The Rational Basis® of Happiness Podcast

The Selfish Path to Romance. Download Chapter One for free at DrKenner.com

Here's a question I received from Brian about having a purpose in life, a central purpose.

Hi, Dr. Kenner. I never have enough time for all I want to do. I have many interests and projects, but I don't feel that I have a keenly focused life. I don't have a central purpose in my life. So when I need to make decisions on how to spend my time or my resources or my energy or my money, I feel like I don't make the best decision. My life feels somewhat scattered, rather than aimed in a focused direction. I don't have time for everything.

How do I identify what I love most in life? How do I identify a central purpose in my life? I want to make sure that I don't just choose something just based on gut feelings. Naming what I want most would help me to make the hard choices of how best to spend my time.

And then he has two questions:

What methods are there for discovering and stating explicitly what you love in life, a central purpose—and this means a career?

What happens if I shift my purpose as I gain more knowledge or as a major life change occurs?

Well, you'd use the same methods or similar methods.

So let me go through the methods. When you're trying to find out, "What do I want to do with my life? How do I want to spend my life?"—many people just look at the range of the moment and they say, "Oh, you know what, there's a job down at the grocery store. Maybe I'll get that." Or, "Dad's got this business and I don't like it, but you know what, I'll go into it." This is your life. Those types of decisions—unless you're desperate for money or there is some extenuating circumstance—if you have the option to look at alternatives and to find out what you love in life, go for it.

So how do you do that?

Well, you want to start tracking: What do I like in life? Or what have I ever liked in life? Like, if I had another life to live over again... I love ideas, so I'd probably go do the same thing I'm doing now, which is a good signal. But I love rational ideas. I love promoting those. But I also love dance. I love dance, and I would have taken more dance as a young kid. Well, I can't do that now, but I can enjoy dance now. But dance is secondary to my career. So my central purpose is that I'm a psychologist, and I have things that integrate around that—a busy practice and a talk show, a book—so things coordinate. That's integration. That's what you want in your life.

So Brian, you want to ask yourself, what do you love in life? What's your current career? Are you in the ballpark?

If you're doing something, let's say that you love journalism, and you've always loved journalism, but you also love skiing, and you would love to own your own ski resort and have a business at the ski resort. Those are going to be hard to meld. Some careers are easier to meld. So you're going to try to figure out: Which do I love most?

Because one of the hard lessons I've learned in life is—

Hey, I gotta interrupt this because we’ve got to pay some bills. 30 seconds, that’s it. A very quick ad, and then Alan will be back.

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So you're going to try to figure out: Which do I love most?

Because one of the hard lessons I've learned in life is—I, Ellen, can't have all my values. I can't spend all my time dancing. I can't spend all my time writing a book. I can't spend all my time with my hobby or my kids. You want to get what is almost trite nowadays—a balance—but that's true. But the central purpose is the key career focus that you'll have. Or if you're in retirement, your career hobby, your career interests—you have interests—is more accurate there.

So list:

Number one: List all the things you enjoy doing or have ever enjoyed doing and still are candidates. And it may only be a list of five things, it may be a list of twenty things.

Then ask yourself a series of questions:

What has held my interest over the years? All of us have been in activities that we like at some point in our life. Maybe I liked bowling once—I don't like bowling now—but it changes. So I wouldn't want to own a bowling alley.

What do you like best about each of these activities? Identify the component parts, the factors in each of the activities that you enjoy. I dance because—oh—emotionally, it's so incredibly liberating. And you can get to express all sorts of emotions—from an elegant Viennese waltz to a tango, an angry tango, to fun cha-cha, sexy cha-cha, or a playful swing. So I know what I like. You want to be able to—I'm talking about a hobby now—but if you're talking about your career, you want that same ability to name: What do I like in this? What are the difficulties? You know? If the difficulties are that you need to know statistics and you don't like statistics, maybe that isn't the career for you.

Ask yourself questions: Under what conditions do I like to work? Do I like to work under deadlines? Well, if you do, journalism may be a good career for you—if you like journalism. Would you prefer administrative work? Would you like working alone or with other people?

There are lots of wonderful questions to ask: What are my strengths? What are my weaknesses?

And you want to think long-range: What would be a career that I could enjoy—not only in the short range building it—but long-range too. What brings me satisfaction?

Then the next step is to get experience. You want to talk with people who are in the career—careers. Possibly do some volunteer work. I volunteered at a psychiatric hospital to get some experience to become a psychologist. Maybe part-time work in that career.

You want to narrow it down. You want to find out what type of training you need. And you want to make sure that you're willing to put in the effort for the long range.

There is a resource: the Occupational Guides in the library. This used to be an Occupational Outlook Handbook—that still may exist.

So I wish you a lot of success with that. A central purpose is your career. It is the main purpose. Everything else is secondary.

You don't feel good about yourself if you're married with kids and you have no job or no career. So you do want to—you can—you can, I mean, in a temporary situation, that's fine. But if you're doing that for life, that doesn't work.

And here's a little more from Dr. Kenner:

"This is the third time this year you've been sent to the office. We need to find a better outlet."

"Maybe I could—people let me go out for sports, honey."

"You know why we can't do that?"

"I promise. I'll slow up. I'll only be the best by a tiny bit."

"You are an incredibly competitive boy—and a bit of a show-off. You always say, 'Do your best,' but you really mean it."

"Why can't I do the best that I can do? Dad always said, 'Our powers are nothing to be ashamed of. Our powers made us special.'"

"Everyone's special, Dash."

"Which is another way of saying—no one is."

And Dash is right. That’s from The Incredibles. And when everyone is special, no one is.

And that whole movement of: "Oh, all my children are the same," or "All my students are the same," or "All my employees are the same," is a lie—a total lie—because we all differentiate.

You've got three kids. You ask them if they rake the leaves—that's their chore—and they get some money for doing it.

If one of the kids rakes the leaves beautifully and comes up with a new method—maybe learns how to use a leaf blower—another kid is adequate, you know, he rakes some and does a good job, and the third one does nothing and runs around and jumps in the other kids' piles and messes up the leaves again, so the kids have to do it again.

Who do you reward?

Do you say, "Oh, you're all equal, and I have six dollars and we'll give you each two dollars"?

That is a total injustice.

Or do you give one child four dollars, the other child two dollars—the one that did the most—and the other one too, so he can learn how to do things better, maybe learn from his brother or sister? And the third one gets nothing, maybe gets penalized, maybe has to forgo something of his own?

You need to judge.

You need to judge people. And we'll be talking about that coming up in the next segment.

For more Dr. Kenner podcasts, go to DrKenner.com, and please listen to this net.

Here's an excerpt from The Selfish Path to Romance, the serious romance guidebook by clinical psychologist Dr. Ellen Kenner.

The bond with an ideal romantic partner is the most intimate bond you can experience. A business friend might respond to your business expertise, a golf friend to your golfing ability, a socializing friend to your personality—but only a romantic partner is able to know your total self, including not just your body, but also the most intimate aspects of your soul.

With a romantic soulmate, you get a mirror of yourself that even a close friend cannot provide. When a partner tells you what he or she appreciates about your character—for example, saying, "I love your warmth and sensuality," or in actions, for example, responding to you emotionally and intellectually—your partner provides you with a unique and priceless psychological mirror.

You can download Chapter One for free by going to DrKenner.com, and you can buy the book at Amazon.com.