How to Navigate Life, page 13
Purpose comes from within us. That is the beauty of the purpose mindset; it takes shape in unique ways for each of us. It’s our job as educators, parents, and mentors to scaffold students in discovering their purpose for themselves.
Asking the right question at a moment in time when a student is brave enough to ponder the answer is at the heart of impactful mentoring.
5
Needs in the World
Play your part by meeting the Big Five Needs.
Don’t ask yourself what the world needs; ask yourself what makes you come alive, and then go do that. Because what the world needs are people who are alive.
—HOWARD THURMAN
Being of Service
Using our strengths and skills in a way that aligns with our values is how we do life. The fifth and final principle of purpose is what we do with life. Specifically, what will be our contribution? What positive impact will we make? What will we leave behind? What will be our legacy? In psychology, this intention goes by many names. It’s an other-oriented, prosocial, or noble purpose. We refer to it as being of service. It’s about honoring your interests, strengths, and skills by applying them toward a need in the world. It’s what sets the purpose mindset apart from “just me” performance and passion mindsets. “Make yourself successful” (performance mindset). “Make yourself happy” (passion mindset). Exhausting and insatiable self-occupations.
The purpose mindset frees us from that rat race. The voice of purpose says, “No more scampering up the ladder toward these imaginary targets. No more feeding a bottomless pit.”
You might be wondering whether “purposeful service” is just another burden to shoulder. Off comes the weight of making yourself successful and happy, and on comes the weight of serving others. How is that freedom?
We were made for this—that’s how. When we’re working toward goals that meet real needs in the world, our lives make sense. We have reasons to get up in the morning. The tools we’ve been given (i.e., strengths, skill sets, motivations/values) feel useful. When our work matters, we feel we matter. Whether we’re contributing to a social cause, helping our families and communities to thrive, or making the world more livable and beautiful by protecting the environment or cultivating the arts.
Students in Belle’s research studies have described this intention to make a personally meaningful contribution in a variety of ways. Tania described inspiring youths in her marginalized community as the reason behind her business aspirations: “I want children who come after me, from the youngest one, not to just look at me but to look at others as well so that we can be real models for them to press on.” Antoine described his desire to leave a legacy as an engineer: “to build something that the world will remember. Something that will stick for a long time. Years. Decades, even … Because for a product to stick around that long, you have to have changed a lot in how we live our lives … which is, in the end, one of the main goals for almost any engineer.”
A question that’s often raised is whether purposeful service is a luxury for privileged people whose own needs have already been met. Are less-privileged people, with their limited opportunities and practical concerns like day-to-day survival, less purposeful? Are they less generous because they have less to give? No. Studies show that a commitment to contribute is highly prevalent among marginalized young people.1 This may be because marginalized youth have done the work of self-reflection to make meaning of their marginalization or adversity. With reflection comes insights into the connections between themselves and other people and systems. And these insights lead to an awareness of their purpose. For example, students often take on civic purposes that redress the very social ills they’ve experienced.2
Young people are stereotyped as “vulnerable and flawed”—as problems to be fixed. But it’s time to see them more accurately. Even the most disadvantaged young people can be supported to help themselves and others. They have the “capacity to change their own behavior, develop new cognitive and behavioral skills, cultivate different interests, and establish new social relationships.” They have the power to “shape policies, cultural practices, and social norms” that affect them.3
Throughout the generations, purposeful students have driven major social transformations. Four college freshmen in the 1960s led the first civil rights sit-ins. Child coal miners in 1903 marched from Philadelphia to New York to protest child labor. Students in Tiananmen Square in 1989 fought for greater freedoms and democratic reforms. High schoolers in 2018 helped to reform gun laws. In the most critical crises of the day—including equity, democracy, diversity, and violence—youths are the sparks that keep society moving forward.
Living out purpose doesn’t require doing great or extraordinary things in the eyes of others. Purpose comes alive in the small moments of everyday life. It’s giving a heartfelt compliment, sending a thoughtful text to a childhood friend, or offering a well-timed hug in a moment of distress.
The secret of giving is that it’s often the best way to help ourselves. Compared with their peers, students who are driven by the intention to contribute beyond themselves have a greater sense of self-efficacy and perform better.4 Among urban, low-income youth, commitment to serve others is correlated with increased academic motivation and engagement in school. When adolescents and young adults have “self-transcending” purposes for learning in the classroom, they have higher levels of self-regulation and persistence, and get better grades. More self-oriented motives for learning, like wanting an enjoyable or interesting career, did not produce the same benefits.5
These benefits extend to the workplace as well. People who focus on helping other people in their jobs, like a mortgage broker who helps a family buy their first home, or a preschool teacher who helps kids learn to read, are happier, healthier, more likely to be employed with higher salaries, and more productive.6 In one study, salespeople who were asked to reflect on how their job helped other people generated 50 percent more annual revenue than those who were not asked.7 Similarly, people who volunteer are less depressed, more satisfied with their lives, and happier on a day-to-day basis. Research shows that volunteering is correlated with a 44 percent lower mortality rate.8
Organizations driven by such purpose also excel. Over a ten-year period, businesses whose primary motives were to make a social impact outperformed those on the S&P 500 by 400 percent.9 In short, doing good for others improves your mental and physical health, your performance, and your relationships, as well.
