Goals and life purpose

If we each knew what the purpose of our life was, we could set goals to help us achieve it. Each of us may feel we have our own purpose in life. That purpose is in keeping with our values, especially our 'core' or most important values. So to find our own uniquelife purpose, we need to identify our own core values.
When we have identified our values, we can set our life goals or career goals or social goals or spiritual goals in accordance with those values. When our goals fit our values, we feel we are living life more purposefully.
Through working with a coach, a person can identify their values and then start to set goals accordingly. Goals that fit our values are more motivating. Therefore such goals are more likely to be achieved. Such goals will also give more satisfaction, reward, and sense of achievement for the person. They do this because they fit with that person's sense of purpose.
So eliciting your life purpose can be a key stage of the coaching process. It may reveal, for example, that your workplace values do not fit with your life purpose. In which case, you may want a change of career!
Also, identifying your life purpose is a way of moving forward. Without a sense of your life purpose you could move on so far but still feel dissatisfied. Without a sense of your life purpose, you could find yourself fulfulling someone else's (boss, parents) purpose.
Identifying your life purpose is a first step toward better life or better performance.

Belief and attitude

I believe that being independent and self reliant is a positive attribute. Consequently, I value times when I can do things on my own without help. I also value the work I do in helping other people become more self reliant and work on their own.

However, I also recognise that there are times when I should call upon support to help me tackle something I cannot do or which could be better done by more than one person. I do not always seek support because that lessens my own sense of achievement. I also do not want to feel a burden to other people.

The consequence can be that work I achieve by myself is sometimes not done as well as it could be if I had asked for support or worked with a team.

I am aware that when I do work in a team, I am more prepared to seek support within that team. When in a team, I prefer to have a clearly defined role to perform rather than just be a team member. In this way, I have a degree of independence as well as a contribution to make.

I also have noticed that when I achieve something as part of a team, my attitude is often one of asking “what’s next?” So in a team I want to be moving forward more. When I achieve something on my own, I tend to sit back and appreciate the achievement more; the achievement becomes a reward.

Beliefs

I know I feel a sense of achievement, sometimes pride, when a child I have been teaching does something by themselves for the first time. When I achieve something by myself I feel a sense of achievement. When others have helped me achieve then I feel a sense of ‘what’s next?’ This is evidence to me of my belief in self reliance.

I used to believe that crowds were bad. This was based in my subconscious based upon what my parents used to tell me and also upon an incident of being stabbed in a football crowd. I used also to believe that I was not very good at speaking to a public audience; this experience wasn’t in my subconscious as it was something I had not done. So I could only think of the pitfalls of it. So imagine my feelings when faced with the prospect of giving a speech at my wedding. Yet I was motivated to give the speech, I wanted to do it and do it well, I wanted the day to be successful. So my first step was to visualise myself giving the speech. This was my conscious mind telling my subconscious mind to show me how I could do it. Repeated visualisations for days beforehand made me better prepared to do it. I could see myself doing the speech but I did not yet have the content of it and my subconscious was saying ‘you’ll make a fool, you’ll get it wrong”. So I started to write practise speeches, this meant that my conscious mind was feeding my subconscious. Toward the end, my prepared speech had everything I wanted to say and I could enjoy my subconscious mind visualising me saying it. On the day itself, the speech went well, it was enjoyable and many people told me how good it was. Today I believe that I can make a good speech to an audience. This belief held me in good stead when I had to speak at my mother’s funeral.

This shows me how the conscious and subconscious minds interact to affect our behaviour and formulate our beliefs. It also shows how a positive attitude particularly in our subconscious can drive us forward and a negative attitude can hold us back. Yet also it is the importance that I placed upon making the wedding speech that triggered the change. Had I not considered it important, I do not feel the change would have happened. Allied to the importance was the motivation I had to make the day a success. So motivation and priority of importance are factors in formulating beliefs and behaviour.

Mevagissey

This bank holiday, the wife, myself and two friends from Yorkshire spent our time in Cornwall at the little harbour village of Mevagissey.
Mevagissey is a traditional Cornish fishing village with a few nice pubs serving real ale.
We stayed at a small farmhouse just outside the village and used that as a base for walking along the clifftops with their spectacular scenery and views of little coves and sheltered beaches.
We also visited the Eden project and the Lost Gardens of Helligan, both were well worth the visit.

Mevagissey Harbour 

Redefining success

I recall passing my driving test, at the third attempt. I knew that with my instructor I could drive the car perfectly well. Yet nerves and an expectation of failure affected me as I faced my next test. This time, instead of going through my head with thoughts of everything I had to do and how to do it, I simply repeated to myself ‘just do it’. This new self talk was positive and raised no possibility of not being capable.
I was in my 30s when I learned to swim. I had not had a need to swim but I did feel that not being able to was limiting. I did have a fear of water but this was a vicious circle I believed I couldn’t swim as I feared water, I believed I feared water as I couldn’t swim. My self talk in this case was a mental contract between myself and my instructor. I said to her, mentally, “you teach me to swim, I’ll tackle my fears”. This I said each time as I walked to the lido and again as I entered the pool. This self talk was effective because it seemed to make a contract with another person; if I failed on my part I failed her as well as myself. The result was I was swimming in 6 weeks.
I value learning yet I see exams as offering the possibility of failure. Yet without the exam and the qualification it can bestow, I find I cannot move forward to achieve what I want. To overcome this I ‘bypass’ the exam in my self talk and I tell myself what I will do when qualified. It is like I am asking myself an ‘incisive question’ in my self talk “when you are qualified, what will you do?” combine this with visualisation and it becomes an effective tool to confront the fear of failing in an exam.


