Weaving your purpose in the world- thread by thread.
“Let yourself be silently drawn by the strange pull of what you really love. It will not lead you astray.”
Finding purpose is like weaving. First you need to find your warp threads.
Weaving involves using a loom to interlace two sets of threads at right angles to each other: the warp which runs longitudinally and the weft that crosses it (Wikepedia)
Living-on purpose is much like the process of weaving. Like in the picture above, first you need to discover your warp threads, or the threads of purpose, around which you can start weaving.
Purpose is not a single idea but is made up of multiple threads, that represent the things we love and care about the most. Some times we have to look hard to see the threads hidden underneath the edifice of the life we have built. Sometimes we drop a thread and come back to it later in life.
“Living on purpose is becoming more of who you are and less of who you are not” Holly Woods
There are books, programs and vision quests promising us, invoking us to find our purpose. Have you ever completed one of these and still not found your purpose? If so, you haven’t failed, but you will have started the process of looking for those threads.
Discovering purpose is an alchemical process that has no hard and fast rules or timelines. You simply start by gathering your warp threads. You might even start weaving, and find that your fabric feels a bit lifeless or is missing something. Then one day you might find the missing thread or someone brings it to you, and you find yourself weaving a beautiful fabric in the slipstream of purpose.
You will find ideas for ways to find your own threads of purpose at the end of this blog, in the meantime, read on if you’re curious to learn more about the process of weaving your purpose in the world.
The golden thread of purpose
Is there a golden thread of pupose?
Holly Woods, suggests in her book the Golden Thread, that there is a single thread of purpose that runs through the stages of our life. It’s there all along. We can’t always see it, but it’s the thread that keeps pulling us towards what we just can’t not do.
When I thought about this, I couldn’t recognise a singe thread in my life, but the notion of something we can’t not do, took me back to a conversation in a cafe a few years earlier
I was chatting with a fellow coach, bemoaning the challenges of trying to make a real difference in the world and make a sustainable income, when she made one of those clever coaching moves that we call holding up the mirror. “Why does the way you earn your income have to be the way you make a difference in the world?” she asked. “You could just as well do that outside of work.” I remember looking at her blankly. Whilst what she was saying was perfectly true and made sense, somehow in my brain, in my being, I couldn’t compute this. I went away wondering why I made my life so complicated.
So when I read Holly’s book, I realised the thing I can’t not do is earn money in a way that isn’t contributing (in some way) towards making the world a better place. It was no wonder I’d called my business Do What Matters!
You need more than one thread to weave a fabric. So if that was my golden thread, I still needed to find others. So how do you spot these threads?
The peripheral vision test.
There’s no big neon sign pointing out your purpose.
Spotting the warp threads is a bit like when you go to the optometrist and do that peripheral vision test. You look forward at a screen and you have to press a button when you see a dot of light. Some are in front of you, but the point is to spot those that appear just at the edge of your peripheral vision.
Similarly, threads of purpose might reveal themselves in the form of recurring ideas, momentary insights, embodied reactions or shifts in energy. The trick is to slow down or get quiet enough to notice and pay attention to these subtle messages appearing in our peripheral vision.
Let me bring this to life with my own story over the last couple of years, The process was messy, full of the unexpected and definitely not linear. It involved two parallel lines of inquiry: one more outwards focused and the other more inwards.
The Outward Inquiry: What does the world needs now and what’s the unique contribution you can make?
Weirdly, I started fantasying about working in a cafe
In my previous blog, I wrote about the struggle to find the work that matters, in the blizzard of the world. It was a long and often painful process, through which two threads kept appearing. I wanted to work with change makers and young people. Also, I wanted to be working with people and organisations who are disrupting the old and paving new ways forward. Moving away from ‘business as usual’. So reshaping business, economics and society became another thread.
Finding this clarity involves finding the courage to say no, overcoming doubt and limiting beliefs, and rewriting the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and who we are not.
The inward inquiry: What feels meaningful (or not) to you in the day to day?
As a Map of Meaning certified practitioner, I have my own meaning practice, by which I pay attention to what feels meaningful and what feels meaningless in my day-to-day experience over time. After years of working from home, I noticed that I often found myself craving for a team or an office to go to. I found myself feeling envious of people who had a ‘normal job’ and started wondering if I should just pack it all in and work in a cafe where I’d see lots of people every day. I was tired of having to summon up high levels of self-motivation and make the endless micro-decisions that self-employment requires.
Of course, deep down I knew that I didn’t want a ‘proper job’, an office or a boss. I love the freedom of being self-employed. What I was yearning for was ‘collective action’ towards a shared purpose. I was craving the buzz, inspiration and energy I get from being with people, and the sense of community and belonging that comes from building relationships regularly over time. So after years of working internationally (which meant either lots of climate-unfriendly travel or time spent on zoom), now was the time to connect with my local community.
