I want to ask you something before we begin.
Where did you ever get the idea that you had to find it?
Your purpose. Your calling. The thing you’re supposed to be doing with your life. Where did the word “find” come from?
Because the language is doing something to you.
“Find,” suggests it’s lost. Hidden. Somewhere out there waiting to be discovered. Some women spend whole decades searching for the thing that has been with them the entire time. They die looking. And the looking is the tragedy, not the not-finding.
This is Foresight. And today we’re going to do something different with the question of purpose. We’re going to stop looking. And start tracing.
Your purpose has been leaving footprints in your life this whole time. The thread was always there. You just weren’t taught to read your own record.
What You Were Told
Somewhere along the way, you were sold a story about purpose. That it’s a singular destiny. That there is one right answer for your life, and your job is to find it before you run out of time. That successful people figured it out early, and if you haven’t figured yours out yet, you must be behind.
That was not wisdom. That was marketing.
Real purpose doesn’t announce itself with a thunderclap. It doesn’t arrive on a mountaintop. It doesn’t require a sabbatical, a vision quest, or a coach who charges you ten thousand dollars to ask you what your inner child wants.
Your purpose is the pattern that’s been quietly repeating itself in your choices, your energy, your returns, your refusals for as long as you’ve been you. It has been showing up. You just haven’t been counting it.
The Signals
Let me draw the pattern for you. Because once you see how it shows up, you’ll never be able to unsee it in your own life.
Your purpose is in the work you do when nobody’s paying you. The conversations you have at midnight that you can’t shut up about. The thing you’d still be drawn to if your title disappeared tomorrow.
It’s in the questions you keep coming back to. Different jobs, different decades, same question. That’s a signal.
It’s in what people keep asking you about. Strangers. Coworkers. Your sister’s friend. There’s something they sense in you that they want a piece of. Pay attention to what they’re sensing.
It’s in what makes you lose track of time. The thing you came up for air from and realized it was hours later. That’s your nervous system telling you something.
And it’s in what you’ve been unable to stop, even when it was inconvenient, unprofitable, or unpopular. You kept doing it anyway. That’s not stubbornness. That’s alignment.
Now look across all those signals. Is there a thread? Almost certainly there is.
That thread is your purpose. It’s been right there.
A Word For The Women Whose Purpose Was Weaponized
I need to slow down here. Because for some of you, the word purpose has been used against you for a very long time.
If you are a marginalized woman, somewhere in your story, maybe in many places, you have been told that your purpose was to serve. To fix. To hold the family together. To carry the company. To raise other people’s consciousness while keeping your own quiet. To be the strong one. The reliable one. The one who shows up no matter what it costs.
That is not purpose. That is an assignment. Given to you by people who needed your labor and dressed it up in spiritual language so you wouldn’t notice the cost.
Here is the difference, and I want you to hear it clearly.
Purpose energizes. Assignment depletes.
Purpose comes from inside you. Assignment was given to you.
Purpose makes you more yourself when you do it. Assignment makes you smaller.
Purpose, even when it’s hard, refills the well. Assignment, even when it’s rewarded, drains it dry.
If the thing you’ve been calling your purpose is exhausting you, demanding constant self-erasure, and leaving you with nothing left for your own life, that is not your purpose. That is somebody else’s job description in your handwriting.
Your real purpose is allowed to belong to you alone. It is allowed to be selfish. It is allowed to serve no one else first.
Leadership Impacts
Let me tell you what happens when you lead from your actual purpose instead of your inherited assignment.
Your decisions get easier. Not the decisions themselves — the deciding. You stop agonizing over opportunities because you have a filter. Does this advance the thread, or does it pull me off it?
Your no’s get cleaner. You stop apologizing for declining things that don’t fit. People feel the clarity. They stop trying to talk you into things because they can sense you’re not negotiable on the core.
And the women coming up behind you learn something they have not been taught anywhere else. They learn that they don’t have to take every role offered to them just because they’re qualified. That qualification is not vocation. That being capable of something is not the same as being called to it.
Your purpose-led leadership gives the women watching permission to refuse the assignments they have been handed in your name.
That is legacy. Quiet, unattributed, real legacy.
One Thing From My Own Life
Thirty-nine years with the Army Corps of Engineers.
If you put my career on paper, you’d see a hundred different assignments. Different bases, different commands, different missions, different decades. They don’t look alike from the outside.
But there was one thread running through every single one of them. The same thing kept showing up in the work, no matter what the work was. I was always finding the woman in the room who was being underestimated, and I was always making sure she knew what she was capable. Sometimes formally. Sometimes in a hallway. Sometimes in a single sentence.
I did not plan that. Nobody assigned it. It just kept happening. For thirty-nine years.
I could not see the thread while I was in the middle of it. I thought I was just doing my job. It took looking backward to recognize that the job was always the same job, even when the title kept changing.
That is what I am doing now. Coaching. Writing. Sitting with you through this microphone. It is the same thread. It was always going to be the same thread. The Corps did not give me this purpose. The Corps was the soil it grew in.
Look at your own life. The thread is there. I promise you it is there.
Reflection
Pause with me.
I want you to think about the moments in your life when you have felt most alive. Not the proudest moments. Not the most successful ones. The most alive.
Some of them are big. Some of them are small. Most of them are not on your resume. A conversation. A project nobody knew about. A walk. A teaching moment. A book you couldn’t put down. A problem you couldn’t stop solving.
Now look at the list. What do those moments have in common?
Whatever it is, that’s the thread. That’s the data your life has been quietly handing you for years.
You don’t have to name it yet. You don’t have to monetize it or build a business around it. You just have to acknowledge that it’s there. That you have noticed. That you are willing to be honest with yourself about what makes you feel like the realest version of you.
That is enough for now.
The Foresight
Here’s what comes next when you stop looking and start tracing.
Your purpose stops being a question and becomes a compass. You don’t have to figure out your whole future. You just have to make the next decision in alignment with the thread.
That’s the foresight. You stop asking
what should I do with my life
a paralyzing question, and start asking
what advances the thread
A clear, answerable question.
Your opportunities reorganize themselves. Some that looked impressive lose their pull. Some that looked small become obviously yours. You start saying no to things you would have said yes to before, and you do it without guilt, because you can finally see why they don’t fit.
This is what living on purpose actually looks like. Not a thunderclap. Not a brand. A quiet, steady refusal to keep walking in directions that don’t match the thread.
Final Thought And A Question
Your purpose isn’t lost. It hasn’t been waiting for you to deserve it. It hasn’t been hidden by anyone. It hasn’t failed to arrive.
It has been with you the whole time. Leaving evidence. Pulling at your attention. Showing up in the moments you couldn’t explain why you cared so much.
Your job is not to find it. Your job is to stop pretending you don’t already know.
Here’s the question I’ll leave you with.
What thread has been running through every chapter of your life that you’ve never given yourself permission to name as your actual purpose?
Sit with that. And then start tracing. Not finding. Tracing.
The thread was always there. It still is. It always will be.
This was Foresight. I see you. I’ll see you next time.