Built for Good
Biology explains why giving is so beneficial. The ventral striatum (VS), reward center of the brain, gets increasingly engaged when people contribute to others. Activating the VS also reduces stress and ultimately improves psychological and physical health. Compared to a control group, adolescents randomly assigned to provide companionship and support to the elderly had lower circulating levels of inflammation, a marker of various chronic health problems.10 Contributing to others on a daily basis also improves adolescents’ moods, especially among those struggling with depression.11
Being of service impacts not just our bodies, but our brains as well. Striving to meet others’ needs fulfills our own psychological needs for relatedness, competence, and autonomy. When we intentionally contribute to the lives of others, we’re connecting with them. We’re gaining a sense of efficacy that fuels competence. And we’re acting out of agency and autonomy. We’re also feeding our need to belong by playing our parts.
Contribution and giving have effects on adolescents that go way beyond traditional developmental tasks such as identity and intimacy. They promote a sense of purpose and generosity more than any other activity. “Making an impact in the world” or “leaving a legacy for future generations” are themes that adolescents consistently mention when reflecting on their hopes and aspirations. We often associate these themes with people entering middle age or beyond, but actually they start mattering during adolescence.
How Self-Reflection Makes Us Generous
Research shows that we are hardwired to do good in the world. The challenge is in discovering the type of service that best suits us. How do we decide what needs we want to commit to addressing in the world? Where does the desire to help others come from?
Two major sources of the drive to do good are adversity and advantages. These two sides of the coin—extreme negative and positive experiences—shape our identities. Both provide deep insight needed to serve others in a way that reflects our own lived experiences. The first has to do with personal hardships—our troubles, mistakes, wrong turns.
Why in the world would we want to spend even a second longer than we have to thinking about adversities? Because hidden in them are clues to our purpose—the change we want to effect in the world.
Adversity
Every generation has walked through pain and adversity. Every individual, family, culture, and society. We inhabit imperfect, mortal bodies and minds, on a vacillating planet with unchecked injustice. Sometimes we reap what we sow, and sometimes we reap what others sow. There are different reasons each person suffers, but we are united in suffering.
Suffering is not a good thing. As therapists, mentors, and parents, we try to help our students become aware of and avoid the unintentional things they do that add unnecessary suffering to their lives. We are very eager to help with that!
But not even the best therapy, mentoring, and parenting can create a suffering-free, perfected life. Try as we might, there isn’t a way to help our people sidestep the painful stuff that is the price of admission to the human condition. The loss of loved ones. The breakdown of physical bodies. The inevitability of failures and frustrations. The injustices of people and systems that remain broken. The impossibility of constant bliss. We can try to avoid our painful feelings toward these unavoidable experiences, but they happen to us nonetheless.
Before we say another word, we must insert several crucial caveats. First, we strongly caution against minimizing or putting a Pollyanna spin on your (and your students’) pain. Youth who’ve suffered environmental adversity—such as poverty, mistreatment, or a tragic loss—have an increased risk of mental and physical health problems, poor school performance, and relationship difficulties.12 Chronic negative experiences and emotions can spiral into serious psychiatric problems, including post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Eight to ten million people in the United States are diagnosed with PTSD, and many more go undiagnosed. So we are definitely not suggesting that adversity is good. Nor are we suggesting that we should be less sensitive to the effects of trauma and adversity on young people, believing that these are “the very experiences embedded in daily life that they need in order to become strong and healthy.”13
Freud explained that the goal of analysis/therapy is to help people overcome “neurotic misery” so that they can face “normal human unhappiness.”14 Since some amount of suffering and adversity is built into life, the goal of therapy isn’t to try to escape it, but to learn how to respond to it. To learn to bear it. Address it. Move through it. And often to even be a part of the solution on a larger scale.
Fortunately, 90 percent of people who experience trauma will not experience PTSD.15 What’s more, many people report experiencing post-traumatic growth (PTG) in the aftermath of adverse life events. PTG is a positive psychological change resulting from adversity that leads to a level of functioning higher than that pre-adversity. Out of stress exposure can emerge resilience,16 and the motivation to make a meaningful contribution in the world. People with the greatest empathy and compassion for others in need are the ones who’ve experienced the most severe stress and adversity.17 And it’s this compassion that leads them to altruistic acts.18 When people have survived acute stress or suffering, they’re a lot more trusting, trustworthy, open to sharing, and altruistic.19 “Survivor mission” is that phenomenon of helping others who’ve experienced something similar to our own adversity.20 Every day, people are converting the pain and suffering they’ve experienced from their own adversity into a will to help others.
