Boost Your Creative Writing Motivation with Dr. Maisel’s Purpose-Driven Approach by LA Bourgeois
Let’s welcome back LA Bourgeois as she shares with us “Boost Your Creative Writing Motivation with Dr. Maisel’s Purpose-Driven Approach.” Enjoy!
***
Dr. Eric Maisel doesn’t seem like a man who can get bored.
“I’m just endlessly curious about human nature,” he says. “I find it easy to move from one project, area or idea to the next. I’ve been doing that for a long time.”
And his new book, Choose Your Life Purposes, promotes all of us to embrace this same wellspring of curiosity as we follow his system to create a dynamic set of life purposes to embody.
Choose Your Life Purposes leads us through bite-sized steps to find our own multiple life purposes and embrace them to become more self-aware and empowered.
Dr. Maisel proposes that by choosing and embracing our life purposes, we can live fully even as meaning flows in and out of our existence.
“It just seemed like a trap to believe that there was one purpose to life,” he says. “Once you get there, then it seems to be obvious that many things are important to us. And I’m turning those many things important to us into the idea of multiple life purposes.”
Dr. Maisel masterfully guides us through this process of defining our life purposes with lists, points of contemplation, and imaginative ways to keep your selected life purposes at the forefront of your mind.
One of the biggest differences between Maisel’s work and that of many authors who talk about “life purpose” is the rejection of the idea of doing “what you are meant to do” by a divine presence. Rather, he returns agency to us.
We are the ones deciding, choosing our life purposes rather than finding them and making meaning rather that discovering it.
This contemplation emphasizes self-awareness and empowerment to bring about a life filled with purpose aligned with our values.
As the song says, “Who could ask for anything more?”
Well, us, of course, because humans are greedy creatures. But from the very beginning of the process, I can feel how this system will help me create and support my own unique definition of a good life.
Dr. Maisel joined me to chat about how curiosity informs this process, and how meaning is different from life purposes.
What benefits does discovering your multiple life purposes deliver?
Well, we’ve got to connect it up with that other word that is so difficult for people to understand, and that’s meaning.
They get lumped together as a phrase, life purpose and meaning, but they’re completely different things.
From my point of view, life purposes are choices and meaning is a psychological experience. It’s merely a certain kind of experience, nothing bigger than that.
We don’t like the experience of meaninglessness, but it’s merely a psychological experience. It’s not about some objective reality.
You might attend a lecture and one person has a meaningful experience, another person is completely bored. It has nothing to do with the lecture. It has to do with the experience of it.
We need that second paradigm shift from seeking meaning to making meaning, and the related idea that our life purposes are more important than our meaning-making activities.
If we’re doing what’s important to us and we don’t get the experience of meaning from it, that has to be okay.
It’s like doing something and hoping we’ll feel joyful. Well, we may not. It may be that sending out 20 emails in support of a cause didn’t make us feel joyful, but they were still the right thing to do.
People are checking in on that meaning thing rather than focusing on just doing the work of their life purposes. Meaning comes and goes.
There’s no reason why life should feel meaningful all the time any more than it should feel joyful all the time.
When people feel that life is meaningless, they don’t know what that means or what to do.
They don’t understand how trivial it is that it’s feeling meaningless.
If they can turn away from that worry about why isn’t life feeling meaningful to the realization that just living their life purposes is sufficient, that’ll do the job.
That’s a transformative shift, to go from feeling to doing.
The difference is, if you live your life purposes, that doesn’t mean that life will feel purposeful.
Attaching to a certain outcome harms people.
If we understand what’s important to do, we have to let go of craving a feeling from doing it. We’re getting a result from doing it.
If I’ve helped a child today and written 3,000 words on my novel and worked in the garden, that’s a perfect day, irrespective of how it all felt.
That’s the day of my choice.
That’s the day of my dream. And if I’m also not happy, too bad.
How does curiosity deepen this process?
We’re born with an appetite for knowing, and that’s squashed in many people by what goes on in school, at the dinner table, at their religious functions and what have you.
Every five year old is curious and creative.
If you ask them to connect a salmon and a skyscraper, they’ll draw you a salmon-shaped skyscraper, a skyscraper-shaped salmon, or they’ll just have fun with it.
The second they get into school and have to draw inside the lines, they need more information than that. They need to know what’s the right answer to the salmon-shaped skyscraper.
We begin to lose our imagination over time.
Curiosity is innate and natural, and gets lost and has to be reclaimed.
That’s one of the jobs of a creativity coach, to invite clients to be imaginative again and to break free of those lines that they were forced to draw within all through school.
***
Haven’t read Choose Your Life Purposes yet? Grab a copy today and embark on your own journey!
Our next book in the Thriving Creative Book Series is Jane Friedman’s The Business of Being a Writer, 2nd Edition, which was released this past April. Pick up a copy at your local independent bookshop or library (or order online) and begin reading today.
Need tips on finishing those pesky craft books? Read How to Finish Reading A Book. And for those who want to make sure they learn those lessons, check out How to Remember What You Read!
***
ABOUT LA BOURGEOIS
LA (as in tra-la-la) Bourgeois is a Kaizen-Muse Certified Creativity Coach and author who helps clients embrace the joy of their creative work and thrive while doing it.
Get more of her creativity ideas and techniques by subscribing to her newsletter at https://subscribepage.io/unlockyourcreativity.
