Finding Purpose In Life – Gay Hendricks
SUMMARY
A lot of us when we reach midlife, tend to have problems with finding purpose in life and this includes having a lasting love relationship. On this episode with Dr. Gay Hendricks, top-selling author, motivational speaker, and a therapist, shares a tip on how we can get in touch with our life purpose. He says that in the second half of life, we choose between, “Generativity” and “Stagnation”. To experience “generativity”, we must keep on discovering new aspects of ourselves and of our partners. .
KEY TAKEAWAYS
After you get up into your 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, it becomes really important to think of every choice you make as a choice between creativity and stagnation.According to Erik Erikson, in the second half of life, everyday, you choose between “Generativity” and “Stagnation”.Generativity means having creativity, which is the ability to keep discovering new aspects of yourself and to keep discovering new aspects of your partner which helps in finding purpose in life.When you’re excited, you’re discovering more things creatively about yourself. It allows you also to see your partner as a living, changing person instead of thinking of them as the same old person all the time.The more you discover your own creative expansion in yourself, the more you’re able to see that creativity and facilitate that creativity in your partner that leads to finding purpose in life.It’s important if you’re single, to get really involved in your own creativity because the more you can open up exciting new visitors in yourself every day, that allows people to discover more of you.One of the things that’s important especially when you get into the second half of life is to make a real, very deep, profound commitment to your own creative development that helps in finding purpose in life and we say you only need to start with 10 minutes a day.Even people who just put in 10 or 15 minutes a day of whatever their creative process is, they see an immediate change in their relationships.Creativity is not about composing a symphony or writing a poem necessarily. It’s about discovering something new that leads to finding purpose in life.Learning to listen to little quiet voices inside that you may not have paid attention to lets us get in touched with the creative part of ourselves and helps finding purpose in life.When we can fire off the spark of creativity in ourselves, it’s a spark that’s contagious. It echoes around our community and our family and light the way towards finding purpose in life.Just a little bit of communing with the deep creative part of yourself every day is what’s necessary to keep ourselves really feeling that zest for finding purpose in life.A lot of us, especially when we get into our 30’s and 40’s, we tend to have problems with finding purpose in life.Spend the remaining years of your life doing things that make you feel more and more alive, this helps in finding purpose in life.One of the best things you can do towards finding purpose in life is to sit down and write a list of your 4 or 5 most important wishes for your life.Making commitments is the place to start to create a lively, creative relationship with your partner that backs you up in finding purpose in life.The great thing about a commitment is that it gives you a firm place to stand towards finding purpose in life. If you know deep down in your heart that you were committed to creating a lively, creative relationship with your partner, that’s a great place to come home to when you slip off of that.To consistently remind ourselves of our commitments:- Have little Post-It’s all over the place. Write down the affirmation of whatever it is you’re focusing on.
- Allot a little bit of time each day for yourself where you can just be in communion with yourself.
TRANSCRIPTION: FINDING PURPOSE IN LIFE – GAY HENDRICKS
Finding Purpose In Life Through Conscious Loving
Kamala Chambers In this episode, we’re going to be talking about conscious loving through all phases of life that lights up the way towards finding purpose in life.
Luis CongdonToday’s guest is Dr. Gay Hendricks. He’s a top-selling author, motivational speaker, counselor, therapist, and someone whose work has really impacted my life. His book, Conscious Loving completely shifted the way I do relationships and his book Conscious Loving is actually one of my top recommended relationship books of all time.So without further ado, it’s an honor for me to bring on Dr. Gay Hendricks. We are excited to talk about finding purpose in life.
Kamala Chambers It’s so great to have you here. Are you ready to launch?
Dr. Gay Hendricks I am.
Kamala Chambers All right. I’m really excited for your new work coming out with your new phase of life and moving into your 35th year of you and Kathlyn together, which is just so beautiful and I’d love to hear a little bit more about moving into an everlasting relationship what that means and how a relationship changes over time.
