Are You Deciding On Purpose (extended interview)

From his home in Scandia, Minnesota, 40 miles from Minneapolis, author, speaker, and counselor Richard Leider overlooks the St. Croix River and acres of woods-the kind of natural environment that he says contributes to better decisions about work and life. A founding partner of The Inventure Group, a Minneapolis-based training firm whose mission is to help individuals, leaders, and teams discover the power of purpose, Leider counts among his clients such high-powered companies as AT&T, Caterpillar Inc., General Motors, Motorola, and 3M-organizations where he both coaches executives and teaches in executive programs. His books include Repacking Your Bags (Berrett-Koehler, 1995, with David A. Shapiro) and The Power of Purpose (Berrett-Koehler, 1997). He also publishes On Purpose, "a journal about taking charge of your work/life."

What has distinguished Leider throughout his three decades as a career coach and counselor is the philosophy he brings to difficult decisions about work and life. Leider's activities as a long-time board member of Outward Bound and his annual backpacking safaris to Tanzania, East Africa testify to his conviction that interaction with nature is an important part of reflection and self-knowledge. At the heart of his approach to counseling is a belief that each individual is born with a reason for being and that life is a quest to discover that purpose.

Fast Company spoke with Richard Leider about his "laws" for making decisions on purpose.

1. Life is a spiral.

People today are intimidated by how much choice they have. There are almost too many career choices, too many life choices. People are overwhelmed at times by the decisions they get to make-and have to make-about their jobs, their families, their businesses, their futures. There are so many variables today: Where will you work? Where will you live? What do you want for yourself? What do you want for your family? If you don't have a way to sort it all out, you can become paralyzed.

I have a visual exercise that helps you understand the choices you have to make at different points in your life. Draw a little spiral, something like a tornado going upwards. That spiral represents the different phases you encounter in your life. There are times in life when you're on a plateau, where things are well balanced. Then along comes a triggering event that knocks you into limbo. When that trigger occurs, you have to put all your energy into handling the situation, whether it's an emergency at work, the death of a close friend, or your own health crisis.

That puts you into the third part of the spiral: a period of uncertainty. Something is ending, something else is about to begin-but you're between the ending and the beginning. To get out of limbo, you have to look at everything you've been carrying with you. You have to unpack your bag and then repack it, so you can go on to the next phase of your life.

Today more and more people are being struck by more and more triggers. One out of two marriages ends in divorce. Every eight seconds, one of the country's 76 million Baby Boomers turns 50. In the workplace, companies have downsized and reengineered, and people have become free agents. As a consequence, more people are asking themselves where they're going, what they're going to do with the rest of their lives, and what really matters to them. These aren't decisions you can just think your way through. They involve emotions more than ideas-how we feel about ourselves, more than how we think about ourselves.

2. Answer these two questions.

Ask yourself these questions and answer them honestly: What do you want? And how will you know when you get it?

People really do have their own solutions. The problem is, either they don't know how to discover them, or they avoid discovering them. But if you want to come up with good decisions for your work and your life, simply ask those two questions-because it all comes down to very simple things.

3. Feed these three hungers.

There are three hungers that people are trying to feed throughout their lives. The first is to connect deeply with the creative spirit of life. Sooner or later, most people come to recognize that there is some sort of creative energy that infuses all of life. They feel a hunger to touch that energy and to be touched by it. That doesn't mean that you have to be a creative person in a classic sense-to make your living as a painter, a dancer, a writer, or an actor. It could mean an experience as universal as bringing a child into the world, or helping to nurture and shape a life. It could mean finding ways to infuse the workplace with more creativity and more playfulness.