A bunch of ingredients without a recipe.
So, towards the end of last year I had identified the following threads:
Change makers
Young people
Reshaping business, economics & society
Collective action
Local community
Yet, I still didn’t know what fabric I would end up weaving. I was like a contestant on Ready-Steady-Cook, with a bunch of ingredients and no recipe!
Start weaving with the threads you already have
Despite not quite knowing how it would all turn out, I started weaving with what I had. I was prototyping ways to bring these different threads together, and testing how strong they were. I ran a development program on Meaning, Purpose and Impact for 8 young people, including 6th formers from 3 local community colleges. I did pro-bono work as a coach and facilitator for Citizens Brighton & Hove, an alliance of local community organisations making a difference through collective action. I facilitated a purpose discovery process for a pioneering local integrated health centre and hosted a retreat for local NHS workers to reconnect with self and each other, and sustain meaning in a system pushed beyond it’s limits.
Through these prototypes, I learnt more about myself and the work I found meaningful and built new relationships in my local community.
Picking up a dropped thread
Towards the end of year, I surprised myself by saying in a conversation with a mentor ‘What if I didn’t just help other change-makers? What if I was the change maker?’.
Back in my twenties, I fancied myself as a fair-trade entrepreneur. I wrote various business plans, none of which ever got it off the ground. Perhaps it was too much of a departure from what I knew, and I was too risk averse. I ended up creating consultancy to support fair trade organisations. It was unsurprisingly short-lived as few fair-trade start ups had money to pay for consultants!
Yet, here I was again, 25 years on talking about being a change-maker. The idea of picking up this dropped thread from earlier in life was both exciting and absurd in equal measure. I didn’t even have a specific idea of the change I could make!
Yet, within days of having that insight, as if finding that missing thread was all that was needed, a number of things came together at once.
I was reflecting on one of the prototypes, the development program for 6th form students, and wondering how to encourage them to find meaning in becoming change-makers rather than contributors to the status quo.
Then I opened an email from my son’s 6th form college, reminding me that he must complete a mandatory week of work experience in July (part of an initiative to bridge the skills gap and prepare young people for the world of work). Students were expected to find their own placements.
And that is the moment the light bulb went off. Reading that email revealed the fabric that I needed to start weaving.
Weaving in the slipstream of purpose
Weaving the fabric of purpose
In that very moment my social innovation project was born. After months of hesitation and prevarication, suddenly there was a solid kind of certainty. Just 4 weeks on, the Brighton Meaningful Futures Work Experience Week (working name) is already underway. The concept is “To provide Y12 students (16-17 year olds) with work experience opportunities (during work experience week) in local organisations who are all working towards better futures (circular, regenerative, equitable, community-based) within a wider futures-literacy & life-skills learning experience”.
The pilot will be this year and three colleges are signed up. I am experiencing the energy, flow, alignment and synchronicities that you read about in other people’s books about purpose. I’ve been weaving at pace, carried in the slipstream of purpose. I’ll write more about this in my next blog, and share what I am learning about weavership.
Ways to find your own purpose threads
If you are keen to begin identifying your purpose threads, I suggest finding ways to slow down enough to be able to listen and notice who you really are in the world and who you no longer want to be. Do things that help you broaden out your vision, away from what’s immediately in front of you e.g. journaling, taking time in nature, reading, if possible taking a break from work, join new networks, finding ways to prototype the new.
Treat yourself to a Circle of Trust™ Retreat.
A weekend retreat: The Heart of What Matters: Making Meaning in a Time of Crisis
I attended two of these retreats last year. They provide a unique space to go within and listen to your inner teacher based on a distinctive set of principles and practices, pioneered by Dr. Parker J. Palmer and developed through the Center for Courage & Renewal, On 12-14th July 2024 in Sussex UK join me with John Watters a facilitator from the Center for Courage and Renewal for a special retreat.
Walk the universe!
6-8th Sept 2024, a weekend Universe Walk with Greg Morter
Last July I experienced a Universe Walk. We walk 13.8km of beautiful Somerset countryside where every metre is a million years in time.
Your guide Greg Morter expertly weaves the science of the universe into the walk. This experience of deep time is certainly mind-bending and can be life changing!
Click on the link below for more info. If you book, do let them know I referred you (and no I don’t get a kick-back!).
Explore your own Map of Meaning.
If you want to discover the threads to start weaving more meaning into your life and work, I’d love to work with you. You will discover your own sources of meaning in life and work and understand the dynamics and everyday tensions that cause meaning to get lost.
Find out more about my coaching sessions, meaning walks, and online courses on my website or sign up now for a free, no strings attached, exploratory call.
It all starts with a conversation!