Before the Life Purpose Equation
Learning how to choose yourself and be all in
It was sometime between reading Phyllis Whitney’s A Window on a Square, Stephen King’s The Gunslinger, and Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged that I first deeply pondered my life — what was possible? Did I want to be a brave heroine or a gunslinger on a quest? Did I see myself amongst Rand’s intellectual elite or as a secondhander? To be sure I found amusement, fear, and delightful fantasy in many other works — I mean, I still believe in dragons, what about you?
At that time, I was a voracious reader, but I was also a well-rewarded student. This meant I easily bought into a myth — not one of the highly creative ones in any of my library favorites, but a practical one that seemed correct, undeniable, and validated by both the rewards I received and the environment I was in — namely, that intelligence, hard work, and good grades would mean success.
Life didn’t turn out that way.
In so many ways, teenage me led my life in the right way. I listened to my parents. I went to church as our family did. I didn’t smoke or do recreational drugs. I worked hard at getting good grades. I took to heart being a kind, moral person.
I wasn’t boring though or guileless — I had passion and ideas, and got myself into plenty of trouble, alongside normal teenage driving indiscretions like backing the family station wagon right into a boulder. I said yes to concerts in ‘unsafe’ downtown Chicago where I was not allowed to go. I said yes to helping a friend who had run away from home. I did things I knew I needed to do, things I thought were right — and I accepted the consequences even when they entailed grounding, several-hour-long parenting talks late into the night, and, once, my father threatening that he would take me out of his will — because I wanted to go to a theme park with a boy two years older than me. (Yes, I went anyway.)
I thought my choices — to do the things I knew I had to do — meant that I was free. That I knew who I was. That I was brave. I operated both with good conscience and integrity.
But, eventually, the choices I had made? Well, ends up some of those choices had been made based on fear — so easy to see in retrospect. I married someone I shouldn’t have. I also stayed on a career path that wasn’t right for me. This was partly because I didn’t fully see how my parents’ financial challenges in parts of my childhood had controlled the relationship between being able to see who I was and ever being able to make it happen.
Having followed the route so much of society says is the way, I topped out. Grit and hard work combined with even exceptional job skills aren’t enough when your colleagues are working in alignment with who they are, with their values, and you are not. I was two people — the person I knew in my head and the person everyone else saw. It was painful because the person inside me is valiant, authentic, creative, inspirational, silly, and kind — and the world I lived in was complicated, fast-paced, devoid of what I valued, and rewarded those who were self-serving.
Being in that much pain was not living. But, for me, ever so gritty and well practiced at hard work, suffering, and survival, the ability to change thus required that the pain become so great that it required or, rather, forced a choice.
This was a very difficult period. But, current me is relieved that I chose the person in my head over the situation I had put myself in, over what my individual experience of society implied or told me — as a smart, middle-class white woman — is the right path. Then me was rightfully terrified, then me knew the choice required choosing myself over everything I had previously done and believed and that having gone so long in the wrong direction, nothing was not guaranteed.
Pain was my tipping point — first emotional pain, then after significant future injuries, physical pain. But even radical change is affected by the incremental. Some years earlier, after talking to a therapist about a major work struggle symptomatic of the lack of alignment between who I was and what my life currently involved, the eight-year-old 4-H’er inside me summed it up saying, “I did my best.” The therapist, to whom I will be forever grateful, asked, “And if your best isn’t good enough?”
Well, I realized in that exact moment that I would still choose me. It didn’t matter to me if I was failing with what I had been doing, if my best truly wasn’t good enough to excel in my current circumstances. Her comment took power away from the job and the status I had as a result of that job, and helped me give it to myself. To me. To the little girl inside me who once had tried to use magic to change the color of stones and still wishes she could.
But as much as I am grateful, I wish the therapist also would have said, “You have to be all in if you want to be happy, to have less pain, to thrive.” And I wish she had known how to teach me how to do it. I have always liked myself and there was never a time I didn’t love myself, but there is a difference between loving yourself and being all in.
Looking back, I didn’t have a single role model in my life who was all in most of the time or even a large part of the time. Not only had I not really been exposed to the idea of what it meant to be all in for myself or for others, I also didn’t know what it looked like in practice. Even the most capable person can be unable to grow in the way she needs to if she doesn’t know the possibility exists or remotely how to get started in doing it.
And, at least for me, it’s human contact — having just one person who believes in you, who sees you, and who celebrates you unconditionally, that makes taking the first steps of being all in possible.
