When it comes to taking lessons from the books we read, my key takeaways may differ substantially from yours as we read books through the lens of our own experience.
As Bjorn Natthiko Lindeblad points out in his book I May Be Wrong, we’re shaped by how we are raised, our culture, our experiences, what we came into the world with, our life situation, and our culture.
That will influence to the messages I took from Dr Gladys McGarey’s book, The Well-Lived Life, and yours too.
The Well-Lived Life by Dr Gladys McGarey
The Well-Lived Life by Dr Gladys McGarey is a reflection on living a fulfilling and meaningful life based on her experiences as a pioneering holistic physician. At 102 years old, Dr McGarey shares insights and wisdom garnered from her long life and career, emphasising the importance of purpose, love, and resilience.
One of the key themes that stood out for me relates to finding purpose and meaning in our lives.
Purpose and Passion
Dr McGarey stresses the importance of having a purpose or passion that drives us, regardless of age. She believes that finding something we care deeply about gives life meaning gives us energy and keeps you moving forward.
In the field of positive psychology having a sense of purpose and meaning in life is referred to as eudemonic wellbeing. It is one of the aspects that contributes to our overall wellbeing and sense of life satisfaction (Steptoe, Deaton and Stone, 2015).
Purpose can be defined as an enduring, personally meaningful commitment to what one hopes to accomplish or work toward in life (Bronk, 2011) that gives us a sense of direction (Ryff,1989) and future-mindedness (Mariano and Savage, 2009).
Pursuing a medical career
For McGarey, finding her purpose came after spending time with her parents, both doctors, running mobile medical camps in rural India. They offered medical care to those who had little, if any, as were typically on the bottom rung of the caste system and considered ‘untouchable’.
Despite having dyslexia, McGarey was determined to follow in her parents’ footsteps and become a doctor. She knew that dyslexia made school hard for her but that it had no bearing on her intelligence. McGarey went on to practise medicine for over 80 years.
Like my parents, healing gave me an opportunity to interact with the world in a positive and meaningful way.
When we find our purpose, our ‘juice’ or ‘creative life energy’ as McGarey calls it, we have a reason for living. It fulfils us, gives us joy, and allows us to do things that matter and mean something to us.
A personal insight
I’ve always been a little envious of those who have known from an early age what they wanted to do with their lives. Several doctor friends seem have known since their early teens that medicine was their vocation.
It feels so much easier to know which direction you want your life to take. The rest of us have spent many decades, in my case, finding the area of life that drives us and gives us the creative energy McGarey refers to.
She points out that many people aren’t able to work jobs they find rewarding but find their passion in the hours outside of work, which is exactly what I’m doing with this site. This is what excites me, gives me purpose, and adds huge value to my life.
But finding purpose and meaning in life does not necessary mean having one large overall goal, such as becoming a doctor or lawyer. McGarey points out that it can mean finding things that contribute to society while also connecting with our unique sense of purpose, such as being an unpaid caregiver.
Our aim in life to feel truly alive, is find this ‘juice’, this life force, and then direct our energy towards it.
Why am I here?
Why am I here? is the title of the second chapter of McGarey’s book and addresses the issues of how we discover what is meaningful to us. She states it can exist beyond our reach. We just need to find it.
Paying attention to the things that excite us, are the clues we are looking in the right place.
Choosing the wrong path
In my teens, I was loved reading psychology books and found them fascinating. But I didn’t fully appreciate that these were the clues I needed to choose a career path and lacked confidence in my ability to make the right decision, as well as my intellectual capacity to study at degree level.
So, I took a different path and did a business degree. It was several decades later that I returned to psychology and completed my positive psychology masters. I can’t undo the fact I took then wrong path initially, because my life would have been different.
I would not have met the people I’ve met and the experiences I’ve had if I had chosen that different path decades prior. I would have been doing something that felt a lot more ‘me’ than entering the world of business, but the path I took has led me here, and ‘here’ is pretty good.
Working with students
Through her work, McGarey worked with many students who were unsure what to do with their lives after graduating, and who had felt they had chosen to study a certain subject, and go down a certain career path, for reasons that were not fully their own.
Some were influenced by parents who wanted them to enter a ‘safe career’. But that left them struggling to find out what they really wanted to be doing with their lives.
Changing paths
To shift from taking one path to choosing another can require us to make a change, stop something we have been doing for some time, or start doing something completely new.
This can be challenging when so much time has been invested in studying a subject such as medicine. There can also be expectations from those around us, and the career path we find ourselves on can feel like part of our identity. To change means to lose that and risk letting people down.
Benefiting our physical and mental health
For the benefit of our physical and mental health we need to do something that feels aligned with who we are, what we believe in, what we enjoy and what we are good at, so we feel happy, energised and that life has meaning.
We generally know when something doesn’t feel right, and that is worth paying attention to.
We can often feel it when we have achieved something we have been working towards, and have created the life we wanted, but still, something does not feel right. We’re not feeling as we expected to. It hasn’t fulfilled us. We’re not satisfied. We need something more.
Passions over time
McGarey points out that our passions and the things that give our lives meaning and purpose will, understandably, change as we age.
We enjoy something for a while, then find something that catches our interest more and move on. Life twists and turns, our interests change, and our physical abilities shift as we age.
Therapy and life experiences
I’d add to this, that it is not just age that changes the areas of life we want to focus our energy on. We can change as a result of therapy or life experiences, which change our view of ourselves or the world we live in.