Dr. Gay Hendricks Great question.Well, Kathlyn and I have just celebrated out 35th wedding anniversary, just had that big ceremony yesterday. That was really a lot of fun and had a lot of our friends over with us on Saturday where we read a couple of poems we’d written for each other.We just finished the paperback edition of our new book about finding purpose in life. Conscious Loving Ever After just came out and so, we’ve spent about the last 10 years or so working with people primarily in their 40’s, 50’s, 60’s, 70’s, and some in their 80’s about what it takes to create lively, alive relationships in those years from 40 and above. It’s important when you’re 20’s and 30’s too but after you get up into your 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s, it becomes really important to think of every choice you make as a choice between creativity and stagnation that leads you to finding purpose in life.The great developmental psychologist at Harvard Erik Erikson, once said that particularly, in the second half of life, everyday, you choose between what he called, “Generativity” and “Stagnation” and, basically generativity is what we mean by creativity, which is the ability to keep discovering new aspects of yourself and to keep discovering new aspects of your partner.One of the most important discoveries we made over the past 10 or 15 years when we were working with several thousand people in the 40 and above category is that….
Dr. Gay Hendricks When you’re excited, you’re discovering more things creatively about yourself that helps you finding purpose in life. It allows you also to see your partner as a living, changing person instead of thinking of them as the same old person all the time.The more you discover your own creative expansion in yourself, the more you’re able to see that creativity and facilitate that creativity in your partner and it also is the same thing for single people too.Over the years, we’ve worked with about 20,000 single people through our program called Attracting Genuine Love, which we had taught for many years, which has a program both online and in person for single people who want to learn how to manifest the love of their lives.So, it’s important if you’re single also, to get really involved in your own creativity because the more you can open up exciting new visitors in yourself every day, that allows people to discover more of you.One of the things that’s important especially when you get into the second half of life is to make a real, very deep, profound commitment to your own creative development and we say you only need to start with 10 minutes a day.That’s been our discovery. That, even people who just put in 10 or 15 minutes a day of whatever their creative process is, they see an immediate change in their relationships.When I say creativity, it’s not about composing a symphony or writing a poem necessarily. It’s about discovering something new. Like even if you’re making a soup that you’ve made 48 times over the last couple of years, change something about it today. Make something a little bit different about it so that you have a chance to really reinvent yourself on a daily basis.
Being Creative Helps In Finding Purpose In Life
Luis CongdonI really love that.I know when I was first starting to get into the relationship world, I was really focusing on trying to find a partner and attracting the right partner and then I read some piece of work that said, “If you want to be really attractive to other people, you have to think about what makes you attractive to yourself.” What do you love doing? What are the things that bring out this aliveness?It led to me meeting more people that were available and really exciting, and being attractive was very easy because as you say Gay, in my zone of genius.I’m thinking, what if I’m in that second part of my life? The kids have moved out, had a same job for a long time, and all of a sudden, I don’t have that same job anymore. The kids have left the house and I’m not sure what that next level of creativity is for me.Now, for the rest of us that are younger, I know that I get stuck sometimes and don’t know how I’m going to be creative that could help me finding purpose in life.So now, I’m just projecting myself out. What if I was older and life was different but the question is still relevant to anybody. How do we get in touch with this creative part of ourselves in finding purpose in life?
Dr. Gay Hendricks It’s a lot about learning to listen to little quiet voices inside that you may not have paid attention to.I’ll give you an example of the dentist. A man who is a very successful dentist that was around 40 years of age, he and his wife had been going through various stuck places and things hadn’t been going very well.I asked him, “Going back throughout your whole life, thinking back to even before you started school when you were a kid, what were the things that you most love to do?” Interestingly enough, he loved to write little things. Sometimes he’d write poems and sometimes he’d write little articles and things. He was a born writer but he had put that away completely when he got into his dentistry career. So, he hadn’t picked up a pen to write anything in many years.I suggested that he start taking 10 minutes a day to just sit and write something. Even if it was the same sentence over and over again just to get in the groove and interestingly enough, he started writing these really excellent little poems and ended up getting several of them published even which was very thrilling to him.That’s just an example of the kind of thing that can spark off the whole new life path for people because the moment he’d touched in to that, it began to have an immediate positive effect on his relationship too. He and his wife noticed it. He had kids still at home. They were teenagers. Even they noticed it.
