People always come to me as clients with this question, and of course it also comes up in management training on how to support their team members in finding their professional path.
The first thing to do in this case, of course, in the world of thought, is that your life has to have meaning first, and then it’s the job to support it. Merely looking for meaning and meaningfulness in your work is limited to very short-term motivation. The search for professional meaning begins with the search for meaning in life.
But in answering the questions, the first thing to do is to look for your strengths, long-term dreams, IKIGAI, etc. This path works, but not always.
I’ve found that for clients, moving through the pain of the past leads to a solution, because it brings out resources they didn’t know existed before. Just like in business – create your business in an area where you see a problem to solve.
The first of these questions to find pain is easy, the second goes deeper and they support each other:
– What was I like when I was little (before school)? And exactly how I remember it. Most of the time, it’s someone else’s stories about you (relatives’ stories), but how do you remember it? What is your nature and being, and what was the area that captured your attention?
– What is the common thread that connects the painful experiences of your life? Particularly those that are particularly emotionally memorable in relationships with other people. What hurt there and how would you have acted in the other person’s shoes or what did you feel you missed out on? What needed to be resolved in these situations that hurt you? When you start to look for order and a connecting thread in such events, one or two themes usually emerge at a deeper level. And developing that theme further will lead to a theme that needs to be resolved in your life, and so the best way to resolve it is to start working on it. And to make it work for you.
For example, in my case, it’s the relationship with authority and frameworks – being led by someone else and being framed vs. being unframed. The most emotionally painful experiences of my life have been repeated in relation to authority and being led/manipulated by someone or conforming/not conforming to someone’s framework.
And today, because of this, my profession (my life’s calling) is in leadership development, mentoring and therapy to provide the connection to self that I was missing and to support leaders in this work with their people. And in order to offer all of this to others, I have needed to find it myself.
And, of course, this work goes on and on and on, but it’s my area of interest and that’s why I’ve developed myself in it and I can pass it on to others.