This can lead us to find certain things are no longer a good fit for us, and that we want to explore a new area.
Therapy can also help us feel more confident and capable ease the negative dialogue in our heads along with the psychological suffering that has held us back. This can also alter our ambitions and set us on a new path.
When it comes to life experiences, many things can lead us to reflect on our lives and alter our perspective on the world. Losing people in our lives can highlight the fact that our time is limited. Illness can do the same.
Anything that causes us to stop and think can result in us altering the course our life is on.
Knowing who we truly are
McGarey points out that to know what excites us we must know who we truly are, which isn’t easy, particularly when we are young. This is where therapy, talking to family and friends who know us well, and reflecting on the things that really excite us can help.
She asks us to think about our dreams, the things we do without anyone telling us, just because we enjoy them. She asks us to think about the activities we naturally lean towards, the activities that come naturally to us, the things we enjoyed as a child.
Also important to consider are the happy memories we have and what we were doing at the time, the things that keep us going, and the times when we felt we were doing something purposeful.
She advises us not to let thoughts of self-doubt fill our minds when we think about what we really want from life, or let us believe our ambition is too big, or that we don’t deserve it.
Instead, we just need to spend time thinking about what really matters to us and be honest with ourselves. She calls it getting in touch with our desire, which can then help us find what has meaning and purpose in our lives and pursue those avenues.
Character strengths
We can also learn more about ourselves and our interests by taking the VIA Character Strengths Survey to identify our character strengths.
This is one of several strengths interventions whose aim is to identify our top strengths so we can use and develop the, enhancing our wellbeing, or sense of personal achievement, as a result (Quinlan, et al. 2012).
The initial rationale for character strengths interventions was that use of one’s strengths is engaging and fulfilling; therefore, development of an individual’s top strengths should lead to increased engagement and achievement and so enhance well-being.
Best possible self
Best Possible Self is a positive psychology intervention designed to help us visualise our future selves. The aim is to imagine ourselves in the future where everything has gone well, and we have achieved what we want to in life.
This exercise can help us learn more about ourselves, our motivations and values. It can help us understand what is important to us and identify the goals we need to be focusing on now in order to achieve that future self.
It can help us identify our passions and goals and work towards them.
Research findings
Research has consistently shown that disclosive writing has numerous benefits for well-being, health, and emotional adjustment (Sheldon and Lyubomirsky, 2006).
Writing about one’s possible selves is thus likely to improve self-regulation because it allows an opportunity to learn about oneself, to illuminate and restructure one’s priorities, and to gain better insight into one’s motives and emotions.
In one study, King (2001) asked participants to write about their best possible future selves for 20 minutes each day over four consecutive days and found this increased wellbeing and caused a significant immediate increase in positive mood.
Small steps
We don’t have to leap in with both feet and invest all our time and energy into the area we’ve identified as giving us a feeling of joy and meaning in our lives.
We can take small steps, dip our toe into the water and see how it feels while contemplating whether we want to travel further down that road.
If you feel your passion is jewellery making, as I once did, it’s better to attend a workshop before signing up to a year-long course, just to check how it leaves you feeling as you thought it would.
We could find we enjoy helping people and decide to do some voluntary work with a local charity before deciding to commit to a career in the caring sector.
Benefits of having purpose
Having purpose in life is associated an increased ability to cope (Brown and Parrish. 2011), to feel hope (Bronk et al. 2009), show empathy (Mariano and Savage 2009), feel happy (Burrow and Hill, 2011) and place emphasis on for the importance of social, psychological, and health-related goals (Pinquart et al. 2009).
As McGarey emphasises, purpose and meaning in life gives us energy, drives us forward and gives is a reason to get out of bed in the morning. It also increases our wellbeing and leaves us excited about life and all it offers. It is therefore a life-enhancing area worth exploring.
Sources
Bronk, K. C. (2011). The role of purpose in life in healthy identity formation: A grounded model. New Directions for Youth Development, 132, 31–44.
Kim, E.S., Chen, Y., Nakamura, J.S., Ryff, C.D. and VanderWeele, T.J. (2022). Sense of purpose in life and subsequent physical, behavioral, and psychosocial health: An outcome-wide approach. American Journal of Health Promotion, 36(1), pp.137-147.
King, L. A. (2001). The health benefits of writing about life goals. Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin, 27, 798–807.
Mariano, J. M., & Savage, J. (2009). Exploring the language of youth purpose: References to positive states and coping styles by adolescents with different kinds of purpose. Journal of Research in Character Education, 7, 1–24.
Pinquart, M., Silbereisen, R. K., & Fröhlich, C. (2009). Life goals and purpose in life in cancer patients. Supportive Care in Cancer: Official Journal of the Multinational Association of Supportive Care in Cancer, 17, 253–259.
Ryff, C. D. (1989). Happiness is everything, or is it? Explorations on the meaning of psychological well-being. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 57, 1069–1081.
Sheldon, K.M. and Lyubomirsky, S., 2006. How to increase and sustain positive emotion: The effects of expressing gratitude and visualizing best possible selves. The journal of positive psychology, 1(2), pp.73-82.
Steptoe, A., Deaton, A. and Stone, A.A. (2015). Subjective wellbeing, health, and ageing. The lancet, 385(9968), pp.640-648.
Yukhymenko-Lescroart, M.A. and Sharma, G., 2020. Examining the factor structure of the revised sense of purpose scale (SOPS-2) with adults. Applied Research in Quality of Life, 15, pp.1203-1222
