Your Priceless Life

When someone says, “Oh, you’re just a big teddy bear!” or, “You’re a gem!” they are using metaphor. As a writer I often employ metaphors, but when I describe myself, I generally identify with human traits, don’t you? During an exercise designed to uncover individual life purpose, one of my colleagues said I was a waterfall. What about me brings to mind rushing water cascading over a cliff?

As I visualized waterfalls in all shapes and locales, I began to think of myself in ways that had not occurred to me previously. Perhaps she meant I was invigoratingly refreshing? A waterfall is constantly moving and changing. It refracts light, creating rainbows in its shower of droplets—just like my namesake, Iris, goddess of the rainbow. A waterfall is a delight to discover, but it can also be as paralyzing as the chill force of brutal honesty once you step into it. Undeniably, it has tremendous power and can be a natural source of energy. After running down the list I thought, all in all, “waterfall” is not a bad metaphor for my life as a coach!

Once I’d contemplated various aspects of waterfalls and put them into writing, I began to get an empowering vision of my life purpose based on what I embody in the world. If I appear to others as a powerful waterfall, then I can harness that energy to empower them as well. Like those who bathe beneath the cold cascade of mountain water, they will bask in the sunshine of their own authenticity and well-being after a refreshing shower of honesty. Thus, the life purpose statement I crafted as a result of the exercise is “I am a dancing waterfall whose invigorating chill awakens who you really are!”

What is your own purpose in life? Have you stopped to wonder, or have you been “doing” life by rote for so long that you’ve forgotten? Having a sense of who we are in the world and what we are about can make it so much easier to navigate a course through all of life’s obstacles. I recently read that boomers face an average of two major life transitions each year. That’s a lot of heavy-duty change—a lot of choices to face, a lot of decisions to be made, many of which we’ve never had to face before. We turn to our spiritual advisors, family and friends to help us wade through these quagmires only to find in the final analysis we must look deep within our own hearts for the answers we seek. If we become clear about our life purpose, the answers will flow with the strength of a waterfall.

If you’ve been out of touch with your own life’s purpose, here are some ways to tune it in:

Ask someone who knows you really well, and who respects you, to describe you in a single word, preferably a noun (person, place or thing). Then, get really curious about the characteristics of what they chose as a symbol for you. What associations can you make between these characteristics and what you already know about yourself? What do those characteristics say about who you are, what qualities you embody and what you have already been doing naturally as an extension of those qualities?

If you were a country of one (imaginary or real), what country would it be? What would your country stand for? Come up with an idea for a simple flag representing your cherished purpose. If you’re good with computerized graphics or a needle and thread, print out or stitch your design. If not, good old-fashioned construction paper and glue make a dandy flag. Hang it somewhere where it will remind you everyday of what you stand for in the world.

Think of an experience or even a dream, in which you felt fully-realized, present and alive. What were you doing? In the case of a dream, who or even what were you? Did you embody your most cherished values at the peak of your experience? If so, create your own metaphor using the following phrase: “I am a ___________, who/that does ___________ .” (Fill in what you are in the world and what your impact is, e.g. I am the sharp stomp of a flamenco dancer that awakens your passions!)

Once you are clear about your life purpose, you will measure every new experience, every proposal, every challenge by a different standard. You may find yourself entertaining a whole new set of possibilities. And if you are contemplating what lies ahead, with clarity of purpose you will understand the legacy you’ll one day leave to inspire loved ones and others.

You know the voice, the one that bellows, “And just who do you think you are, young lady (or young man)?” How many times since you were a child have you heard THAT voice echoing in your head, even though there is no authority figure around to ask you except yourself? And how silly is this “young lady/young man” bit when you’re over 45?

We usually end up listening to these bombastic Saboteurs that live inside our heads, thus, remaining exactly where we’ve been our whole lives. What if we said to them (with just the slightest hint of sarcasm back), “Thanks very much for your concern. Now excuse me if I ignore your vote of non-confidence and continue on with what I was doing.” How DOES one find the guts to deal with the constant barrage of negativity we harbor in our own minds?

At the age of 52, I made plans to move across country from Florida to California and spend more time writing. For years, my Saboteur had told me it wasn’t practical, and on my salary as an administrative assistant, I couldn’t afford it. I agreed. I was a procrastinator anyway, so if I couldn’t achieve my dreams right where I was, I would fail miserably no matter where I went. I meekly endured the litany this purveyor of failure intoned. It went something like this: “Creative people end up as starving artists. You’ll be a bag lady in a city where you don’t know a soul. You haven’t got what it takes to survive on your own…blah, blah, blah.”

Eventually I got brazen enough to say, “Enough!” and contemplated my break for freedom. I awoke every morning with terrifying anxiety as I thought seriously about moving. Then one day as I lay in bed almost crying with the fear my Saboteur had stirred up, I began to envision staying instead of leaving. In that moment I realized, the only thing scarier than following my dreams, was witnessing them die a slow death. And so I began to pamper my dreams and ignore their adversary, my Saboteur. Concerned as he was for my safety and well-being, I still had to kindly tell him repeatedly to get lost.

How did I nurture my dreams? Every day I spent at least an hour of quality time with them, not just envisioning them, but living them vicariously by logging onto an Internet community where I could look for suitable apartments, cool activities, interesting jobs and social connections in the city where I wanted to live. In other words, I gave my dreams real substance until I accepted them as a “done deal.”

So just who DO you think you are? It’s not too late to be it!