Life purpose coaching is for the moment you realise that the life you are living no longer points anywhere you want to go, even though you cannot yet say where you would rather be. Together we look carefully at your values, your past and present passions, your skills and the things you are quietly drawn to, and we turn what we find into a direction you can test in real life before you commit to it.
Most people who look for this kind of help are not in crisis. They have a job that pays, responsibilities they take seriously and a life that looks perfectly reasonable from the outside, and yet they have started to notice that the years are passing in a direction they never really chose.
If you are quieter or more reflective than the people who usually give this kind of advice, you will not be asked to become louder or to announce a grand calling you do not feel.
A calm, structured and evidence-based process for finding direction, carried out privately and online.
People rarely arrive with a single dramatic problem. More often they arrive with a quiet, persistent feeling that something important has been postponed for too long, and with no clear idea of what that something is. If one of the situations below sounds uncomfortably familiar, you are in the right place.
The week ahead is already mapped out, you know you will get through it, and you are good at what you do, but some part of you has stopped believing that this is where your effort should be going, and that feeling arrives with more regularity than you would like to admit.
You have read widely, started several things with real enthusiasm and been good at more than one of them, and yet when someone asks what you actually want to do you find it harder to answer than people with half your curiosity seem to find it.
The degree, the career or the business you chose made sense at twenty-five, and you followed it faithfully, but the person who chose it has changed, and you are no longer sure whether to repair the old plan or to replace it with a new one.
You are willing to do the work, and you may even have some savings or some freedom to use, but every idea you consider seems either too safe to be worth the effort or too risky to explain to the people who depend on you.
None of this means that something is wrong with you. It usually means that the direction you set for yourself years ago has quietly expired, and that nobody has yet helped you to look at your own life carefully enough to set a new one.
“Purpose is rarely a sudden revelation. It is usually assembled slowly, from evidence that was in your life all along.”
I do not believe that anyone has a single hidden calling waiting to be discovered by the right quiz. I do believe that most people already hold the raw material for a good direction, scattered across their values, their abilities and their history, and that the work is to gather it, look at it honestly and test it.
We start with four kinds of evidence. Your values tell us what a good life has to protect. Your strengths and skills tell us what you can already offer. Your passions, including the ones you abandoned years ago, show what has held your attention without anyone asking. Your inclinations show the kinds of problems, people and settings you keep drifting towards.
Where these four overlap, a small number of plausible directions usually appear. Rather than asking you to leap into one of them, we design modest experiments, such as a conversation with someone already doing the work or a short project over a few weekends, so that your decision rests on real experience rather than on imagination.
The sequence below is a guide rather than a timetable, and we adjust it to what you bring. It usually takes around ten sessions over three months, with short pieces of work between sessions that most people fit into a normal week.
Where you have been
Grounded inNarrative identity research (McAdams); the Meaning in Life Questionnaire (Steger et al., 2006).
What you are made of
Grounded inThe VIA classification of strengths (Peterson & Seligman, 2004); Holland’s theory of vocational interests; the Reflected Best Self exercise (Roberts et al., 2005).
What could fit
Grounded inPossible selves (Markus & Nurius, 1986); test-and-learn career change (Ibarra, 2003); life-design prototyping (Burnett & Evans, 2016).
Where you are going
Grounded inSelf-concordant goals (Sheldon & Elliot, 1999); implementation intentions (Gollwitzer, 1999); mental contrasting (Oettingen).
At every stage we will notice the beliefs that have kept you where you are, such as the conviction that it is too late, that you are not the kind of person who does this, or that wanting more is somehow ungrateful, and we will examine them calmly using cognitive-behavioural techniques rather than simply trying to argue you out of them.
Much of the real progress happens between sessions, when you have time to reflect without anyone watching. Each worksheet comes with a worked example, so that you are never left staring at an empty page and wondering what a good answer might look like.
Peaks, low points and turning points from childhood to today, with a note on what each one taught you.
Everything you have loved doing, including what you dropped, with the reasons you stopped and what you still miss.
