Second Calling: Life Purpose for Professionals at an Inflection Point

Do you need to be qualified to do what you find most purposeful? Probably not.
Steven Lavine was the president of the California Institute of the Arts for 29 years. He had a very successful tenure, despite not being an artist.  He got the job through "dumb luck," and he constantly had to face what he didn't feel qualified to do. His story is that of following your passion regardless of perceived ability to do it. 
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• Surrounding yourself with people of purpose
• The powerful role dumb luck plays in finding purpose
• Learning by making mistakes
• The value of throwing ourselves into our incompetency
• Why purpose carries with it the idea of struggle

Biography of Steven
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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

What, exactly, is meaning? How can we continually find it in our physical and spiritual world? 
Alex Pattakos is one of the world's leading experts in the study of meaning. He founded the Global Meaning Institute and is a scientist and philosopher. Guess who encouraged him to write a book about meaning? Viktor Frankl himself! Alex has thought deeply and lived fully when it comes to meaning. He shares his insights with us. 
In this episode, you'll learn about

• Finding meaning in every moment
• Definitions of meaning and purpose
• Logotherapy as developed by Viktor Frankl
• Why leadership is always spiritual
• Why awareness is the entry point into meaning

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Find more at our Instagram page. 
Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

What is it like to being willing to go wherever your sense of purpose takes you? 
Steve Sorensen has been wine grower, film maker, executive, and, now, a highly successful mandolin maker. He's been willing to go wherever his interests take them, and he's created a rich, purposeful life in which each stage prepares him for the next. This week he tells us his story. 
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• The twists and turns in life that happen when we pursue purpose
• How our natural skills and abilities can show us our purpose
• When it's time to leave a job that doesn't feel purposeful
• How starting a hobby can lead to purpose
• How purpose can organically grow with what we're doing

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

When we talk about finding purpose, our minds often go to young people who are just starting out or maybe people in the middle of life who want to make a course correction. Anna Hall makes a compelling case this week that we're overlooking a group that may need purpose more than others--senior citizens.
Anna is the founder of The Purpose Equation. She brings years of research into the topic of purpose, and she uses her expertise to help people--not just seniors--to find more purpose in their lives.
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• why purpose might be more important in old age than at any other time of life
• living without purpose is heartbreaking
• why each of us have a unique way of living purposefully
• how purpose changes our perceptions of the world
• how we can make assisted living homes meccas of wisdom

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

It's easy to think that we need to find our purpose before we act on it. But, maybe it's the other way around. We act on what we think is purposeful--however little we understand it--and we then get clarity about our purpose as well as the resources to enact it. In short, take action first, find purpose second.
Wayne Gill is someone who takes action. He started a very successful law firm. He has overseen a highly impactful non-profit organization. He's an accomplished speaker. From his experience, he has plenty of wisdom to share about finding purpose.
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• Becoming a dream enactor
• Not being able to see the end from the beginning
• The importance of having partners who believe in you
• How action opens up possibilities
• That gifts determine destiny

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

Purpose is usually thought about in individual terms-"What is the purpose of my life?" But, organizations can have a sense of purpose as well. It's their mission. Having a sense of mission benefits organizations in many ways.
Jeff Ikler and Kirsten Richert study organizational mission, especially in schools. They have written a book together and host their own podcast on the topic They bring unique insights into what it takes for organizations to develop a sense of mission as well as the problems in getting there.  
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• What is a mission driven organization?
• Types of organizations by how clearly they understand their mission
• The impact of having a clear mission in an organization
• Best practices for creating organizational mission
• The similarities between individual purpose and organizational mission

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

What prevents us from finding purpose? Knowing this guides us in arranging our lives so that we are able to find purpose. A major barrier to purpose is being overly busy. Busyness diminishes our capacity to find purpose in multiple ways, as explored in this week's mini-lesson.

Have you seen that Venn diagram about purpose that's popular online these days? It has four circles, and in the middle is the word ikigai. We're told this is a Japanese word for purpose.

Well, it turns out that this Venn diagram, as with much of what we see online, is not accurate. Ikigai is a Japanese word, and it does relate to purpose, but it has a much richer meaning than being the overlap of four circles. In fact, the Venn diagram was created by someone who actually didn't really know what ikigai is.

Here to set us straight is Nick Kemp. He has lived in Japan and studied the concept of ikigai with those scholars who know it best. In this interview, he shares what he's learned about it and its implications for his life. Nick's work in this area is so impactful that once he started teaching about it, he received requests from people around the world to train them in it. This started Ikigai Tribe.

In this episode, you'll learn about:

• How ikigai relates to what makes life worth living
• The relationship between ikigai and social roles
• The importance of daily living in ikigai
• Why feelings are the most important indicators of ikigai
• Seven things we should all experience to have full ikigai

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

A commonly expressed reservation about discovering purpose is that it's limited to the well-to-do. This mini-lesson explores how purpose is relevant to the poor and how poverty affects the attainment of purpose.
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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]

How do you find purpose amid great power and privilege? By using it to help others. 
Berta Aldrich entered the corporate world with a good heart and more than a little naïveté. She thought people would act ethically and focus on doing great things together. While she was able to climb the latter to the top, she encountered people trying to sabotage her career-both because she was a high performer and because she's a woman. Now, Berta is dedicated to helping other people who are entering business, like her college-aged daughter, to navigate these obstacles as they find their own way forward. 
In this episode, you'll learn about:

• How we can be energized for purpose by younger people
• The value of standing up for the oppressed
• The need to figure out our strengths and going with them
• The power of a difficult path
• Why we should follow our purpose and not our position

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Want to connect? Have a question? Just want to say "hi"? Send me an email at [email protected]. Would enjoy hearing from you.
Want to start your own podcast? This podcast is edited and produced (and music too) by Josh Gilbert. He does a great job and is a joy to work with. Contact him at   [email protected]