Academic Interests
1. Throughout your schooling, which classes/subjects did you enjoy the most or find most interesting?
2. What was it about the classes/subjects you found interesting?
3. Throughout your schooling, which classes/subjects were you interested in least or enjoyed the least?
4. What was it about the classes/subjects you found uninteresting?
Work Interests
1. Of all of the jobs you’ve had, which were your favorites?
2. What was it about each job that you enjoyed?
3. Of all of the jobs you’ve had, which were your least favorite?
4. What was it about each job that you didn’t enjoy?
5. What type of work seems boring or tedious to you?
6. What type of work seems interesting and exciting to you?
Hobbies
1. What sorts of activities or hobbies did you especially enjoy as a child or teenager?
2. What sorts of activities or hobbies did you especially enjoy as an adult?
3. List your top three favorite television shows of all time: For each show, what was it about the show that you found appealing? Can you see any commonalities among the shows?
4. List your top three favorite movies: For each movie, what was it about the movie that you found appealing? Can you see any commonalities among the movies?
5. List your top three favorite fiction books: For each book, what was it about the book that you found appealing? Can you see any commonalities among the books?
6. List your top three favorite nonfiction books: For each book, what was it about the book that you found appealing? Can you see any commonalities among the books?
7. Are there any characters from any of the above who inspired you or who you admired?
Passions
1. Who in your life inspires you or who do you look up to?
2. What was/is it about this person that you admire?
3. What makes you feel passion or excitement?
Dreams
1. If you didn’t have to worry about making a living or what others thought of you, what would you do with your time?
2. What are you most drawn to doing? Forget prestige, your friends’ ideas, your parents’ goals for you, and money.
3. What would be your top three dream jobs if money were no object?
4. Can you see any commonalities between your top three dream jobs?
5. What do you see as the main barriers to obtaining your top three dream jobs?
Once you’ve done this exercise, ask yourself:
What did I learn about myself and my interests?
Is there any way to tie in the interests I discovered in this process with what I am currently doing as a career?
Is there any way to tie in the interests I discovered in this process with what I can do as a future career?
Is there some action I can take to look into the possibility of incorporating my interests into my current career or another career?
Now put your responses away for at least a full day. After a day or two, come back to what you wrote and follow the breathing instructions noted above. Review what you’ve written and see what kind of reactions you get when you read it for the second time. Note any new insights or ideas.
Now that you have a better understanding of your basic personality, values, strengths, talents, skills, and interests, it’s time to put it all together to figure out your purpose or mission.
Resources
How to do What You Love by Paul Graham: http://FriesenPerformance.com.paulgraham.com/love.html
How to Find Fulfilling Work by Roman Krznaric: http://amzn.com/1250030692
Finding Your Element by Ken Robinson: http://amzn.com/0143125516
Jackson Vocational Interest Survey (JVIS): You can take the test on-line here: http://FriesenPerformance.com.jvis.com/take/
BONUS MATERIAL
Visit FriesenPerformance.com/Achieve-Bonus-Materials to download printable copies of both the Strengths Guided Discovery Exercise AND Career Interests Guided Discovery Exercise.
STEP 4
KNOW YOUR ‘WHY’
Chapter 12
Know Your Purpose or Mission
Efforts and courage are not enough without purpose and direction.
― John F. Kennedy
Definiteness of purpose is the starting point of all achievement.
― W. Clement Stone
Think about the people our society admires for the great things they have done. Think of Martin Luther King Jr., Steve Jobs, Mahatma Gandhi, Albert Einstein, Jackie Robinson, Marie Curie, Oskar Schindler, Michael Jordan, George Washington, Louise Pasteur, Muhammad Ali, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, Rosa Parks, Galileo Galelei, Nelson Mandela, and Mother Teresa.
These people knew who they were, what they valued, what they were good at, and what moved them.
But they had something more than that. They had figured out their purpose or mission. Their purpose for being on this earth. They realized their life had a meaning that was bigger than themselves. Some of them paid dearly for pursuing their path. Some even paid with their life. But I doubt any of them would have had it any other way.
I don’t believe you can really figure out your life’s meaning, purpose, or mission without developing an intimate knowledge of yourself. This book is designed to provide you with that knowledge. This is not to say that your purpose or mission won’t change over time, or that you only have one purpose or mission. But having purposes or missions that are bigger than yourself will make you unstoppable.
You may be a professional athlete and playing your sport is in line with your personality, values, strengths, and interests. But your mission or purpose may not be simply to “play tennis.” It may be bigger than that.
Your tennis career may also be about your kids. Maybe you want to give them the financial freedom you never had growing up. Maybe you want to show them that they too can achieve their goals and dreams if they work hard enough. Maybe you want to be a role model for them by showing them how to live a life driven by the right values.
