On Purpose

The Busy Woman's Guide to an Extraordinary Life of Meaning and Success

Tanya Dalton

• Publisher: Thomas Nelson
• Year: 2021
• eBook ISBN: 9781400214396
• Topic: Personal Development
• Subtopic: Personal Success

Discover how to take back your life from soul crushing busyness so you can start living with unhurried purpose. 

Are you caught up in the chaotic rush of your calendar? Have you found the time to check in with yourself lately?

In On Purpose, bestselling author and productivity expert Tanya Dalton helps you carve out time to pause, take a step back from your busy schedule, ask yourself the hard questions, and reflect on how you really feel.

Tanya teaches us that by getting to know ourselves better, we can finally start living our lives on purpose. This shift isn't about changing who you are--it's about rising up and becoming the best version of you, adjusting your mindset so you can discover what drives your daily choices, and finding the unhurried purpose that's hidden in each day when you stay true to yourself.

On Purpose gives you the tools and the encouragement you need to ask and answer your own deepest questions. Combining cutting-edge research and thought-provoking infographics with candid stories from her own journey, Tanya leads you through innovative exercises designed to help you better understand how to:

• Create a map to your ideal future
• Move through life with confidence
• Discover the simple shifts that turn unexpected obstacles into opportunities
• Unpack the common lies we tell ourselves
• Live a more fulfilling life

 

Joy and happiness deserve to have a seat at the table and it's time to pull up a chair for them. If you're ready to start running your life instead of feeling like your life is running you, it's time to live your life On Purpose.

Praise for On Purpose:

"On Purpose is a must-read for anyone seeking to find success on their own terms. Tanya Dalton gives you the easy-to-follow actionable guide you've been searching for to take ownership of your life, make intentional choices, and fill your soul with what matters most to you."

--Lisa Hufford, author of Work Your Way and CEO of Simplicity Consulting

part one

REFLECTION

Answers the Question: Why?

one

CHOOSE TO DISRUPT YOUR PATTERNS

It’s just going to be one of those days.

We’ve all said it. We wake up in the morning and the day seems destined for failure within 30 minutes of opening our eyes.

Maybe you woke up late and are tearing around the bathroom scrambling to get dressed while shouting feverishly down the hall to get everyone else moving.

But no one else seems to feel the urgency to move, making your irritation level rise to DEFCON 2.

Or maybe you stumbled groggily to the kitchen for your morning cup of joe only to be suddenly jarred awake by the white-hot pain of stubbing your toe on the doorframe.

Coffee won’t fix that.

Or maybe you are just so ridiculously tired, and the idea of pulling off the warm covers to go to the gym feels like a monumental effort. So you hit snooze just one time . . . okay two . . . maybe three.

And then feel heavy guilt shrouding you all day long for skipping your workout.

Somehow the day is already made, the course has been set, and there’s no changing it or veering off the path. It’s just going to be one of those days.

PATTERNS AND DISRUPTIONS

As humans, we are drawn to patterns. When we see a pattern, we believe there’s no breaking it. It’s fixed and set in stone. It is what it is. Unfortunately, we can allow this idea of permanence to hold us back. When something negative happens, we hold fast on to it and we hold it up as absolute evidence that this is just how life is destined to be.

What I find so fascinating with our brain is how we steadfastly—almost stubbornly—cling to the negative. Did you know that our brain is actually hardwired to see the negative five times more than it will see (and remember!) a positive experience? Five.

This negativity bias was wired to help us survive—historically we needed to remember the negative in order to live another day and pass our genes down the line. Obviously, this was great for our cave ancestors to help them remember not to touch the fire and to avoid the saber-tooth tiger, but in today’s world it means we have a hard time seeing past the negatives.

This happens so often with our past. We look behind us and we see the trail of where we have been and what we have done, and it’s littered with bad experiences, decisions we regret, and trauma that feels like it defines us. It’s hard to see the strength we gained by overcoming the challenges, the lessons we learned when we picked ourselves up after failing. All we can see is a pattern of mistakes and failures.

This is one of the reasons that the idea of looking back and reflecting can feel like something we’d prefer to avoid. We want to shove it under the bed—the same way I dealt with my dirty laundry when I was told to clean my room at age thirteen. It was there . . . and the room wasn’t really clean. That pile of dirty laundry was subtly adding a lingering odor of mildew. I knew it, and anyone who walked into my room knew it.

YOUR BRAIN AT 88 MPH

We show up every day with our baggage—our pile of dirty laundry. But we are so used to having it around, we don’t even notice the smell. We’ve gone noseblind, but it’s there . . . adding its aroma to anything and everything we do. We allow the disappointments in our past to obscure our view of the future. We see a pattern and we believe we’re stuck—and the rut is so deep we cannot see out.

Our brain, though, loves patterns. It likes being able to guess the ending based on what it already knows. So when the pattern doesn’t really work, it confuses us. It’s why we are gobsmacked when Jo somehow doesn’t end up marrying Laurie in Little Women. Or why we gasped out loud the first time we heard Darth Vader utter the words “I am your father” to Luke. It doesn’t fit.^* How is it possible?!

