Stop looking for purpose. Start noticing purposeful moments.
What I ask almost every client in almost every coaching session.
“I’m somewhere at a 7 today. Feeling quite energized and positive.”
“What are all the good things that made you feel this way this week?”
This is how I start almost every coaching session. A trick I picked up in my coaching certification. Simple. And it does so much more than you’d think.
I start with,
“On a scale of 1-10, what energy are you coming with today?”
It forces self-reflection.
For a lot of my clients, this is the first moment all week they’ve stopped to ask themselves: How have I actually been feeling? And why? Is this as good as it gets right now — or have I been in a funk and didn’t even acknowledge?
The follow-up question does the heavy lifting of shifting your focus.
It pulls your attention toward what went right. Toward gratitude. Toward the things that are still filling your cup even when you feel drained — and toward the possibility that you could pour in more of those things, on purpose, starting today.
Then comes the proactivity piece.
When you reflect on what makes you feel alive, energized, confident — you stop waiting for life to hand it to you. You start designing your days for it.
And the biggest piece of all: it builds self-knowledge all of you need.
So many people reach midlife with an impressive list of things done and almost no clarity on what they actually care about. Who they are. What they want to spend their one life on.
And that answer isn’t hiding somewhere out there waiting to be discovered.
Purpose, who you are, what makes your life complete - all of it isn’t something you go find.
It’s YOU.
It’s a feeling, a compass you already have — every time you do certain things it points to your true North.
Activities can vary but the essence tends to fall in one of these buckets:
Helping others.
Feeling like you matter in someone’s life. Mentoring a colleague through a task you’ve mastered. Sitting with your parent while you untangle whatever new piece of technology just landed on them — most of them grew up with no internet at all. Can you imagine how disorienting that must feel?
Learning something.
Getting better at a skill, work-related or not. Growth, in any form, feels meaningful to any human — especially when you take the time to notice it happening. When you can feel yourself moving closer to the person you’re trying to become.
Making progress on something that matters to you.
Whether that’s your business, your fitness, or finally getting that AI agent to work the way you imagined for your clients — chipping away at milestones is one of the most rewarding experiences a human brain can have. It’s your brain’s candy! Especially paired with learning, or with other people. Teresa Amabile’s lab studied 12,000 work diaries and found that meaningful progress is one of the strongest predictors of feeling good at work. Even the smallest win registers as a hit of dopamine rush for your brain.
Leaning into a challenge.
Choosing to solve the problem instead of avoiding it. Taking the first real step on a health issue, a work issue, a personal one. Every time you decide I’ve got this, I’ll figure it out — anxiety loses ground to confidence.
Simply sharing this strange, beautiful experience of being alive with another human.
It still amazes me every time. How easily and fast the conversation with sometimes total stranger you’ve just met — a barista, someone at the gym, coworker you barely talk to — can turn real deep, like meaning of life kind of deep. All it takes is stepping out of transactional mode and asking: what does it feel like to be human, doing this weird thing we call living together?
These are the things I keep noticing — and so does most of the research on what makes a life feel meaningful.
Once you know they work, not just for you but for basically everyone, entire human race, you can start designing your days around them.
Especially on the days your number drops to a 5 or lower.
It’s a bit like hunger.
You don’t have to sit there miserable. You take a bite. Nourish yourself. Suddenly your 5 is a 7 — and some days, even a 10.
I’m not saying every hard thing in life gets solved by running through a checklist.
But you’d be surprised how consistently good you can feel when you feed your soul the right things.
Eat your soul protein :)
What’s your favorite thing to do when you need to fill your cup?👇
