Purposeful: A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Clear Direction in a Chaotic World

by John Carroll

Overview

Author John Carroll's upbringing in war-torn Africa, personal tragedy, chronic illness, and business success in three continents have made him a passionate and hugely successful developer of people. In Purposeful, he shares the strategies he uses to help others become their best selves.

Using a step-by-step approach, this guide teaches you a proven process for gaining a deep understanding of yourself, a good sense of the purpose and direction you want in life, and how to become the sort of person you want and need to be to live that way. John reveals the three foundational principles of purposeful living that will help you take control of your own life rather than letting life and other people control you.

Including action guides and exercises, Purposeful outlines the steps to help you live a fulfilled life--a life of purpose, direction, and meaning--whatever that is for you. It's about living the sort of life you want to live by being the sort of person you want to be.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781504304139
Publisher:	Balboa Press Australia
Publication date:	09/19/2016
Pages:	172
Product dimensions:	5.00(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.40(d)

Read an Excerpt

Purposeful

A Step-by-Step Guide to Finding Clear Direction in a Chaotic World

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By John Carroll

Balboa Press

Copyright © 2016 John Carroll
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5043-0413-9

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CHAPTER 1

PRINCIPLE ONE

~HAVE CLEAR PURPOSE ~

What's Important?

Shortly before we left Zimbabwe for Australia, I was doing some consultancy work for the Meikles Hotel in Harare, the capital city. Meikles is a five star hotel that has been listed in the Leading Hotels of the World for many years.

I was running leadership training and coaching for the hotel's management team. One morning I received a phone call from one of the managers.

"John, could you come in and see me this morning? I've had one of our janitorial staff resign and I'd like to get your opinion on how to handle it."

When I arrived, the manager told me that Samson, the man who'd resigned, was one of their longest serving staff members. His main role was in garbage collection and cleaning of the hotel's open areas. Early each morning he also cleaned and re-filled the sand ashtrays outside the lifts on each floor (you could smoke in hotels in those days). He then imprinted the hotel's symbol, a large "M", with a metal stamp in the smoothed-out sand in each ashtray. He took great pride in his work, was trustworthy and reliable.

"Just last week I told him I'm promoting him to porter," said the manager. "He'll get much higher pay. I can't understand why he's resigned."

I suggested we go and speak to Samson. We found him in the hotel basement, just packing up to go home at the end of his shift. I greeted him and he returned the greeting, his round, open face creased in a smile. He was a typical Mashona man. (The Mashona are the main indigenous tribe in Zimbabwe.)

"Samson," I said, "I believe you've resigned. You've been here at Meikles for fifteen years. What made you want to leave now?"

He looked down at the floor and shook his head. "Ah, sah," he replied in his Shona-accented English, "I am very sad for this. I very happy here. But they want me to be porter now. That means I must work from 8.00am to 5.00pm five days each week. For now, I work 4.00am to 10.00am six days each week. That is much better. I can be finish work by 10.00am and have plenty time with my wife and childrens. If I be porter, not so much time with wife and childrens.

That is no good for me."

"But you'll get a lot more pay as a porter," I said.

"And it's a much better position in the hotel."

"Yes, sah. But the pay is no problem for me. I have enough money for what I need. This is okay for me. And I try very hard to be good cleaner. I am liking this job. To be porter ... Aah ..." He shook his head sadly.

The manager and I went back to his office to discuss what to do. In the end, Samson kept his job and his hours as a cleaner, with a good increase in wages for his ongoing excellent performance. Someone else was found to fill the porter position and everyone was happy.

It was a salutary lesson for me. We are not all driven by the same things. We have differing views on what's important in life. For Samson, it was his family.

They took precedence over money, so long as he had enough money to live a reasonable life. Others would have jumped at the opportunity for an increased wage and the upgrade in status from cleaner to porter.

We all need to understand what truly drives us, what life is about for us. Most of us seldom, if ever, think about it. But we should.

Determining Direction

When you're building a house, it's very important to have a solid foundation. So before launching into the big question of the driving purpose of your life, there are a couple of key building blocks that need to be in place first. So let's discuss those.

By the way, we're not actually going to try to solve the age-old mystery of the "meaning of life". We're just going to look at what you want your life to be about. That's completely do-able and hugely important if you want to have a fulfilling life. How can you feel fulfilled in life if you don't know what makes you feel fulfilled and don't live in a way that delivers that?

But one thing is very important to remember:

The direction you're heading in is more important than how you will get there.

In Man's Search for Meaning, Viktor Frankl wrote about the mindset of those who would survive through the hell of a Nazi concentration camp:

"It did not really matter what we expected from life, but rather what life expected from us. We needed to stop asking about the meaning of life, and instead to think of ourselves as those who were being questioned by life – daily and hourly. Our answer must consist, not in talk and meditation, but in right action and in right conduct. Life ultimately means taking the responsibility to find the right answer to its problems and to fulfil the tasks which it constantly sets for each individual."

