There is a question in the world of NLP that we use, for what we call, ‘chunking up’. It’s where you go into the blue sky thinking mode, big project type ideas, or are philosophical. I want to explore that with you today.
If you are at a point in life where you are not entirely sure what your purpose is, then we will explore that today.
When we are ‘chunking up’ in linguistics, you have a couple of different options as to how you can manoeuvre a conversation or any idea, concept or subject area. You can get more specific which means you get finer details around what you are talking about. The other option is that you find other similar subject areas with a connection between them but it’s not the same conversation that you started out with initially. The remaining option is that you do something called ‘chunking up’. When you chunk up it makes your thinking broader, bigger and more of a global concept based.
It is useful for us to explore the question ‘for what purpose’ because there is lots of change happening for people and some of you are in a position where you’re working and day-to-day life has changed quite considerably recently. Some of you are in a position where your working life, for example, is quite different to what you had intended it to be or what it had been previously.
Over the years, a lot of companies have turned human jobs into robot roles. People you work for might business planning and adopting new innovative ways to do things so you need to start asking yourself “what is my purpose and role going forward?”
This is going to apply to lots of people from different areas of life because lots of us have been feeling a little bit lost or just a bit confused about what the future is going to look like. It’s really important that you find an alternative purpose for yourself. We have to have a feeling of striving for something in our lives. It’s important that we continue to grow and develop.
Our brains like to be busy. If we’re not busy giving them some kind of purpose, growth and development then we can see that problems start to set in. Problems are just a kind of growth and entertainment. You need to have goals if you do not have goals you will have problems because problems are like unhelpful goals.
When you have a problem you’re still working towards resolving something but you don’t necessarily get anything good on the other side of it apart from getting rid of some pain.
“What is my purpose?” is such a broad question it can kind of send you into some spiritual Zen mode. It might be that you think about yourself as a carer, a lover, a spiritual being, an artist or creator.
All of those things can be true but you’ve got to start with that bigger picture in mind before you’ll be able to drill down into the specifics of what that actually needs to look like for you going forward.
By Gemma Bailey