That question, “if your best isn’t good enough …,” started a new journey. And, in time, when demands at work continued to exceed my ability to stay centered, I didn’t give more to work, I started giving to myself. I realized the way forward, the way to a better self and eventually to a healthier relationship with work was to step away. To do less. To breathe. To participate fully in family life when I got home. To leave work at work. No matter my failings, my challenges, I was not someone who needed to work harder or to be more gritty or to improve myself. What I needed to do was to better understand myself and what works for me so I could find a situation in which I could thrive.
And though any good coach will caution you on trying to solve your problems solely through the distortions a rational approach can create, I used the practical skills that had sent me fairly far up the wrong career ladder to get me down and, eventually, back up another ladder. This meant that I used my relational and analytical skills to observe myself.
I collected data. What made me smile? What was I doing when I gave freely of myself and my time? Who in my life made me feel good about being me? When was I relaxed? When did I have wisdom?
Some of the tidbits were very small. I noticed I was very happy reading magazine articles in waiting rooms. I noticed I could spend hours outside tending my garden. I realized I loved art and design and, more importantly, that practical me had never even thought, even once, that making a career of it was an option. That was a big moment for me. To see unspoken and unthought of limitations I had placed on my life.
In this way, as much as I collected data I also observed how I characterized data. And I questioned that, too. In doing so I started to see how I had been making many unconscious decisions and judgment valuations in so many areas of my life. My early successes, incurred by following a path so much of society promotes, had blinded me. My parents’ financial challenges had further sealed the deal that it was unsafe to stray from the known way.
But, more than 13 years ago, I opened my eyes wide anyway to start making brave choices based on who I really am. The first choices didn’t look brave on the surface. They looked like going on a multi-week international trek. They looked like signing up for a photography class. They looked like closing my laptop when work demands pushed me out of equilibrium. They looked like reading inspiring articles online and finding and talking to the people who wrote them. This journey, begun with such incredibly small steps, is how I eventually left what former me considered the legitimate, professional world of tech to become a trained, professional coach. Coaching is where I belonged all along, but it was me — my judgments and assumptions — that had prevented me from getting here.
The bigger they are, the harder they fall.
When I stepped off that first, misleading career ladder, it wasn’t a straight path right up the next one. I spent a lot of time at the bottom of all the possible ladders. Similar to the phrase the bigger they are, the harder they fall, I had so bought into the myth that had created the first four decades of my life that I needed time to figure out who I was. I even started climbing up two other career ladders on my way to finding the right one. And guess what? As frustrating and scary as that was, it was OK, too, because there was no other way to figure out what worked for me than having new experiences.
It’s understandable that it took me a long time, including for reasons I’ll share in another post, but, the point of this essay is that we are surrounded by stories and myths and also by what look like real, trustable superhighways to our futures. The way forward is even commonly referred to as a life path — as if it is a neat, well-marked, thoroughfare that isn’t also full of ambiguity, dead ends, cliffs, quicksand, misdirections, backsteps, and unknowns. Ironic, don’t you think?
It is important to have a model though — some philosophy or structure that allows you to make sense out of your life and this jointly painful and splendid process of finding your way. Choosing yourself means you acknowledge there is a way forward, unique to you, and that you can only be your very best self by honoring it. Being all in means that no matter what challenge presents itself along the way, you will persist — not through grit or hard work, but through love, whereby you take your deep love for yourself, this choosing of self, and you consistently take actions and make choices in alignment with who you are.
This means you do fun things, things that scare you, things you want to do — even when logically you know you have one in a trillion chance of making it. When you are all in, you understand you have to say yes and that when you do — whether you fail or succeed — you change not only your reality but you also become more of who you are. And it is only in becoming more of who you are that you can ever truly find your way.
You are forever changed by the experiences you choose. Make them count.
During my journey I have come to know my strengths, my weaknesses in the most intimate way. I have learned how no one else — other than me — could possibly know what is right for me or what I should do next. I learned surprising things, like that I think in images and that I am compelled to draw situations and relationships and ways to navigate this world. This is balanced by the fact that I also don’t consider myself particularly skilled in the actual act of drawing — which is then balanced by the fact that in choosing myself and being all in, I draw these images anyway and do the often scary thing of sharing them with others, too.
When we choose ourselves, everything changes. True self-care self-propels us toward that which we know to be true to ourselves. That which makes our blossoms bloom. That which allows us to say, yeah, I suck at this or I failed, and that’s OK because I am going to use what I learned to try again tomorrow. I am not only going to be fine, I am fine because I already have everything I need: me.
I’ll write again soon about how my journey eventually resulted in my creation of the Life Purpose Equation, which I can’t fully explain without a drawing or two. And in saying this, I know you understand that current me is already getting ready to remind future me that my imperfect drawings will be enough. Because I am always enough, and you are, too.
