Breaking Free from the Chicken Coop: How to Discover Your True Purpose and Reveal Your true Identity

This post is Part 1 of a series I am writing about what I have observed when people overcome significant challenges like depression, addiction, divorce, you name it. This first entry discusses Sense of Purpose. I often share this with clients and it becomes part of our gauge for improvement. If you are doing well with a sense of purpose that is great. It’s not everything. Also know that this five part series is not ordered by way of importance. The importance of each principle depends on the person, you and your situation. This is good stuff, these are some of my best thoughts about what I have observed how people thrive after just barely surviving. I hope this is beneficial to you in some way. Also, these are not meant to be entirely comprehensive. I recognize I may not be the first to recognize these important principles. These are my observations from life and my professional work. Utilize them however you wish.

The Post-Holiday Purpose Crisis

What is your purpose? What is your reason for today and tomorrow and the next? There are people who feel a strong sense of purpose during the holidays and they celebrate with friends and family. They sing, they connect with friends and loved ones. Then it’s over. It’s a New Year and now what? We look to the future and resolve to be better. I don’t know about you, but during the last three months of the year my routine gets totally jacked up, especially in December. So when January hits I’m ready to get back to it – the routine; reading, exercising, planning… Its go time right? There is so much to do! Where do you start? Well, it’s time to re-evaluate your purpose. For some of us, this can be a difficult undertaking. For others, we define our purpose by the roles we play, it’s our identity. For example one might think, “I’m a father, I provide security and comfort and teach. So I go to work every day even though some days I don’t want to.” For others answering this question is more challenging. Maybe you always wanted to be a “Mommy” but that is biologically impossible for you and everything else you do seems trivial in comparison to what you thought you might do.

The Identity-Purpose Connection

There are many books and articles one could read to learn more about how a sense of purpose help your overall well-being. The most famous being that classic from Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning. For a review of some recent research about how a sense of purpose helps go here.

So developing a greater sense of purpose sounds like a good idea right, but how do you evaluate your own sense of purpose and further develop it?

Well, there is scientific evidence here that religion does help people have a greater sense of purpose.

I have read about various types of purpose and long-term versus short-term purpose. I suggest you get the ball rolling and shore it up. If your purpose is just getting through the day without crying in front of your kids that’s okay for now but eventually your purpose would need to expand to something bigger.

Yes, eventually you want to develop a greater sense of purpose. A great place to start is by getting really good at defining who you are. Who are you really? Are you what you do every day or what you don’t do? Who is defining you right now? Are your parents? Your neighbors? Your culture, or other people than yourself defining who you are?

Do you realize your identity has significant influence on your sense of purpose? Right now, today is a great time to think and further develop your personal identity and ownership of yourself. Take inventory on what you are focused on. Do you worry about certain priorities like family or finances but spend an inordinate time reading social media, or gossip pages online? I really don’t understand our celebrity culture. I once got an autograph of a couple of football players when I was in boy scouts. It was cool listening to their stories of playing football. But I looked down at the signatures and thought “what do I do with this?” Nothing. Exactly.

From Surviving to Thriving: The Eagle's Choice

I recall a story my dad shared with me when I was young. It’s not his story but he shared it. Many of you may have heard it before, but I thought it applies to the principle of realizing your true identity and purpose:

A young man, climbing in some rugged, high mountain peaks, came across an eagle’s nest. The nest contained several eggs. He took one and gently carried it back to his home. He then put it with several eggs an old hen was setting over. In due time all of the eggs were hatched, and there came forth the eaglet with the baby chicks. During the next several months the baby eagle grew along with the chicks.

He scratched in the barnyard for his food like chickens do. Although he grew to full size, he still never flew. The young man watched the process with great interest. He wanted the eagle to fly. So one day he took the eagle up on top of his house and said, “You’re an eagle, fly.” But the eagle just flew down to the barnyard and commenced scratching like the chickens. A few days later, long before sunlight, the young lad took the eagle to a lofty crag high among the mountain peaks. Then, as the first streaks of sunlight burst over the mountain range, he said, “You’re an eagle, fly.” The eagle began to stretch its wings; its eye caught a shaft of sunlight; a sensation swept through it from wing tip to wing tip. The fresh, cool air, the smell of pine trees, and an exhilaration it had never known coursed through the great bird. Its wings spread wider; power swept through its entire frame. It began to lift off the arm of the young man. Soon it was lifting and soaring hundreds of feet above the high peaks. It lifted higher and higher and soared farther and farther into the endless sky. It saw more in an instant than its earthbound chicken companions saw in a lifetime. From that time forth the eagle was never more content to be a chicken.

