How to Find Your Purpose & Design the Life You Want

KEYPOINTS

• 01

  Feeling stuck can come right before a breakthrough

  Life coach Martha Beck now treats an impasse as a signal that a leap is coming. She says to get right down in the mud and admit you're miserable, then go for a walk, take a drive or watch birds out the window, and let another part of your mind come up with an idea you couldn't have imagined. She compares it to a caterpillar that can't imagine becoming a butterfly: stuckness means you're about to be transformed.

• 02

  Your body and your suffering are allies

  When you feel lost, Beck says to tune into your body and notice your suffering. Find where the 'not peace' sits, name it as mad, sad, glad or scared, then let it grow as big as it wants without resisting. Invite it to sit with you and tell you everything. When Mel tried it, the tightness in her chest grew into a 'nuclear cloud' that, oddly, felt smaller.

• 03

  There's clean suffering and dirty suffering

  Clean suffering is the pain of the event itself, like being hit. Dirty suffering is the storm of thoughts about it: she hates me, I deserved it, this shouldn't have happened. Beck argues that most of our pain comes from those thoughts rather than events, and that letting the pain tell its story helps you separate from it.

• 04

  Flip your most painful thought

  Beck's core tool: hear your suffering out until you're tired of it, then state the opposite of your most painful thought and look for ways it could be true. She says that opposite is your next step toward awakening. 'I'll never find love again' becomes 'I'll always find love', in a tree, a cat, a parent, everywhere.

• 05

  Follow the feeling of freedom in your body

  On her seminars in Africa, Beck takes people rhino tracking, then asks them to track their purpose the same way. The sign to follow is a sense of joy, lightness or relaxation in the body. It never shows you twenty years ahead, only the next step. Something that feels trapping, however slightly, is 'the track of not there'. Over time, the steps add up to a purpose.

• 06

  Purpose is personal

  Beck defines purpose as what brings you the greatest satisfaction and joy while letting you contribute the most joy to the world, quoting theologian Frederick Buechner's 'where your deep gladness and the world's deep hunger meet'. She says it's as individual as a fingerprint, and that the things that bring tears to your eyes matter more than career or money.

• 07

  Creativity can calm anxiety

  Beck says there's plenty of evidence that anxiety shuts down creativity, and suggests the reverse is also true, though it's less studied. In her account, anxiety runs in a fear-and-control loop in the verbal, time-tracking left hemisphere, while senses, imagination and making things engage the right. Her line: 'anxiety always lies, but only always.' Her main takeaway is to swap 'what do I do now?' for 'what can I make now?'

• 08

  Try a day without lying

  After her darkest period, Beck went a year without telling a single lie. She lost friends, and her motto became 'burn every bridge but love.' With clients she's gentler: try one day with no lies, including the small social ones, and notice where you bend the truth to fit in. She says the truth can be told with compassion, but don't lie to yourself.

• 09

  Find your community

  Beck says we're social primates who look for a safe person in a crisis. She tried to rebuild alone after losing everyone and says it was horrible and took years. She now recommends joining something, like a book club, a church or an online community, to make a safe 'cocoon' while you grieve the old life. She adds that people mid-change often cut their hair or rearrange the furniture first.

• 10

  KIST: kind internal self-talk

  For deep fear, Beck uses the acronym CAT: kindness, art, then transformation. Kindness comes first, through what she calls KIST, kind internal self-talk: 'I'm here, it's okay, I've got you, tell me everything, would you like some tea?' You don't have to believe it at first. She says this was the only thing that brought her back from her worst fear.