People who’ve experienced post-traumatic growth aren’t glad about their losses or crises. But they do recognize that they’ve been changed in meaningful ways. These “changes” occur in five areas:
Possibilities: A sense that new opportunities have emerged from the struggle.
Relationships: Closer relationships with people, or a greater sense of connection with others who are suffering.
Strength: A sense that they are stronger than they thought. “If I lived through that, I can face anything.”
Gratitude: A greater appreciation for life.
Spiritual growth: A change in beliefs about life and purpose.
The Rose That Grows from Concrete
These personal changes grow into a desire to create change beyond oneself. When people reflect on their experiences of adversity, stressors, or problems, it can clarify how they want to serve.21 This critical reflection is an opportunity to sharpen a sense of the purpose elements. Wanting to commit to a purpose mindset. Wanting to play growth games even when competing in fixed games. Leaning in to mastering skills and roles. Adding their value where it’s needed most. And knowing where they will make their contribution.
That said, the journey from adversity to purposeful service is not a cakewalk. It must be fought for. It involves navigating the brambles of cynicism, fear, anger, and shame in the world. While there is no cookie-cutter road map, we provide a general guide informed by research in resilience and post-traumatic growth.
Recovery and resiliency involve coming to terms with our adversities, including making meaning of our experiences, and bringing all of our personal experiences, including unresolved and challenging ones, to bear in helping and healing others. Cultivating a desire to contribute begins in our minds. Shapes our expectations. Crystalizes through our words. And eventually breaks through to our actions. You can tell when you come across someone who’s gone through this process. You see emotional freedom and generosity. Elisabeth Kübler-Ross wrote: “The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.”22
All this points to a profound truth: adversities often activate personal growth and purpose. This certainly does not mean that a student who has sailed through life with a supportive home environment and little struggle is doomed to lack purpose. Tedeschi and Calhoun emphasize that personal growth after trauma should be viewed as originating not from the event, but from within individuals themselves through their process of grappling with the event and its meaning.23 Those without trauma can grapple with suffering in the world as well if they have other motivations for doing so, such as an awareness of suffering and healthy empathy.
Students who feel disempowered or come from underprivileged backgrounds have some of the highest levels of empathy and compassionate behavior on a daily basis.24 Marginalization is tied to increased stress and adversity and, in turn, reflection on these experiences. Reflecting on stress and adversity is tied to developing a sense of purpose.25 People from impoverished and war-torn countries, as well as those who have survived traumatic events like natural disasters, are most likely to report a sense of purpose.26 Within the United States, too, those who come from poverty, or have been affected by crimes or homelessness, are more likely to consider their life purpose.27 In sum, experiencing adversity makes us think about life more. The more we think about our lives, the more likely we are to find purpose in them.
As we’ve written, people are not glad for their experiences of marginalization, trauma, or systemic racism. And we must fight for systemic changes, not just help people cope better. Still, we’re left with the findings that adversity informs purpose, and can catalyze a desire to meet needs. Clearly, students are change agents. Not just problems to be fixed.
Our research and work with students documents their journeys as change agents who heal, fix, and crush the very adversities that have hurt them. They become experts in their own adversity. We see their wisdom, insight, and compassion as they tackle personal and systemic adversity. They listen. They express compassion. They advocate. They take action. They point out systemic injustices to be addressed by policy change. They understand they’re not responsible for abolishing the social ills that have harmed them. But they seek to be part of the solution and call others to do the same.
The Examined Life
Adversity changes how we view ourselves, other people, and the world we live in. And this changed view has a special impact on our principles of purpose. Adversity can crystalize our authentic core values, uncover our unique strengths and skills, and compel us to go beyond ourselves and help others. Adversity doesn’t just cause a psychological or spiritual response that cultivates purpose. It creates a biological response that readies us for purpose as well.
Our main biological response to adversity is stress. And we tend to view stress as a very “bad” thing. This culturally bound take on stress calls to mind the “fight-or-flight” response. We think of pounding hearts. Rapid breathing. Bodies trembling. Pupils dilating. All the signs that we’re preparing to fight or run for our lives.
But there’s more to “fight or flight.” And it’s important to understand the other parts of the picture.28 Stress in and of itself is not a bad thing. It can help us rise to a challenge by amping up our physical and psychological capacities. It can spur us to strengthen our support networks. It can change the way we see ourselves, or our view of what’s important in life.