What he's suggesting is that it's more about what life expects from us, rather than what we should expect from life. We need to understand that we are not victims of life; we are challenged by life, and to be successful we must act the right way to meet those challenges.

Most of us, particularly in the First World, won't face anything like the horror of a Nazi concentration camp. And paradoxically that can be a challenge in itself because very often the less we're challenged the harder it can be to succeed. If you never face truly testing issues in life — no life-threatening illnesses, no major trauma or unexpected tragedy, no do-or-die situations, no threats of possibly losing everything — it's very easy to stick to the routine of just getting by within your comfort zone.

And that can mean you don't learn to take risks, because even the smallest risk becomes a scary thought, something you're not sure you could deal with. So you stick to that comfort zone and perhaps only realise very late in life that you've got through by avoiding situations that might upset the status quo of what seems to be a comfortable existence.

The problem is that all too often a risk-free life can be an unfulfilling life. And all too often people don't admit to themselves that they feel unfulfilled until it's too late. I think there's far more regret in a life lived too safely than in a life lived more fully though trial, failure, the development of resilience, learning and, ultimately, a real sense of purpose and meaning.

A risk-avoiding life can mean never knowing what might have been, because you didn't really try. It can mean, as has happened in a number of Western countries, the rise of the "nanny state" – over-control and over-regulation to force the nation's citizens to avoid risk. It can mean misleading people into believing they're unable to cope with even relatively minor trauma without help and professional intervention. It can mean that too many people come to believe that the government, and/or some other body, is responsible for their wellbeing and for their happiness. Self-responsibility goes out the window and a finger-pointing, litigious society takes control because someone else must always be to blame.

And that leads to a nation of people with diminished resilience and reduced self-confidence, accompanied by a loss of meaning and purpose. If we believe we are not responsible for ourselves, that we can't cope with the ups and downs that are a normal part of life, that others control what our lives are really about, how we can we feel good about ourselves? How can we feel that our lives matter? How can we respect ourselves? How can we feel needed? How can we feel that our lives have some significance in this world?

Without those crucial feelings of self-responsibility and self-worth (the two terms are inextricably linked), we end up taking one of two paths in life:

1. We let our perceived inability to cope and our feelings of low significance become reflected in a sinking mental state – then depression becomes rife, other mental illnesses sky-rocket and suicide rates climb.

2. Or we seek fulfilment in inappropriate ways – then sociopathic tendencies become more common, crime rates rise and young people turn to extremism. Anything to try to fulfil that basic human need for meaning and purpose.

Either path could lead us into a whole new, very lengthy discussion, so we won't go there in this book. The point is, it's how we meet whatever level of challenge we are faced with in any given situation that both shows and determines the sort of person we are, because our actions influence our self-perceptions and vice versa.

So if we know what sort of person we are, or want to be, before the challenge arises, we have a far better chance of rising to meet the challenge. And, believe me, most people are capable of meeting pretty tough challenges – I've seen it happen many times. More than that, knowing what sort of person we are, or want to be, gives us a sense of meaning and purpose, something to strive for on a daily basis. It's a way of keeping ourselves on track, being in control rather than just allowing life and other people to control us.

Knowing what sort of person we are, or want to be, at the core is what gives our life a broad sense of direction. And that's what differentiates the successful, fulfilled person from the person who lives a less meaningful life of safety and comfort, perhaps to spend their later years in bitterness or regret.

Values and Principles – Your Personal Code of Conduct

The sort of person you are, your character, is wrapped up in the values and principles you subscribe to and by which you live your life. I'm talking about really core values and principles. I don't mean just the clichéd, lip-service values people say they subscribe to, like "honesty" or "I always tell the truth". You might genuinely try not to tell big porkies, but no one always tells the truth. And anyway, I believe you can sometimes do more harm than good by always telling the absolute truth. Sometimes you're better to either say nothing or to tell a little white lie. People who say they pride themselves on always being brutally frank are usually the sort of people who hurt a lot of other people, because all too often they say stuff that doesn't need to be said.

I know there will be some people who will say it's okay to hurt others sometimes, that people just need to toughen up. While there's some truth in that — many of us do need to toughen up and stop being so sensitive, especially in this over-politically correct world — you can go too far with this approach to life. I once worked with a woman who frequently quoted and lived by the Adolf Hitler adage (subsequently adopted by a few other politicians): "If you're not making enemies, you're not doing it right." As a result she set out to push, bulldoze and bully her way to get whatever she wanted out of any given situation regardless of the feelings, wishes and desires of anyone else. She did a great job of making enemies wherever she went. The outcome for her was not good. She was okay until someone was prepared to stand up to her bullying and take her on. Then she came crashing down and lost her position and her opportunity to continue to work in a role she had devoted a lot of time to for a number of years.

You shouldn't be a pushover. Sometimes you need to stand up and be counted. And it's important to realise that in many situations you won't be able to please everyone. But I will strongly argue the case against the need to make enemies. You can achieve a great deal more if you set out to be kind and considerate to others rather than riding roughshod over everyone in your path. You don't always have to agree, but you don't need to be disagreeable.

