“Whosoever can think deep will
know how to give thanks”- Yoruba proverb [Literal translation]
Unfortunately, I am not able to tell you the exact steps to take in
discovering your purpose in life. However, I can share with you the single
thing people fail to do which makes it extremely difficult to discover the
unique attributes and abilities the Creator has placed in them. Here lays the
secret: People ask questions, a lot of questions, but not to themselves. People
spend their whole life asking questions about others! “Oh, why did she act in such and such a way?” “Oh, why did he say this
or that?” “Oh, they should not have had these things they have”; but they
fail to sit still, reflect and question their own actions and reactions while
making-sense of them.
*Professor Judi Marshal of the Management Learning and Leadership
department at Lancaster University wrote a great piece published in the System Practice and Action Research
Journal. She titled it “Living life as Inquiry”. The aim was to show how she
“applies notions of inquiry as a method to many areas of her life space”. Judi explained what she meant by living life as
inquiry. She says it refers to:
“a range of beliefs, strategies
and ways of behaving which encourage her to
treat little as fixed, finished, clear-cut. Rather she has an image of living continually in process, adjusting and
seeing what emerges, bringing things into question”.
Get this! The beliefs you hold in your mind determine your ability to
rightly inquire your life experiences. There
are people who blame others for every ill they experience in life. They
continually believe someone somewhere
is against them. Such people never inquire their life; rather they spend their
days judging the life of others.
The big question is: When things happen in your life, what sense do you
make of it? When you pass through an experience, what does it mean to you as an
individual? The act of Sense-making is
defined as “a process by which people give meaning to experience”.
When gold miners in South Africa dig deep into the rocks, what they
initially find is not pure gold. In fact, it is a mixture of gravel, sand and
gold. Gold miners therefore go ahead to extract the gold through what is termed
“gold ore processing”. Typically, you cannot get the most out of your
experiences until you get those experiences processed through inquiry with the purpose
of extracting the senses those
experiences make to you.
Your ability to effectively inquire your life experiences and learn from
them requires a conscious resilient effort to work on your behaviours. You will
have to hone your mind-set until you find it normal, natural and seamless to
continually question what you know, feel, do and want. You then develop a
keenness to keep knowing.
Let me introduce you to a process of inquiry that ensures you are able
to make sense of your experiences. It is centred around three basic words that
start most questions: Why, What and When.
Asking the “Whys”
When you go through experiences, it is important to make out time to
reflect on your actions and those of others. When you do, learn to ask the “Why” questions. Such questions as: Why did I fail to pass Physics while I easily made good grades in
Sociology? This is best used in kick-starting an inquiry process. Asking
the “Why” questions exposes the inner
and outer arcs of attention. It influences your thoughts (inner) and actions
(outer) based on the experience you are inquiring and subsequently, the sense
you make of the experience. Asking the “Whys”
enables you to analyse situations from diverse perspectives thereby boosting
the richness of your learning.
Asking the “What questions”
After the “Whys” have been
answered, the next is to get to know “What
the answers to the Whys mean?” Using the previous example, you’ll be asking:
“If I failed Physics because I realised I’m
not inclined towards science subjects, what
does this mean to me?” Finding answers to the Whats reveals the action steps you could take hereafter. These
answers simply help you make sense of the experience
Asking the “When questions”
Most people repeatedly act the same way not because they did not realise
their past mistakes but because they failed to plan a change in behaviour—and therefore,
their learning is incomplete. They might have realised their mistakes, but fail
to learn from them by not taking new actions.
If answering the “What” questions
helps you make sense of your experiences and exposes action steps, there is a
need to set-out plans on when to take action; and this is by no means the least
important thing to remember. Indeed, your learning is incomplete without this.
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