Right now think, are you going to cluck around like a chicken or soar and see new things like the eagle you know deep down you really are? Where are your steps taking you now? Decide. Look up the Latin origin for decide it translates from off –cut so when we decide we cut off other possibilities. This implies a certain amount of focus doesn’t it? I can’t be everything or all things, but I will be . . . . what?

Practical Steps to Discover Your True Purpose

1. Audit Your Current Identity

Ask yourself: Who is defining you right now? Is it your parents, neighbors, culture, or social media? Take inventory of where you're investing your mental energy. If you're worried about family or finances but spending hours scrolling through celebrity gossip, there's a disconnect worth examining.

2. Start Where You Are

If your current purpose is simply "getting through the day without falling apart in front of my kids," that's okay—but recognize it as a starting point, not your destination. Purpose can expand as you heal and grow.

3. Embrace the Power of Decision

The Latin root of "decide" means "to cut off." When you decide who you want to be, you're cutting off other possibilities to focus your energy. This requires courage, but it's essential for authentic living.

4. Monitor Your Inner Dialogue

Remember: thoughts lead to words, words lead to actions, actions form habits, and habits develop character. Pay attention to the story you're telling yourself about who you are and what you're capable of achieving.

The Choice Before You

Right now, you have a choice: Will you continue scratching around in the barnyard of limiting beliefs, or will you spread your wings and discover what you're truly capable of? The mountain peak of your potential is waiting, but only you can make the decision to soar.

Reflect and Take Action

Three Questions to Consider:

1. What roles or labels are you using to define yourself, and are they empowering or limiting your potential?

2. If you removed all external expectations and judgments, what would you attempt if you knew you couldn't fail?

3. What's one small step you could take today to align your daily actions with your deeper values and desired identity?

Ready to Transform Your Life?

If you're tired of living below your potential and ready to discover your true purpose, you don't have to navigate this journey alone. Schedule a consultation today to explore how we can work together to help you soar beyond the limitations that have been holding you back. Your eagle moment is waiting—let's make it happen.

This post is Part 1 of a 5-part series on overcoming life's challenges and moving from surviving to thriving. Each principle builds on the others, but the order of importance varies by individual. Stay tuned for the next installment, and remember: today is the perfect day to begin defining who you truly are.

The Power of Prioritizing well: How to Master Intense Focus and Excellence

Part 5: When you find yourself excited about something and really passionate, then nothing can take your attention from it very easily. The things you are most interested in claim your most devoted attention, which can look like an obsession or hyper-focus. Here are some thoughts on how to take ownership of what you focus on.

What Is Intense Focus?

It involves something very popular right now in research called grit. What is grit? To me the word doesn't sound very scientific, but it's being researched in depth right now. It has to do with perseverance and—guess what?—grit is not tied to intelligence. So the excuse, "I'm a dummy," is irrelevant.

Grit alone, without focus, won't necessarily accomplish what you really want. According to Angela Lee Duckworth, who is really focused on researching grit:

"Gritty individuals are especially motivated to seek happiness through focused engagement (e.g., the state of flow) and a sense of meaning or purpose, but less motivated than others to pursue happiness through pleasure."

This clicks with my observation that people who thrive have a strong sense of purpose.

How Does One Become Gritty?

We are not entirely sure—there are some smart people trying to uncover that carefully. While they work on that, let me suggest practice. Practice activities designed to improve specific aspects of performance.

From what I have heard, in martial arts, practicing a specific skill or move is a common routine. Routine leads to excellence and helps certain moves become automatic. When I was 14, I spent hours teaching myself to serve in tennis. I wanted to learn to serve so well that the opponent would have little chance to hit the ball back to me, because I was too lazy to practice my backhand. I actually developed a pretty wicked serve, and it masked some of my other deficits.

The Navy SEALs practiced for weeks to perform what took a number of hours to hunt down and kill Bin Laden in his compound. They made a replica of the compound and practiced the scenario over and over before the raid was carried out.

Does that mean you practice being gritty when you practice a skill over and over? I think so. It takes grit to improve on one thing before moving onto the next—it also takes focus.

