Man’s Search for Meaning – Viktor FranklĪt the top of my list (and many others of its kind) is Man’s Search for Meaning: The Classic Tribute to Hope from the Holocaust (Frankl, 1946, 2004). Altruism: The Science and Psychology of Kindness – Matthieu Ricardġ. The Power of Now: A Guide to Spiritual Enlightenment – Eckhart Tolle Aristotle’s Way: How Ancient Wisdom Can Change Your Life – Edith Hall The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living – Dalai Lama and Howard C. These creative, science-based exercises will help you learn more about your values, motivations, and goals and will give you the tools to inspire a sense of meaning in the lives of your clients, students, or employees. I hope you will find it enlightening.īefore you continue, we thought you might like to download our three Meaning and Valued Living Exercises for free. The list below includes thinkers from both sides of the argument. Other common suggestions include self-realization, relationships, pleasure, service, and creativity. The most cited contenders are happiness and love. But they tend to disagree on what that meaning might be. Others maintain that there is an absolute meaning to our existence. The meaning of life, they argue, is a subjective affair. Some believe that life has no intrinsic meaning and that we must construct our meanings ourselves. Many thinkers, past and present, have grappled with it (Baggini, 2005 & Eagleton, 2007.)īroadly speaking, the theorists of meaning fall into two camps. There is no more important topic than the meaning of our lives. You can also download this exercise as a PDF.What aims should we pursue to live a fulfilling life? Trigger #3 _Age _Īdapted with permission of Inventure-The Purpose Company ( 2013. Focus on each of these life lessons-what did they teach you, and how did they change you? Can you gauge from this exercise where you are in your life today and where you’d like to be by the end of it? What would a life well lived look like? Seeing your life in this broader perspective can help identify what is meaningful and valuable to you.What was the life lesson learned in each case? Write down the age each trigger took place. These could be any major life events, breakthroughs or breakdowns, such as weddings, divorces, moves, losses, career changes, etc. Record three trigger experiences that shaped your life story.How far along are you in this life? What feelings does this evoke? Mark the place on the spiral which represents your current age. At the top, write the age you think you will live to be. At the bottom of the spiral, write your date of birth. This is the secret to a fully alive life: to reframe our life questions over and over.Īs we do, at different stages of our lives, we find different questions and different possibilities. But this can also prompt physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual transitions and even sometimes a chaotic period as we begin to ask new questions. Moving into new chambers opens up the way for new possibilities to emerge, allowing our life purpose to evolve. They begin to ask what they can do to expand their space. Likewise, as people grow into a different phase of life, their old chambers can feel cramped. Our life can be seen as a nautilus that adds new chambers to its shell as it grows and needs more space. (Sharon Daloz Parks calls these events “life’s shipwrecks.”) Questions about life purpose may arise at any time in life, but you may notice that they are especially prevalent during times of transition or crisis-for example, a career or educational change, personal loss, or long-distance move.
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