at home with myself and what was going on. I knew I had latched on to some sort of alignment and I’m still on that journey, following the cues as I get them. 

I know this sounds a bit woo-woo, and maybe it is exactly that. Not all things in life are to be explained through language and logic. 

But it’s important to note that this moment of alignment didn’t come out of the blue. It happened because I had made the active choice to follow my desire to live abroad. I didn’t go there to find my purpose and I didn’t know whether Portugal was a country I’d like to reside. I went there because I knew I had to do something different, I believed that I’d enjoy it and was hopeful to gain some new perspective on where and how to live.

This is why I encourage my clients to pursue their passions and seek joy. It’s through these pursuits of enjoying life in the now that we can find alignment. In those moments of alignment, purpose can find us. All we need to do is follow the guidance within ourselves that tells us where we need to be and what we need to do right now. 

The best way to get closer to the guidance that brings us to our purpose is by making space for introspection and calm. 

What to do with an alignment once you’re in it?

Let’s say you have identified the things that bring you joy and have had a few experiences of purposeful alignment. So what? How do you turn these moments into a purpose that guides your life and your career? 

My best advice is, feed and follow that alignment. Do more of what seems to work. 

Let’s say you get these experiences when you’re taking your singing lessons. You truly enjoy the singing, you get along with your teacher and the people you meet there, you leave feeling ecstatic and stay in a great mood all day. Go for more. Maybe you amp up the number of lessons each week, set up a jam session with the other students, or start your each and every day with ten minutes of singing at home. There is clearly a purpose for your singing and you should follow that purpose. 

This happened to me when I started my yoga teacher training. Through that training, I found a community of people who shared similar world views, got the chance to practice more yoga, speak about spiritual development, and enhance my teaching skills. I felt like I’d found something I had been looking for all my life. And since then, it’s been clear to me that having a connection to yoga is essential for my life and sense of alignment. 

It’s also given me a skill that allows me to connect with the world in a certain way. And because of that skill, I’ve been able to deliver added value to the interactions I have regardless of the situation. The sense of presence I’ve gained through yoga comes with me whether I’m speaking at a conference, creating a sales pitch or writing this newsletter. I believe the skills I’ve gathered through teaching asanas and meditation techniques have had a purpose in my career in ways that go beyond the yoga studio.

Little by little you can start to pick up purposes here and there and they may grow and evolve during your life. Like friends, not all purposes last a lifetime but some might. You’ll find that some are just stepping stones to the next moment of purposeful alignment. 

Remember that purpose doesn’t have to be sexy. It doesn’t have to make you an Insta-famous celebrity. It doesn’t need to look good on your CV. That’s not the point of purpose. The point of purpose is to give you an inner sense of fulfillment and peace.

✨ Don’t go running after shiny objects if you want to experience purpose.
✨ Don’t take pressure from the world trying to tell you there’s a single purpose for everyone to find. 
✨ Don’t either put too much pressure on the purpose you have found, you won’t have to declare it to the world. 

I strongly believe that purpose exists to help us to do good in this world. So if you follow your alignment, you’ll connect with the world around you and be in the right place at the right time. What you have and what the world needs will coincide when the time is right. 

Right now I’m living another moment of alignment by writing this newsletter and coaching people to start hopeful adventures. Does that mean I’ve found a purpose? Maybe or maybe not. It doesn’t really matter. I feel like my internal compass is at peace with what I’m doing right now. I feel like my internal world and my external world are aligned. And that’s enough. Time will tell what this can become. 

And in moments of doubt I remind myself: Look for alignment and purpose will follow.  

Let me know how this resonates with you in the comments and share your moment of purposeful alignment if you feel brave enough today. 

Become the hope you wish to feel in this world.

With kindness,
Aurora