Cultivating Purpose

Purpose

Research reveals that purpose offers direction to a life, just as a compass offers direction to a person trying to choose the right path. Some researchers have described it as a “central self-organizing life aim” that helps to guide you to make certain choices over others when faced with multiple options or limited resources. It creates powerful motivation to consistently dedicate resources and time to achieve your goals when they are consistent with this life aim, or purpose. And, when you are living in your purpose, your resilience is astonishingly high, even in difficult circumstances. 

When you are living with purpose, your purpose actually narrows the set of all possible choices to those that you feel have the most positive consequence to the world beyond yourself, and which have an equal and powerful motivational affect in your desire to achieve goals consistent with that purpose. In other words purpose is pro-social in nature, meaning it is grounded in the purpose you derive from contributing to something greater than yourself.

Importantly, living in alignment with your purpose offers you a self-sustaining source of life meaning (versus moments of happiness which can be fleeting). 

In Forum, you’ll learn to examine and foster purpose along three dimensions so that you have a sustained sense of meaning in your life:

• scope of purpose (ubiquity in your life),

• strength of purpose (tendency to influence actions, thoughts, emotions), 

• and awareness of purpose (creating behavioral flexibility and efficient resource allocation because you are aware of your purpose).

And, you’ll learn how purpose is powerful. It stimulates behavioral consistency—enabling you to overcome obstacles, seek alternative means, and maintain goal focus, even in challenging circumstances. It generates approach-oriented behaviors, meaning it helps you approach even difficult goals with a sense of excitement, engagement and high motivation. It stimulates psychological flexibility, making it easier for you to be flexible when faced with changing demands and opportunities. And, it fosters efficient allocation of resources. In other words, it gives you a great deal of resilience and motivation.