The Secret Ingredients: Optimism and Contentedness

Would you like to know what seems to help people, kids and adults develop grit and that intense focus? Optimism and a certain level of contentedness.

There is evidence that being optimistic and thinking that personality traits and life skills are malleable over time helps tremendously. In other words, if you believe you can change, you are more likely to change.

I recently read a very depressing blog/tweet entry that expressed something contrary to this: "It's not the pain, but the hope that kills me." Holy crapola! That's a formula for feeling like a total loser.

Duckworth suggests "a growth mindset encourages children to construe failures and setbacks as opportunities to learn and improve, rather than as evidence that they are permanently lacking in ability." Good stuff, right? It also sounds like the antithesis of perfectionism.

How about looking for progress or even excellence rather than perfection? Perfection leads to all-or-nothing thinking, black-and-white thinking, or catastrophizing. Being content is not perfectionism, and it is not complacency. It's a growth mindset combined with savoring the moment, the struggle, and actually being grateful for the challenge!

A Lesson from My Father

My dad had polio. He had a severe limp nearly his entire life. After going through a number of surgeries, he was able to play some sports. In South Africa, where he grew up, tennis was quite popular.

A few times he related a story to me about playing in a tournament against a superior opponent. He said this guy was thrashing him. So my dad decided to focus on getting better during the match and would focus on getting his footwork right and following the ball as he hit it with his racquet. As the match wore on, he noticed his opponent getting frustrated since my dad was enjoying himself because he was getting better, even though he was losing.

A nice ending to that story would be that my dad ended up winning, but I don't remember if that was the case. He taught me an important lesson, however, about being content. Had he been complacent, he would have just put his time in and gotten nothing more from his match. He focused on improving, and that was his real satisfaction—getting better. He was not comparing himself to someone else; he was competing with himself.

You can stop comparing yourself to others and focus on getting better. This is something I admire about marathon runners—I mean the ones who are competing against themselves and are happy to just finish the race. This is something I also appreciate about golf. I heard that the famous Bobby Jones had the philosophy that he wasn't competing against other golfers; he was competing against the course and maybe himself. That is an interesting way to focus with a growth mindset and be content.

(Incidentally, if you are trying to help your kids learn to handle losing, this is a pretty good formula for that. Add appreciation and respect for the opponent's abilities along with a focus on learning to get better, and your kids won't give up as easily and will learn to tolerate frustration and loss, even failure.)

The Focus Challenge

Until you learn to really focus on a task, you just aren't going to get it done very well or in a timely manner. Believe me, I know. Like most of you, I have experienced the frustration of an unfocused day, week, and life, even. I have many interests and struggle to become the master of one thing. Let us change perfection to excellence.

What Can You Be Excellent At?

Go ahead and identify something you want to be excellent at:

• Cleaning the toilet

• Getting homework finished on time

• Accepting compliments

• Washing your hands

• Showing respect to people you interact with every day

• Leaving that stupid phone alone when you are with family!

Find opportunity in failure. Go ahead—pick your own thing to become excellent at.

Pick something you know you have the resources for. Being an excellent billionaire philanthropist might be a little far off today.

Pick something you can build on. Set that budget. Eat a homemade lunch instead of fast food. That might be a good start to more financial freedom and self-control.

What can you be excellent at next? What would you like to be excellent at?

Focus on that like nothing else matters.

Questions for Reflection

Before you dive into your excellence journey, take a moment to honestly consider these questions:

1. What's one area of your life where you've been making excuses instead of putting in the deliberate practice needed to improve? How might shifting from a fixed mindset to a growth mindset change your approach to this challenge?

2. Think about a recent failure or setback you experienced. How could you reframe that experience as valuable data for improvement rather than evidence of your limitations? What specific lesson could you extract from it?

3. If you had to choose just ONE thing to become excellent at over the next 90 days—something that would have a meaningful impact on your life—what would it be, and what would your daily practice routine look like?

Ready to Develop Your Grit?

Excellence isn't built overnight, but it starts with a single decision to focus intensely on what matters most. Your journey toward mastery begins with that first deliberate step.

Take action today: Choose one specific skill or area you want to develop. Write it down. Create a simple daily practice routine. Then commit to showing up consistently for the next week—not because it's easy, but because that's exactly how grit is built.

What will you choose to become excellent at? The time to start is now.