Feeling Stuck? Here's An Exercise To Help You Discover Your Life's Purpose

Are your needs for general physical health, safety, and human connection basically met? Are you looking for something else—an understanding of your purpose beyond the basics? Do you know that you have work to do in the world but you're not quite sure what it is or how to do it? 

Successfully bringing your gifts into the world has been called self-actualization by psychologist Abraham Maslow, who also emphasized the importance of self-transcendence—joining something larger than yourself to make positive changes in the world. All intelligent and reasonably sane people, as long as they have their basic needs met, have the desire to achieve both self-actualization and self-transcendence. To do both is to pursue your calling. 

If you're reading this, you might already know this—but pursuing your calling is not logical—it's experimental. As a scientist, I see it as deeply scientific.

Most of us were trained at a young age to think that science is about everything other than ourselves. For example, disciplines that study human experience and behavior, such as psychology, anthropology, and sociology, are not usually taught prior to college. Meanwhile, physics, chemistry, and biology are taught to middle-schoolers and sometimes even younger children. So our first impressions about what is called "science" don't include the exploration of human nature or human purpose.

Most of us have been taught that the scientific method is a relatively boring set of steps that we should memorize and maybe try to use the night before we have to turn in our lab notebooks for some high school chemistry or biology course. Develop a hypothesis; test it by running an experiment; observe the data and form conclusions; try to write down what we think the teacher wants to hear.

This version of the method is remarkably powerful. But it's not the heart of the scientific method in its original form. It's not what I call the deep scientific method, which I believe is used by virtually every scientist who actually does experiments and creates models. 

The deep scientific method is magical. It is play with a purpose. This kind of play doesn't just help us harness chemical transitions, predict astronomical events, and cure medical conditions. It can also be applied to the processes we are focused on here: self-actualization and self-transcendence.

What if you're the scientist, and the process you're investigating is your calling? You would have to do the work of defining your calling so that you have a clear idea about what it is, energizing your calling by understanding it thoroughly, and engaging your calling in the world in a playful way, which you can continue to do for the rest of your life. 

There is an assumption here, and I think it's a good idea to state it clearly. Your calling works almost by itself once you handle the sludge and impediments that are blocking its progress. You can think of your calling as a car that's already been built. You just have to dig it out from under a pile of garbage, activate the engine, clear the road, and go. 

Every one of us has a calling that is unique, possible, life-giving, and important. In a way, your calling is simple: It is to do what you do when you are living as who you are. We all share this generic calling. Your unique calling can be found in the all-important details, which you can use the deep scientific method to work out. C'mon—I'll race you to the start line. 

Now set a third overarching intention to test out your inner lab. See the location of your inner lab—as shown to you by your intuition or wherever your inner lab "appears" now. Do you like it there? If not, move it someplace that feels better. Enter your inner lab in the way your intuition showed you or in the way that is just happening right now. Did it work? If not, try another way to gain entry.