Kevin W. McCarthy

The Professor of On-Purpose

God

What Is the Meaning of Life?

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Did you make the choice today that your life is going to be meaningful? If so, please tell me about it in the comments area below. What do you anticipate the implications of your decision will be over the rest of your life?

 

“What is the meaning of life?”

Now there’s a tiny topic hardly worth pondering! The graphic and T-shirt design below by artist Aled Lewis (used with his permission)29_the_meaning_of_life_big may provide as good a sense of “clarity” on the topic as one can find.

Kidding aside, the value of asking, “What is the meaning of life?” may be less in the answer to one of life’s big questions, but more in the very act of the inquiry.

Asking this question is a positive sign that changes in life, ideally growth and maturity, are budding.

There’s an awareness that can lead to a new life with the potential to lead to a life of purpose and meaning. Engagement in a greater reality has begun.

Change is a part of life, but a change for life needs to be self-initiated—owned if you will. Those around may demand or encourage us by saying “Change your life,” but at the end of the day, it is our responsibility and challenge.

How you go about embracing growth is up to you.

For me, my big shift change happened when I attended a Bible study of the book of Romans back in the spring of 1985. Like many, I had been searching for meaning in life. As a true student of self-help literature, I was well read in the classic and contemporary self-help writers. At some point, however, it all started to sound like the same stuff simply rehashed from a different point of view.

I was not a Christian, but I was curious and willing to give that “old and irrelevant book” and the institution of the Church a chance. The Bible, I discovered, had a ring of authenticity about it that none of my self-help books had. There were no lightning strikes or trumpets sounding.

It was mostly an intellectual pursuit to better understand

  • Who am I?
  • Why am I here?
  • What should I do with my life?
  • Is life meaningful?

The Bible was different because here was core wisdom instead of just knowledge.

What is the meaning of life?

It doesn’t matter what I say. You have to find your answer for yourself. What I will tell you, however, is this: life is meaningful!

Start with this basic assumption and go forward.

Is It Right to Pray For Business? (Part 2)

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Yes! Pray for Business.

My most recent On-Purpose® Business Minute, Is It Right To Pray For Business, clearly struck a chord with many viewers as the public and private comments came pouring in. Additionally, I had a record number of unsubscribers from The On-Purpose Business Minutes. Too bad for us all.

In my decades of business advisory and consulting services I’ve worked with founders of a Fortune 100 company to floundering entrepreneurs. The principles of sound and ethical business can all be found in the Bible. But if you don’t have a biblical understanding, it is hard to know that.

Purpose is a spiritual concept.

That may make you uncomfortable. Don’t let discomfort keep you from growing as a leader or growing your business. Learn to pray for business success. Matters of faith often arise in my work with leaders.

Prayer is a natural outgrowth of these engaging relationships.

Plus prayer beats talking to yourself.

Your insights and comments are always welcome below.

Be On-Purpose!

Kevin

Is It Right To Pray For Business Success?

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Prayer Integrates

Many of us grew up with a compartmentalized view of life. The wisdom of the day went along these lines: “Your personal life is your personal life. Your business life is your business life. Don’t mix the two.”

While there is something to be said for keeping healthy boundaries and focusing appropriately, there is a dangerous downside risk to one’s ethics and behaviors. As we separate our spiritual life from any part of life, we’re dis-integrating.

The cost of being off-purpose in real dollars and human terms is incalculable.

As we advance from the agrarian age to the industrial age to the knowledge age and head into the age of purpose and meaning, integration—not disintegration—is the norm. Central to each individual’s personal life is their spiritual life or faith. If you are inclined to pray in your personal life, perhaps the role of prayer in your business life is a concept you’ve never considered.

Can I Pray for Business and Career Success?

  • Pray unceasingly.
  • Pray from your spiritual tradition for wise guidance, profitable relationships, and right decisions.
  • Pray for your co-workers, clients, team members, vendors, and competitors(!).
  • Pray before you go into a meeting or start on a sales call.

Just don’t pray as some sort of prosperity gospel or demand on God. To pray for business success isn’t really prayer. It is a demand and expectation for a result, not a relationship. Placing your agenda ahead of God’s agenda is akin to self-idolatry. It is the arrogance of telling God you know better. Pray, but trust God for the result that is best for your maturity and growth.

Formal and Informal Prayer

There’s formal prayer where you get down on your knees in a praying position clasping your hands together and perhaps using a book of common prayer or a guide. You may be in a service at a house of worship or next to your bed saying your prayers.

