Common Ground Coaching

Somewhere along the way, most of us picked up the same story about purpose: that it’s a single, dramatic realization. A lightning bolt moment where the clouds part and you suddenly know. You’ll be doing dishes, or driving, or sitting in a meeting, and it will just… hit you.

I want to gently push back on that story, because in my experience, it does more harm than good. It sets people up to wait for a moment that rarely comes, and to feel like something is wrong with them when it doesn’t.

Here’s what I’ve seen instead, with client after client: purpose isn’t a single flash of insight. It’s a pattern. A thread that’s been running through your life all along, quietly, in the choices you’ve made and the moments that stuck with you. The work isn’t to discover something brand new. It’s to trace something that’s already there.

Why We Keep Waiting for the Lightning Bolt

The lightning-bolt myth is appealing because it’s simple. One moment, one realization, problem solved. It also lets us off the hook, if purpose is something that happens to you, you don’t have to do the slower, less glamorous work of paying attention to your own life.

But purpose rarely announces itself that clearly. More often, it shows up as a quiet, recurring pull, toward certain kinds of problems, certain kinds of people, certain kinds of moments, that you’ve been noticing and dismissing for years because it didn’t arrive with fanfare.

Purpose Leaves a Trail

Think about it like this: you don’t need a single bolt of lightning if you already have a trail of footprints. And you do. Every person does.

The trail shows up in things like:

• The moments in your life you remember most vividly, and why
• The kind of help people have always come to you for
• The topics you research for fun, with no external reason to
• The stories that move you more than they seem to move other people
• The tasks that make time disappear, versus the ones that drag
• The compliments you brush off because they feel “too easy” to count

None of these on their own is “your purpose.” But together, they form a pattern. And patterns are much easier to trust than a single dramatic moment, because they’re built from real evidence, years of it, not one lucky afternoon.

A Simple Exercise: Trace the Thread

Here’s an exercise I give clients who feel stuck trying to “find” their purpose. It won’t hand you a mission statement in ten minutes, but it will give you real material to work with.

Step 1: List ten meaningful moments. Not necessarily happy moments, meaningful ones. Times you felt most yourself, most alive, most useful, or most moved. Pull from every era of your life: childhood, school, jobs, friendships, hard seasons included.

Step 2: For each one, ask two questions. What was I actually doing? (Not the job title or setting — the specific action. Comforting someone. Solving a puzzle. Building something. Explaining an idea. Standing up for someone.) What did it give me? (A feeling of usefulness, connection, mastery, freedom, order, creativity, name it.)

Step 3: Look for repeats. Lay all ten side by side. You’re not looking for one grand theme. You’re looking for words and actions that show up more than once. Most people are surprised to find the same two or three threads running through moments they never would have grouped together.

Step 4: Name the pattern, not the plan. Don’t jump straight to “so I should become a therapist” or “so I should quit and start a nonprofit.” First, just name the thread honestly: I keep gravitating toward helping people feel less alone. I keep being drawn to making complicated things simple. I keep showing up for the person nobody else notices.

The plan can come later. The pattern comes first.

Trust the Repetition, Not the Revelation

If you’ve been waiting for a single defining moment to tell you what you’re here to do, it’s okay to let that expectation go. It was never going to arrive on schedule, and it isn’t a reliable measure of anything.

What’s far more reliable is what you’ve already done, again and again, without being told to. That repetition is the evidence. It’s been there the whole time…. you just have to stop waiting for a lightning bolt and start tracing the trail you’ve already left.