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Cultivating a Sense of Purpose: the Benefits (enough that I got a PhD in it), but throughout my professional career, I have found myself constantly seeking out opportunities to mentor others both within my field and external to it. This has led to the realisation that, for me, mentoring and helping others succeed is profoundly important to me and shapes the decisions I make in my professional and personal life. This acknowledgement of purpose has helped me keep the even keel Dr Burrow describes during the ups and downs of living, especially during a pandemic.
Life in a pandemic can feel like many things, and sometimes all at once, but life in a pandemic can also help us cultivate habits to carry us beyond the crisis. I use the word cultivate intentionally, as does Dr Anthony Burrow, a Cornell psychologist who has spent the last decade researching the role of purpose in our lives. Dr Burrow defines purpose as “an ultimate life aim, or direction for one’s life ... that guides one’s goals.”1 A purposeful life can be defined simply as one in which your daily activities progress you toward those ultimate aims or directions. Psychologists measure sense of purpose by asking people if “they regularly engage in non-trivial, personally meaningful activities in their daily life.”2 Speaking about his research, Dr Burrow explains that people who score high on purpose tend to keep a more even keel in times of stress and in times of joy. Emotions, even good ones, can have negative impacts and purpose seems to be a mitigator to those impacts. Which leads us to the question, how do we cultivate purpose?
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Inside News
Three ways of finding purpose Dr Burrow shares three ways in which people find purpose. The first is through what he terms “proactive pathways”, in which people gravitate toward purpose by way of gradual and sustained interest
"Life in a pandemic can feel like many things, and sometimes all at once, but life in a pandemic can also help us cultivate habits to carry us beyond the crisis." in something. While this pathway is proactive, people may not realise at the beginning of their interest that they have found something which gives them purpose.3 I would identify with this pathway; I have always been interested in space and science communication
A second way of discovering purpose is through what Dr Burrow refers to as “reactive pathways”, where something happened that “calls you into it.”This pathway comes with clarity—you know what seed was planted that cultivated your purpose. Perhaps it was the diagnosis of a loved one with cancer or the joy of a first time you took a new class. Whatever the catalyst, your life begins to orient around that purpose. The last way in which people generally uncover their purpose is through what Dr Burrow terms the “social learning pathway”, where you watch another cultivate purpose and this can lead you toward your own. I immediately think of the late Dr Randy Pausch, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University, who gave a moving 'last lecture' when he was dying of pancreatic cancer. The talk “Really Achieving Your Childhood Dreams” is a moving tribute to living a life with purpose, when you know that life is about to end. Dr Pausch says that life isn’t about achieving goals, but about how you live life because “if you lead your life the right way … the dreams will come to you.”4 Dr Pausch’s words live on today, and are echoed by Dr Burrow who encourages us to ask ourselves: “If a goal can be accomplished, what becomes of you once you’ve accomplished it?”