Forty values sorted and ranked, then tested against five real decisions to see which ones you actually live by.
Short letters from people who know you well, describing you at your best, from which we draw out the patterns.
Three honest five-year versions of your future, each weighed in time, money, energy and what it would mean to you.
Every small real-world test you run, what you expected, what actually happened and what it changed in your thinking.
When we lay your history out carefully, moments that once seemed unrelated often turn out to share something: a kind of problem you enjoy, a kind of person you want to help, or a setting in which you do your best work. Seeing that thread is usually the point at which people stop searching for a calling and start recognising one.
Making difficult things clear for people who feel left out of them.
An illustrative map, not a real client’s story.
Insight that disappears a week after the last session is not much use to anyone. By the end of our work you should have a small number of concrete documents and decisions that you can return to whenever the old doubts come back.
A few sentences in your own words that describe what you are for and whom you want to serve.
A short list of values you have tested against real decisions, so that future choices become easier.
Your strengths, skills and inclinations brought together on one page, supported by other people’s observations.
Two or three possible directions, each examined through a real experiment rather than imagined from a distance.
A realistic first chapter, with specific actions that fit the week you actually have rather than an ideal one.
Your baseline scores next to your final ones, so that you can see what has changed rather than guess.
We agree on a few measures at the start that are worth tracking. They are not vanity numbers or a spreadsheet of your life, just observable signs that you are actually moving in the direction you have chosen.
Every few weeks we look at the evidence together, so that neither of us has to rely on a vague feeling about whether anything is changing.
It is worth being clear about what this work can and cannot do before you commit any time or money to it, because the right expectations make the process far more useful.
A few years ago I was overweight, I had been postponing my PhD for longer than I care to admit, and I was working in a teaching job I had stopped believing in. From the outside nothing looked particularly wrong, which made it easier to keep waiting for a better moment to change.
What eventually helped was not a sudden revelation but a slower and more honest look at what I valued, what I was good at and what I kept returning to, followed by small steps that I could repeat. I finished the doctorate, lost fifteen kilos through training and consistent practice, left salaried teaching in 2019 and built an online business from nothing, including the brand, the website and the clients.
I use the same careful, evidence-based approach with the people I coach. I will not pretend to know your answer before you do, but I can help you look for it properly, and I can tell you from experience that a life can become considerably larger without you having to become someone else.
Lost, then rebuilt through training, structure and consistent practice.
A self-published guide that became an Amazon bestseller.
Completed after years of delay, in Education Policy.
A salaried path traded in 2019 for a business built from zero.
Career coaching usually concentrates on the next job: your CV, interviews and the skills an employer wants to see. Life purpose coaching starts earlier, with what you value, what you are good at and what gives your work meaning, so that the next job, business or project is chosen for reasons that will still make sense in five years.
No. Almost everyone does this work while they are still employed, and the experiments are designed to fit around a normal working week. If a change of job or a move to working for yourself turns out to make sense, we plan it carefully and at a pace that respects your income and your responsibilities.
That is the most common starting point, and it is exactly what the process is designed for. You do not need to arrive with a theory about yourself, only with a willingness to look honestly at your history and to try a few small things you have not tried before.
Most people work with me for around ten sessions over roughly three months. Some reach a clear direction sooner, while others need more time to run their experiments or to work through the beliefs that have been holding them back, and we adjust the pace accordingly.
The exercises draw on published research in positive psychology, vocational psychology and goal-setting, together with cognitive-behavioural techniques. There is nothing mystical about it, and you will always know why we are doing a particular exercise and what we hope to learn from it.
Many of the people I work with have this problem, and the answer is rarely to pick one interest and abandon the rest. More often we find the thread that connects several of them, or a structure in which two or three can sit side by side without competing for the same hours.
The first consultation is free, lasts thirty minutes and takes place on Zoom. You can tell me where you are, ask whatever you need to ask, and decide afterwards, without any pressure, whether life purpose coaching is the right next step for you.