There’s also informal prayer. Invite prayer to be a casual part of your everyday walking about. Take one-minute prayer breaks. You’ll be amazed how much dead time opens on your schedule.

  • Do you wait for the hot water to come or the bath to fill? Pray.
  • Do you wait for a meeting to start? Pray.
  • Do you commute to work, drive to appointments, sit at your office desk, etc.? Pray!

Recognize these seemingly empty minutes and redeem the time with a prayer.

Our Unfair Advantage by Dr. Jim Harris
Click the book cover to buy it at amazon.com

“But Kevin, I don’t know how to pray for my business.” I hear that from time to time. A great resource for you is Our Unfair Advantage, written by my Christian friend and colleague, Dr. Jim Harris. Discover the why, what, how, and importance of getting counsel from your most important “silent partner”—the Holy Spirit.

Pray, Don’t Prey

Don’t, however, prey on people or use your faith as a means to excuse yourself from excellence, rationalize your mistakes, or create personal entitlement.

If integrity is an important value to you, then be sure to hold dear forgiveness as a complementary value. Master the art of being aware of your defensiveness, calming yourself, acknowledging your errors, asking for forgiveness, and giving thanks for the lesson learned.

You’ll become a more authentic and trusted leader when you can admit and right your wrongs within the scope of your control and authority.

This On-Purpose® Business Minute explores the power of being “on the job” and praying for owners and employees alike. What do you think? Is it right to pray for business success?

Am I Irritating The Living Hell Out of You?

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Typically when someone is irritating the living hell out of us, this bothersome behavior provokes the fight or flight impulse. While the expression is often used, what if there really is more than meets the idiom?

How many of us find ourselves or someone close to us caught in a living hell within our body, mind, spirit, and financial condition?

There’s nothing worse than this sense of hopelessness except resignation to the hopelessness and denial.

On-Purpose® is about awakening us to face our “living hell” by getting to the core of our being which by definition is good, pure, and whole—our purpose. Here is the keyhole to the escape hatch into being true to ourselves.

Choose hope!

Putting a name on our situation strengthens us to face it more directly, boldly, and successfully.

Why not experience the promise of “on earth as it is in heaven” on-purpose? Yes, I hope tshareasimage(5)his message irritates the living hell out of you … and you’ll thank me for it.

Escape Your Living Hell

On a highly selective basis, I’m looking to mentor and develop quality people who want to build a true business as a coach. This will mean learning, ongoing dialogue and development, determination, and a long-term commitment to stay the course. You’ll be helping your clients get to a healthier place in their lives in the most robust sense of well-being. For you this means work, learning to engage clients, and growing as a leader on-purpose.

Interested? Email me why you think this sounds like you. I’m conducting interviews to work with 3 people.

Are You An Explorer?

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Age doesn’t matter when it comes to developing the attitude of being an explorer.

Adventure is most often associated with youth. Let’s not, however, confuse inexperience with adventure. To be an explorer of life is to see life as an adventure versus a chore or time served on the planet. I know adventurers who are 9 and those who are in their 90s. The choice is yours.


Cultivating a spirit of curiosity about the world is a noble endeavor, but don’t forget yourself.

The better you know who you are the richer that journey beyond you will be and become. The ultimate exploration is to know oneself because in the process of that journey you’ll face some very challenging ordeals (Hey, it’s an adventure!) that will clarify your thinking and provoke your beliefs. To understand your design, you’ll look into the mind and heart of the Designer. Wow!

“We must develop a compelling vision of later life: one that does not assume a trajectory of decline after fifty, but one that recognizes it as a time of change, growth, and new learning, a time when our courage gives us hope.”

Sara Lawrence-Lightfoot
Author: The Third Chapter: Passion, Risk, and Adventure

 

“We are here to be excited from youth to old age, to have an insatiable curiosity about the world. Aldous Huxley once said that to carry the spirit of the child into old age is the secret of genius. And I buy that.

“We are also here to genuinely, humbly, and sincerely help others by practicing a friendly attitude. And every person is born for a purpose. Everyone has a God-given potential, in essence, built into them. And if we are to realize life to its fullest, we must realize that potential.”

Norman Vincent Peale
Protestant pastor, Author, The Power of Positive ThinkingCrazy_grandpa

This photo to the right is not Norman Vincent Peale. It is Mr. Six of Six Flags. I want to meet him! Dig the shoes! Watch him in action! (He’s actually an actor, not a real old guy but you get the point about the attitude.)