Or maybe it’s all of these things. Each person’s purpose and mission is unique to them. Nobody can tell you what it is.
There is a Cost Associated with Your Choices
I want to make a few things clear here. Doing the exercises in this book will help you better understand and motivate yourself, and make sure you are pursuing and achieving goals that are in line with what you are, what you value, what you are interested in, and your purpose or mission. In other words, knowing the WHAT, WHY, and HOW. This is the path to achieving great things in your life. At the same time, you may have noticed that the steps to achieving are not easy or simple.
But the reality is that you are going to face pain and setbacks no matter which path you choose. All choices in life open some doors and close others. With each choice there is good and bad. Each choice comes at a cost. To be the world’s best mixed martial artist or be one of the country’s top business consultants, there is going to be a cost, even if only temporary.
Even if you make the best choice for you, realize and accept that it will still be a struggle. You need to be ready for this and be willing to accept it as par for the course. Keep in mind that even if you complete all the exercises in this book and find your dream job or reach your goal, there will still be parts of it that you don’t like or that are hard or make you uncomfortable.
The idea that you’re going to achieve your goals or find out exactly what you love to do — and then love every second of it — is a myth. Don’t get me wrong. I’m not suggesting you live your life as a martyr. Following the strategies in this series of books will reduce the amount of suffering you experience in your life. But nothing worth achieving comes without a struggle.
Understand that there’s a difference between suffering and struggling. As the Dalai Lama wrote: “Pain is inevitable. Suffering is optional.” So you will struggle and feel pain. Whether you suffer de
pends on how you see it. If you live your life and pursue goals that are in line with who you are, what you value, and your purpose or mission, then the struggle will be worth it.
So make no mistake, you will face self-doubt, uncertainty, mental and physical pain, and failure when pursuing your goals. These are the rules of the game. You need to make sure you’re working on goals worth the inevitable struggle that will come as you pursue them.
The best way to reduce the amount of suffering is to determine and then follow your purpose and mission. You’ll also have to find a way to love the process, the journey. If not, it won’t be worth it. One way to make sure your journey is fulfilling is to make sure you’re living your life congruent with your personality, deepest values, strengths, passions, and mission.
There is a cost to every choice we make. Understand and accept this fact and you will go far. Hoping you won’t feel pain along the way will only lead to disappointment. Even success, happiness, and living fully comes with a price. Life is difficult. Accept it and keep moving forward.
The Case of Viktor Frankl
Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for.
― Viktor Frankl
Everyone has his own specific vocation or mission in life to carry out a concrete assignment which demands fulfillment. Therein he cannot be replaced, nor can his life be repeated. Thus, everyone’s task is as unique as is his specific opportunity to implement it.
― Viktor Frankl
One of the best examples of living a meaningful life that was in line with one’s values and mission is the life and work of Dr. Viktor Frankl. If you’re not familiar with Frankl, I highly recommend you Google him. His story is both horrifying and inspiring.
Frankl was a Jewish psychiatrist and neurologist living in Austria when the Nazis took power. Frankl’s story highlights my earlier point about how each choice we make has benefits and consequences that we have to accept responsibility for.
During the Nazi’s reign, despite the persecution of Jews, Frankl made a choice to stay in Nazi-occupied Austria. He was well aware of the risks he was taking. He even had his own immigration visa to the United States, but decided against leaving. He did so for two reasons. One was that his parents didn’t have visas and he didn’t want to desert them. Secondly, he was the director of neurology in a hospital for mentally ill Jewish patients and felt a strong sense of moral responsibility to protect them from the Nazis.
Despite the danger to his own life, he felt his purpose at that time was to sabotage Nazi procedures by making false diagnoses to prevent the euthanasia of his patients. In other words, he made a choice and was fully aware of the consequences of his choice. He decided to live true to his values and purpose and not let circumstances or his fear dictate his choices. Unfortunately, he paid a price for this.
Frankl and his family were sent to Nazi concentration camps. While a prisoner in the camps, Frankl observed his fellow captives and discovered that, despite facing the same horrific conditions, including diseases and starvation, there appeared to be systematic differences between those who lived and died of natural causes that were in line with his previous ideas of the importance of finding meaning in life. His observations lead him to conclude that those who lived and those who died differed in their perception of the meaning, purpose, and mission they had for living.
In his book, Man’s Search for Meaning, he notes: “Everything can be taken from a man but one thing … the last of the human freedoms … to choose one’s attitude in any given set of circumstances, to choose one’s own way.”
This became all too apparent to Frankl when he was being tortured by his Nazi captors. He realized the Nazis could do whatever they wanted to his body, but they couldn’t destroy his mind unless he let them. In the camps, he knew he had to survive to spread his message to the world. This sense of meaning and purpose is what kept him alive.