Dr. Gay Hendricks It echoes around our community and our family.Writing is my thing too and I go in my little den back here where I’m doing this interview from. I pop in here every morning around 5:30 and I write for a couple of hours. Kathy likes to sleep in so I write for a couple of hours until she gets up and so, it’s a time for me to commune with that deep creative part of yourself that helps me finding purpose in life. You don’t need 2 hours of it but just a little bit of it every day is what’s necessary to keep ourselves really feeling that zest for life feeling inside.The other thing too is that a lot of us, especially when we get into our 30’s and 40’s, we tend to have problems with finding purpose in life. You’ve heard of the famous mid-life crisis but what that really is, is a crisis of purpose and I can’t count the number of people I’ve had in here over the years, especially people around 40-42 years of age, often, very successful people.I’m thinking of a guy who came in and he said, “I’ve been a lawyer now since I was 27 years old. I’m 42 now, so I’m really successful at it. I make 300 to 400 hundred thousand dollars a year and everybody likes being a member of the country club and all that kind of stuff but I feel like I’m dying inside unless I can find some other place to connect within myself.”So many of us have a crisis in finding purpose in life when we get especially up in the midlife where we realize, “What are we doing this for?” “What are the key things that are really driving me?” That’s why I wrote that little book a few years ago called Five Wishes because one of the best things you can do to get in touch with your life purpose is to sit down and write a list of your 4 or 5 most important wishes for your life and you can do that when you’re 25 or 35 or 55 and I’d even had people in here in their 70’s asking that same question. Like, let’s say you’ve got a year left or 5 years or 10 years left. Whatever you’ve got left, let’s spend it doing things that make you feel more and more alive.One of the best ways to get in touch with your life purpose is to really just sit down and do a little bit of thinking and cogitating on the 5 most important things you want to accomplish or experience in your life.I started asking that question when I was in my 30’s and at these days of the game, I have accomplished all of my 5 wishes except number one, which was to create a loving relationship with a woman and I’ve since done that and I still want to keep doing that every day. That’s still number one.
Various Ways To Finding Purpose In Life
Kamala Chambers Wow. I’d love to hear what you do after you create your 5 wishes that helped you in finding purpose in life.
Dr. Gay Hendricks As we graduate high school and getting into our early 20s and we have this version of success that we’ve typically adopted from what we’ve seen in culture and media and maybe those that we’ve looked up to. I think as we get smacked in the face by reality, as we go through relationships, and as we looked in at certain people and go, “Gosh, I don’t like that about you,” and looked at other people and go, “I really admire that person.” It really starts to form in shape what success really looks like and I don’t think that success is very relative.The key to success is not very specific. I think that there are different channels of success but I think to have it all, if you will. This has been one of my aim on my journey of success is to have it all. Meaning to have strong relationship with my wife, my family, and my kids, to have a really have strong spiritual life that I’m a Christian guy but just to make sure that’s a priority in my life, which suggests that the key to success is a wide term. To make sure I have good reputation, and that I protect that and the day of the internet where the internet never forgets whatever you say can be construed and pushed against you. We got to be very careful to protect our names and our reputation. And then, my physical health, on top of that, my finances. Together, those kinds of things really make up my success and really help in defining the key to success.You can tell it. I don’t talk about my business. My business is not something that I do and I think it’s fairly successful as a channel but for the most part, I don’t want to become the wealthiest guy that nobody likes. Mere being wealthy is not the key to success. I don’t want to become the guy that got too busy making a living that I forgot to make a life. There are all these puns that I can just keep going with in terms I don’t want to be the richest guy in the graveyard. That’s the life that I want to stay away from and I define the key to success on my own terms.I might not be the wealthiest guy that you’ve ever meet but my hope is to become one of the most successful people you’ve ever meet.
Luis CongdonOne thing I noticed about your 5 wishes is that they could be dramatically different than many of the types of wishes that I know especially before I was impacted by really deep spiritual work. I know that my wishes or goals were more like make a million dollars a year, have a fancy car, have a really special intimate relationship, and that one is a little deeper which I thought could help me finding purpose in life.Do you suggest anything around how we voice or write down or create these 5 wishes in order to finding purpose in life? They really feel like intentions for me too but do you get what I’m saying Dr. Gay? Because I feel like some of us might just go to, “I want a house on the hill with 5 bedrooms,” “I want this kind of car,” and when I hear you talking about your 5 wishes, they’re fairly different.
Dr. Gay Hendricks What I recommend is that we consider in your imagination, imagine yourself being at the end of your life looking back over all of your life and you ask yourself, “Was my life a success?”At the end of your life, if you say, “Yes, my life was a success,” then you ask yourself, “What is the number one thing that I accomplished or experienced that makes me call my life a success?” Then, you say, “Okay, let’s say I had that. Then what would be the number two thing that if I enjoyed it or experienced it or had it happened to me, what would be the second thing that would make me call my life a total success?”I don’t want to be morbid here but I have had the opportunity of being around people as they were passing out of this life. They tend to work to talk about the love in their lives. They don’t ever say things like, “I wish I’d watch more TV,” or “I wish I’d gone to the office a little earlier every day.”What people are frequently talking about are things at the heart that leads them to finding purpose in life. When you create your list of 5 wishes, make sure you consult your heart, as well as your head.
