16 Mar Creating a Life for You That Has Meaning To You

The problem with coming to know your purpose is that you have to have done some work to get to know yourself first. Getting to know yourself however, comes in different shapes and sizes. 

For me, I had the backdrop of some lived experience. I had raised four kids, been married for decades, lived in more than one country, lived in different geographies within the countries I had lived in and had many different jobs doing a variety of different things. At the time all this mishmash served to weigh down my deflated self-esteem and added to my internal narrative of a dysfunctional life. Which while not entirely untrue I didn’t realise just how much these base products could later be alchemised into precious metals.

I hit a point of profound failure, my marriage was on shaky ground, my family showing signs of imploding and I found myself in the fight of my life to hang on to everything I held dear. 

During this time, the need for clarity of purpose became acute, I no longer had the option of dabbling with a variety of options, and additionally the intensity of the trials I was experiencing had eliminated a host of distractions. 

My energy and time if I was going to survive had to have focus, I had made promises I had every intention to keep, all aspects of my journey I realise now had been leading up to this point and something deeper than the conscious me wanted me to stay alive long enough to experience it.

Four things emerged, coaching, writing, designing and art. It would have been disingenuous of me to simply try to do just one of these. However, evolving into all four seemed like a lot. However, over the months that proceeded I was able to see the ways in which these roles tie into each other and can feed off each other weaving a tapestry for a lifestyle for me which has meaning to me.

This is what The Idea of a Man™ is all about. Each of us as men discovering how we can build lives for us which actually have meaning to us. 

We underestimate the power of meaning. When our lives feel meaningless we so often get caught up in stupid shit. I’m not just talking about knuckle heads, I’m talking about respectable appearing blokes. Dudes with responsibilities, roles and positions. 

Doing all the stuff you’re supposed to do but not what you were born to do is a recipe for boredom and unfulfillment. And the question we must ask is; ‘how do we anaesthetise  that pain’. 

Un-anaesthetised pain just becomes more profound until we are forced to pay attention. Ignoring our Souls causes this kind of pain. Our bodies keep the score, we feel it in the tension in our muscles, the excess weight from over consumption of food or alcohol, we develop habits and addictions and all the while the journey ‘within’ beckons.  

Our purpose is not a mystery, it’s probably something which some part of you does occasionally already or used to do before life got in the way. Maybe it slips out at odd moments. For me I suppose I have always coached people even though I was probably the one needing the coaching. When I sat down to write; paragraphs, sentences and narratives just flowed out. I’ve been redesigning everything around me in my head since I was a kid and when I had no other way to create art my creativity came out making meals for my wife and my family. 

Therefore, It wasn’t a stretch, I just had to acknowledge and recognise ‘for this I came’.