Amazingly, Frankl survived three years in multiple Nazi concentration camps. When he was finally released, he officially learned that most of his family, including his parents, his brother, and even his pregnant wife, had died or were murdered in the camps. Although he felt unbelievable despair, he found purpose in further spreading his message about the importance of finding meaning and purpose in one’s life, and other observations about human nature he obtained through his experience in the concentration camps. Within a year of his release, he wrote Man’s Search for Meaning, a book that has now sold over 10 million copies around the world.
Thankfully, we don’t have to go through what Frankl did to learn this lesson. We do need to be thankful to people like Frankl and others who have shown us just how powerful it can be when we live a life congruent with our values and with a purpose bigger than ourselves.
The Case of Janet
When I first met Janet, she looked like she had it all. She dressed impeccably, drove a Mercedes-Benz, and was tall and attractive. When she spoke, she commanded herself with authority. It was also quickly apparent that she was as smart as they come. She displayed all the characteristics of what it would take to become a high-powered lawyer.
Janet was a highly paid personal injury lawyer working her way up in a prestigious law firm that primarily defended institutions being sued by injured employees. She came to me because she saw herself as a high achiever and wanted help taking her performance and productivity to the next level in order to reach her goal of becoming a partner in the firm.
I don’t always start off with the exercises in this book with all of my clients. But despite Janet’s outward appearance and persona, something seemed off about her. I had the suspicion that she was not feeling fulfilled. Because of this, I recommended we start with some of the exercises from this book before pursuing her original goal of learning strategies to maximize her daily performance.
At first, she was resistant to the idea of doing these exercises. She even made a joking comment that it was a little more “shrink-like” than she expected from me. At first she commented that it would be a waste of time and that if we did it at all, that we should do it in a few months. I told her we could, but that I had an inclination that this would be helpful for her. She grudgingly agreed.
At our third meeting, we did the Funeral Exercise. For the first time, she looked uncomfortable and less confident. Once we began the Values Survey though, she broke down and sobbed.
She relayed that deep down she must have always known that being a lawyer was not her real calling. She recalled that her parents never directly told her she should apply to law school, but they had high expectations of her and expected she train in some sort of profession that required higher education. She relayed how she was continuously reinforced by external forces like praise from her parents, professors, and peers. She recalled people telling her in law school that she was going to be one of the top lawyers in the area. This kept her going.
Janet also felt she had to be continuously doing something productive, a problem common to those high on the personality tendency of Motivation like Janet. If she ever slowed down or took time off, she would feel a little depressed and down.
After a few sessions, she admitted that her dogged pursuit of her goal of becoming a partner in the firm was destroying her health, friendships, and family. Her pursuit became all-consuming and she felt endless pressure to perform. As we worked through this, Janet came to realize that she was not living in line with what was truly important to her. She was living incongruent with some of her core values. Janet realized that her purpose was not to work in the personal injury arena.
We worked together for a number of months. We did a number of the other strategies outlined in this book to help her learn more about her personality, values and purpose, and to develop goals that were in line with these. She found a new purpose and mission that included more than her career.
Janet ended up changing the type of law she practiced. She now works in healthcare law. She changed her life mission from being the best personal injury
lawyer in the area to being a great lawyer — but also to being the best mother and wife she can be. She realized that her health was important for all aspects of her life mission and began to prioritize this as well. She is still driven to do well, but works fewer hours. She finds she has more time to spend with her family, friends, and even herself. She reports she’s never been happier and has no regrets changing the focus of her career.
The Deathbed Literature
I want to point out here that Janet’s discoveries are in line with what is known as the “deathbed literature.” A famous example of this is the work of Australian palliative care nurse Bronnie Ware.39 Ware recorded the epiphanies, regrets, and wishes of her dying patients. She found that those who were dying generally reported wishing they:
Lived their lives being more true to themselves and not by others’ or society’s expectations. This included following their own dreams and passions.
Took advantage of their lives more when they were healthy.
Didn’t work so long and hard at the expense of their other roles.
Expressed to others how they truly felt about things.
Stayed in touch with friends.
Got out of old patterns of thinking and behaving that prevented them from making the choice to be happy.
We can learn a lot about living a life with meaning from the dying. Please don’t wait until that point to make the right choices. Janet is sure glad she didn’t.
Janet’s Case and Happiness Research
Janet’s case also highlights the research on happiness.40 I brought this up earlier in this book, but feel it’s worth repeating here. Seligman and others have found that what should be considered as happiness is really a combination of a number of factors. These factors make up the acronym P.E.R.M.A. For your review, these include the following:
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