Kamala Chambers Such a beautiful thing that’s so easy to overlook and part of the consulting of the heart is this creative way of being.I’m curious, how do you recommend couples who have been together for a long time? How do they keep that passion and that creativity in the relationship?
Dr. Gay Hendricks The number one thing Kamala is to make a commitment to it.We’ve had many people here in our office that really didn’t know how to make a meaningful commitment. So we have people sit there and face each other and say, “I commit to discovering something new about you every week for the rest of our lives,” or, “I commit to spending at least 10 minutes a day on my own creative processes.”Making those commitments is the place to start. Committing, “I commit to creating an exciting relationship with you.” To be able to say that to your partner in a heartfelt sincere way is really the starting place. Until you’re committed to something, until you could actually feel yourself making as sincere commitment to it, there’s no reason, it’s going to show up in your life.Just like if you want to climb Mt. Everest, it takes a powerful commitment to that and then, even every step of the way as you go up the mountain, you’re often going to slip out of that commitment when you get tired or you get an altitude headache or something. So you need to keep returning to that commitment all the time, this helps you finding purpose in life.The great thing about a commitment is that it gives you a firm place to stand which leads you to finding purpose in life. If you know deep down in your heart that you were committed to creating a lively, creative relationship with your partner, that’s a great place to come home to when you slip off of that.
Luis CongdonThat’s beautiful, I love your insights about finding purpose in life. I know one of the things that happens for me is that I tend to forget my commitments. In the whirlwind of life sometimes, I get wrapped up and can go on automatic. No matter how hard I try, I find that I can develop certain habits and there’s still other things that I’m working on that I consistently return to and heal those or work on those areas and create new intentions.Life is like where I was bouncing this thing and then, proving and making it all better, looking in areas where we really want to get more out of our own lives.I’m curious, is there something that you recommend for us so that we can have a healthy way to return or healthy reminders to return back to those intentions that helps in finding purpose in life? I know that the more I practice returning to those intentions, the better I get at it.For example, I know that for a while, I did a practice where I had a little notecard. I cut it out about the size of a credit card. I typed up some stuff, put it on this card, printed it off, cut it out and then, laminated it. It was laminated and it could go into my wallet so throughout the day I pull out this little card and it had different intentions on it.What do you recommend so that we can consistently remind ourselves and stay in that essence in finding purpose in life?
Dr. Gay Hendricks I do the same thing. I have little Post-Its all over the place when I’m changing some aspect of myself.What I like to do is write down the affirmation or whatever it is I’m focusing on. Like, I can see one from where I’m sitting here that I keep in my office all the time. It says, “I choose easy world where everything is easy.” That’s to remind me when I get to struggling too much, to just ease up a little bit, to let it be easier.Nobody knows exactly what the meaning of life is but I’m very sure it’s not to have a bad time. I’m very sure it’s not to struggle. So, whenever I get caught up in struggling too much, that little sign reminds to take a couple of deep breaths and choose easy world again where everything is easy. I think those kind of reminders are great in finding purpose in life.I also want to really stress this idea of carving out a little bit of time each day for yourself like 10 minutes, 15 minutes, 20 minutes where you can just be in communion with yourself. You can do some kind of formal meditation that lights up the way in finding purpose in life. I’ve been a daily meditator since the early 1970’s so, I’ve got 45 years of meditation where I go into myself each day twice a day and drop into that deep space in myself.One of my students got out his calculator and figured out that I had spent close to 15,000 hours of my life in meditation. It’s just like anything else. If you spend 15,000 hours of your life driving a motorboat, I’d be very good at it. In meditation, it’s the same thing except you’re driving your own cosmic motorboat through the cosmos.
Kamala Chambers Yeah. It’s so great. I love how you simplified things for us so we can actually apply all of the things you are talking about today. It’s been so fantastic.We’ve been here with Gay Hendricks. We’ve been talking about conscious loving through all phases of life that helps in finding purpose in life. Keep thriving everyone.
Luis CongdonIt’s a real honor to have you here today Dr. Gay.
Dr. Gay Hendricks Thank you very much folks.
WHAT TO LISTEN TO NEXT
How To Express Yourself – Kathlyn Hendricks How To Keep Relationship Strong – Guy FinleyRelationship Communication – Marty Babits
How To Make Relationship Lasts – Drs. John and Julie Gottman
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