But not all patterns are designed to continually repeat until the end of time. Many need to be broken. Yes, patterns create order—and no matter who you are (I’m looking at you, Enneagram 7s), your mind likes a nice foundation of order. It relies on order to make assumptions about what will happen next. That’s what our brain does. It creates order out of chaos so we can move through our daily lives.

Can you imagine how taxing it would be if we didn’t rely on patterns? If everything in our world was a surprise? It would be exhausting if we were perpetually excited and distracted about every tiny thing—the spray of water shooting from the spigot when we turn on the shower or the way the sun filters through the slats of the blinds.

Michael Pollan explained it² like this: our brain uses what it learned in the past to “develop shorthand ways of slotting and processing our every experience.” We want to know what to expect next, so “our brains [are] continually translating the data of the present into the terms of the past, reaching back in time for the relevant experience, and then using that to make its best guess as to how to predict and navigate the future.”

In other words, our brain uses its own Marty McFly time machine to constantly hop back in time to see what’s happened in our past so it can guess what will happen in the future. Creating order.

It does this with mind-numbing speed—we don’t even realize we are doing this. Yes, mind numbing, because it dulls the hope of possibility: What if this time is different from the last?

Thanks to our brain’s love of patterns, we can get hung up on our past mistakes and failures to the point where we make ourselves afraid of what could possibly happen next. Our brain takes over and insists on filling in the gaps, making guesses about our future. It plugs them in the spaces like autocorrect on your computer. Yes, it’s helpful . . . but then there are the times you hit Send too fast on your text or email only to realize your message is utterly and entirely wrong. We’ve all done that—shot off a quick message and then scrambled to fix it.

What if your brain is sometimes wrong? What if the most “logical answer” isn’t the right one?^*

Because here’s the truth: the thing our brain forgets is that all the trials we’ve gone through up to this moment are the very things that have helped shape us into the people we are today and the people we are striving to become tomorrow. We just have to learn how to break the patterns.

Every failure, every experience—the good and the bad—has, in one way or another, led us to this exact moment.

These are the treasures hidden in our minds, nestled in that pile under our beds among the dirty laundry. Those things that, in the moment, felt like they were happening to you, but with the beauty of hindsight, you can now see that those things were really happening for you—to help you become who you are right this very second. I know that sounds like it should be written on a Hallmark card—and maybe it should, because it’s true.

But you cannot find the treasures among the trash unless you pull all of that junk out. Spread it on the floor and take a good, hard look at it. Dig and start mining for the gold that’s hiding underneath the piles.

LOOK BACKWARD TO MOVE FORWARD

If you want to move forward, you have to begin by looking back. It may seem counterintuitive, but looking behind helps illuminate the path ahead. Reflection is such a key element to discovering who you really are and who you want to become. I call them breadcrumbs—the little things that have marked the path of where you’ve been. Breadcrumbs are incredibly helpful in unlocking who you are at your core. And they can help reveal how and where to invest in yourself.

Reflection is an incredibly powerful exercise, but it’s something we instinctively want to avoid. I know you don’t want to dive into your past. I know you can come up with about 5 million other things you can do to avoid looking back—including deep cleaning your cat’s litter box or starting that new vegan cleanse you’ve been talking about doing for the past 6 months. Here’s a question I want you to think about as we talk about this idea of reflection:

Would you rather stay stuck living in the past, in a life that no longer exists?

or

Would you rather celebrate the many things you’ve already been through—the good and the bad—so you can start to live your future?

Taking time to reflect requires having the courage to acknowledge that your life has included negative experiences. Having hardship or failure in our lives doesn’t make any one of us unique. Learning how to deal with the negative is a skill we all need to sharpen because life is always going to be filled with incredible highs and, yes, some occasional deep lows.

Of course, when we are digging into that laundry pile, we will—and should—look for the positive. The good pieces of our past can help us see what we’re capable of accomplishing; they give us springboards to know what we do well and what we can build upon to bring us successes. The shiny, happy moments are fun to look at—like little trophies lined up in a glass case. Pieces of plastic spray-painted gold and shellacked until they shine, they stand up as proof that we’ve done good. Let me correct that . . . we believe they stand up as proof that we are good. It’s easy to want to pull them out of the case and proudly hold them above our heads like Rocky at the top of those steps.

To be honest, though, the hardships, the failures, the mistakes, the trauma—those are the most fertile ground of all. That’s where we can plant our seeds for learning who we want to become in moving forward. Knowing what we like is helpful, but knowing what we don’t like, what we don’t want to repeat, is more than helpful—it’s powerful.

It’s easy, though, to miss the gift because of the package it’s wrapped in. We are so caught up in the disappointment, in the thick, oozy hurt, that we cannot see the pain as part of the process. Hidden inside is a tiny flicker of what it is we truly want in our lives.

Did you know that¹ people are inherently more likely to take action to move away from pain than they are to move toward pleasure? What that means is pain and hardship are a stronger motivator than the good. This is why we need to mine for those tough parts of the past. When we hold them up to light, we can clearly see exactly what it is that we want to avoid, which means it also shows us what we truly want.

Think about it....

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• A Note to The Reader
• How this book works
• Introduction
• Part One: Reflection
• Part Two: Projection
• Part Three: Action
• Part Four: Alteration
• Conclusion: Choosing to Choose
• Bonus Content
• Acknowledgments
• Notes
• About the Author