I have already admitted that I had a limiting belief that I shouldn’t be too successful. This belief arose from a conflict between school and home. I avoided success at school in order to avoid conflict at home.
Today, I have defined success for myself as not comparing myself with other people but as comparing myself with how I used to be. So success is self improvement, not being better than other people.
To get to this stage has involved rational analysis. I have had to identify the cause of this limiting belief. I have had to accept that it is irrational and accept that it has been holding me back. I have had to analyse what success meant in the past and take note of the uneasy feelings that definition instilled in me. I have then redefined success for myself and in so doing, noticed that the feelings are now positive.

Self Talk and beliefs

In 1980, I became a qualified teacher. That year was the first year since the age of 5 that I had not had to face an exam. That was the first year I did not have to prove myself to anybody, did not have to strive to get a pass and did not confront myself with the possibility of failure. For a solid 18 years of my life I had had to face not one or two but a series of exams in both autumn and summer. Twice a year, I had had to show what I had learned (or not learned), what I could do (or not do) and be graded accordingly.
In 1980 I had none of that and I made a promise to myself that I'd never put myself through an examination again.
I made that promise because I felt that as an adult I should not have to prove myself to anybody.
The promise lasted 5 years. Until I wanted to become a radio ham and had to pass 2 examinations. Even then in the exam room I remember saying to myself 'what am I doing here when I promised myself I wouldn't put myself through this again'. Moreso as I was suffering from an allergy during one part of the exam.
Actually things worked out well as I gained two distinctions in the exams. Even this reward, however, did not and has not changed my attitude toward exams.
Even today I still feel that I should not as an adult have to prove myself to anyone.

Values ... what are values?

Our values are important to us. They determine how we live our lives, they govern our behviours and our attitudes, they influence how we interact with other people and the environment, they affect how we interpret other people, their actions, words and behaviours. We are affected by values in ourselves, in other people, in society and in its institutions. We perceive values in politics, philosophies and religions. Yet what are values?

If you were to ask people what their values are, they are likely to say things like 'love', 'honesty', 'success'... but what do these words represent? In themselves, words such as these are not values, they are human attributes or qualities. This seems to be the essence of 'values'. A value is a human quality or attribute that we feel is worthy, positive, and which we approve.

If we accept this definition of a value as being a quality or attribute of which we approve, then we will be able to create a long long list of values from 'love', 'caring', 'honesty','cheerfulness' to 'learning', 'humourous' and 'pleasing other people'. All of which are positive and few people would say were not worthy. So how does a worthy quality become something more than just worthy and become a 'value?'

A worthy quality becomes something more when it means more to the individual. I, as an individual, would consider being humourous as a positive quality. However, I would not judge humourous people as being better than non-humourous people, I do not strive to be humourous, I do not think that humourous things are better or more important than things that are not humourous. For me, humour is not a value. For another individual, humour might be a value. If that individual felt that making people laugh was an important social skill, if that individual felt that poeple making him laugh was important to him, or that his making others laugh was important, then 'humour' could be a value for that individual.

The last paragraph slipped in the concept of certain things being 'important' to individuals. Some values are more important than others to each individual. These more important values can be described as an individual's 'core values'. These are the key values that are most important to an individual, they are what makes an individual decide to do one thig rather than another, to choose some people as friends or partner rather than other people, they are what makes each of us lead our lives the way we do.

In the opening paragraph, I said that we are affected by values in ourselves and other people.That would be evident; are behaviour and actions are determined by our values and so are the actions and behaviours of the other people we meet. I also said that we are affected by values in society and its institutions. Each society has its values which refelct the values of the majority of its members or of those who hold power in the society. If an individual regards 'caring' as a core value, then they are likely to view a society that cares and supports its members as being a positive or good society. The same individual is likely to look less favourably upon a society that promotes the success and interests of a few over the interests of the rest of its members. However, someone who values individual success and achievement is likely to look more favourably upon such a society. Similarly, institutions within societies, such as newspapers, media, charities, political parties, companies etc., will have their values either expressly held by the institution or as perceived by individuals in and outside of the institution. Each individual's regard, support, criticism etc. of these institutions is going to be based upon values and whether that individual's values match those of the institution or not.

So now we can begin to see how one's values determine one's interaction not only with individual's but also with society and its institutions or organisations. Moving on, we can consider the values implicit or explicit in more theoretical concepts such as politics, philosophies and religions. Each of these is likely to have a value system which it both places upon and draws from its membership and/or its originator. In this way, an individual is likely to support a political party or a philosophy or a religion if their values match or closely match the individual's own values.

However, we now touch upon the interactive nature of values. Concepts or entitities such as society, politics, religion, impose, to some degree, their values upon each of us as individuals. They tell us what is important and what we should value. In many ways, our values or some of our values are given to us by outside bodies such as relgions or politics.

So now, having explored what values are, we reach the question, where do they come from ?