So you need to develop a moral compass to guide the way you behave. Defining your core values and principles is a good place to start. The values and principles I'm talking about is the stuff that, deep down in your gut, you know is really important to you. These are the sort of things that if you break them, your actions will make you feel bad about yourself.

When I was living in England in my late twenties, I was offered an opportunity to make a huge amount of money very easily. It could have set me up for life. The problem was that it would have involved me being a key part of an illegal, fraudulent scheme to get control of some investments owned by a man who couldn't be traced by the bank that I was doing some temporary work for at the time. No relatives could be found for this man, and simply by setting up a fake bank account in a third-world country and submitting a few false reports, which wouldn't have been too hard, I could probably have walked away with around $1 million dollars.

The risk of being caught was quite low. To my shame, I have to confess I actually thought about it. No one would really get hurt, I reasoned – the man, if he was still alive, would have been in his nineties, appeared to have no relatives and hadn't so much as looked at his investments for over twenty years. If he wasn't traced, the money would go into a trust fund in the bank for several years and, we were told, the bank would eventually acquire it by default unless someone popped up to claim it in the meantime. Why should we let the wealthy bank have the money rather than acquiring it for me and my potential partner in crime? Fortunately, to the great annoyance and frustration of my potential "business" partner, I made the decision not to do it. I knew I would spend the rest of my life looking over my shoulder, wondering if a knock on the door or a phone call would put me in jail.

I truly believe that had I gone through with it, I would be a very different person today. And I'm not talking about being wealthier. I know that one action carried out against my values and principles would have changed my perception of who I am. I would have seen myself as untrustworthy, as a fraud. Unless you have no moral compass, living life knowing you're an untrustworthy fraud will ultimately destroy you. Our minds are very powerful – it's incredible what they can do to us.

So the values and principles I'm referring to here are beliefs about what sort of person you want to know you are, what sort of morality you want to uphold in life. These are the things that underpin your character and make you who you are.

I like the idea of putting them into words as a "Personal Code of Conduct" – a personal charter that stands as a reminder to yourself of what sort of a human being you want to be.

Your Personal Code of Conduct will underpin every major decision you make and some of the minor ones. That's why it's important you clarify for yourself what it is. Taking a little time to think about this now could save you from making that one bad decision in the heat of the moment, the sort of decision we hear about that has destroyed someone's life and family.

So what sorts of things go into your Personal Code of Conduct? I think short phrases are more meaningful in this context than single words. For example:

"I try to be fair in all situations" has more punch than just "Fairness".

There will probably be only four or five of these phrases that sum up what sort of person you want to be and the values and principles you want to live by.

If you have many more than that, they may not be truly core morals that are the real foundation of your actions in life.

Here are a few examples, but don't just copy these – really think about what's right for you. It's important.

"I look for the good in others."

"I try to give my best in any situation."

"I review my own actions and behaviour before criticising others."

"I give credit to others when it's due."

One of my personal ones is: "I always try to be kind even when I have to be tough." That has stood me in good stead in the management roles I've held, especially when I've had to discipline people. You can make far better, more reasonable, rational decisions when you stop and take the anger out of your reaction. And your words will be far more powerful in that sort of situation when people know you're a genuinely kind person.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Purposeful by John Carroll. Copyright © 2016 John Carroll. Excerpted by permission of Balboa Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Setting the Scene, ix,
Life Lessons from Africa, x,
Why You Should Read This Book, xxi,
Take a Little Time to Think, xxiv,
How to Use This Book, xxvi,
Honesty and Courage, xxviii,
"Success" is a Personal Thing, xxx,
How the Program Works, xxxiii,
Principle 1: Have Clear Purpose, 1,
What's Important?, 2,
Determining Direction, 4,
Values and Principles – Your Personal Code of Conduct, 9,
How Do You Want to be Remembered?, 14,
What's It All About?, 17,
The 5 Pillars of Purpose, 25,
Aligning Purpose with Values, 40,
How Will Living Your Life Purpose Affect Other People?, 41,
Principle 2: Have Clear Perceptions, 47,
We All See Things Differently, 48,
First, Know Yourself, 49,
Perception is Everything, 51,
How do You See Yourself?, 56,
Linking Personal Image with Life Purpose, 66,
How Would You Like to See Yourself?, 68,
Promoting the Right Self-Perceptions, 71,
Promoting the Right Perceptions with Others, 80,
Principle 3: Have Clear Priorities, 91,
We All Make Choices, 92,
Clarity, Consistency, Persistence, 94,
Time to Take Action, 96,
Developing a Priorities Action Plan (PAP), 101,
Setting Core Goals, 106,
Setting Annual Priorities, 109,
Setting Monthly Priorities, 112,
Setting Weekly and Daily Priorities, 115,
Maintaining the PAP Process, 118,
Handling Curveballs and Rocks, 120,
Forming the Right Habits, 122,
A Few Final Tips, 127,
Wrapping Up, 133,
Get in Touch, 134,