The aging process is inevitable.

How we age, however, is significantly within our control. Just because you might be part of an “aging population,” such as the Baby Boomers, it doesn’t mean that you are

  • over the hill
  • washed up
  • kaput
  • done for

Heck, you’re finally better equipped than ever.

Keith Lawrence is the co-author of Your Retirement Quest. Keith has been researching and advising those approaching and in retirement. Why wait to get started until you are retired or in assisted living to begin your Retirement Quest? Discover your Retirement Quest today regardless of what decade of life you are in.

Just about every day, I visit my Mom who is in her early 90s. This affords me the honor to meet her friends, many of whom are well into their 90s. One woman just turned 105 and looks like she is 75. I learn a lot from being with this Greatest Generation in this independent living facility. They’re an interested lot who read, discuss, debate, and embrace life. One observation I’ve had about this vital group—they aren’t the grumpy old people so often portrayed. They’re vibrant, interested, and interesting. As Peale recommends, they’ve carried a youthful curiosity into their advanced years.

Begin by discovering who you really are. Retirement age is not mandated by an employer or the government; it comes when we decide to stop discovering who we really are and what we are capable of achieving even to our death bed.

Those who never tire of learning, never retire.

How Do You Manage Disappointment?

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Disappointment is inevitable but it need not be debilitating.

How you manage it, however, is a choice with profound implications to your well-being, relationships, and opportunities. The easy route is to react negatively and stay there, but what good is that? You have a better choice.

I got to thinking about the word: disappointment.

It led me to this chain of words: disappointment > disappoint > point > appoint > appointment. The common word is “point” as in a mark or dot or direction. When we’re disappointed, the mark has been missed. It does, however, provide an opportunity for redirection.

What if disappointment is really intended to direct us to a greater appointment?

So when we stay in a negative place, aren’t we the ones who increase the price of the initial disappointment and risk missing where we’ve been appointed to shine?

(To see another use of “the point” you can watch this 9-minute video about the punctuation of your life. Is your life a question mark, period, or exclamation point? It is an excerpt from a keynote speaking engagement I did a few years ago.)

The holiday season sets high expectations, which can lead to great disappointment.

How do you turn that around?

As one year rolls into the next, take some time to refocus on-purpose.

I would love to hear your words of advice for getting unstuck when you find yourself disappointed with something important.

What works for you in managing disappointment? Share your thoughts in the comment box below. What you have to say may be the very words that help transform another person’s perspective. Now don’t disappoint me!  : )

Why Am I Fearful?

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Does fear interfere with your life, business, or career?

What’s your fear? What are you fearful of? Where in your life do you say, “I am afraid of … ,” yet you know it is a hang-up—not a danger to your life or limb?

Would you like to be at a place where you can say, “I am not afraid” … and mean it? Read on!

Fear, like pain, is partially designed to be our friend, not our foe.

  • Fear keeps us from being in harm’s way.
  • Fear protects us from injury, peril, and even death.
  • Fear provides for self-preservation.

This is our good or helpful fear.

Bad or harmful fear debilitates our inherent motivation and destroys our confidence. The ripple effects beyond oneself can damage relationships, opportunities, jobs, finances, and more.

  • Fear can be an occupying foe taking up unjust strongholds in our spirit, mind, and body.
  • Fear can lead to anxiety that spawns a panic attack that triggers the fight or flight reaction.

This fear is unhealthy in every aspect.

Fear is not to be necessarily avoided; it is, however, to be understood.

Fear is a God-given guidepost to growth and healing. Facing fear, however, is not a solitary endeavor. Be wise and seek the help of a professional counselor or therapist skilled in working you through your fear in a progressive manner.

Why bother?

If you’re locked in unhealthy fears, your aspirations and dreams are muted.

When fear prevails it is hard to be on-purpose.

Do You Have a Sense of Purpose?

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Look for it! You’ll hear it. Perhaps you’re even one who says it. “I did (such and such) and I had a real sense of purpose.” A “sense” is an inkling, a tiny bit, a nibble, a whiff, a morsel.

Why are you settling for so little? A sense of purpose is merely fumes on the combustible fuel found in truly knowing your purpose.

Invest 30 minutes to watch The POWER of Your 2-Word Purpose Statement. Learn what you’re missing and what you have to gain by knowing your 2-word purpose statement and learning to live on-purpose. Tip: When watching, click the “Listen” button. Next, place your cursor on the video controls and drag to minute 10 to the actual start of the webcast.