Purposeful: A Step-By-Step Guide to Finding Clear Direction in a Chaotic World

By John Carroll

Author John Carrolls upbringing in war-torn Africa, personal tragedy, chronic illness, and business success in three continents have made him a passionate and hugely successful developer of people. In Purposeful, he shares the strategies he uses to help others become their best selves.

Using a step-by-step approach, this guide teaches you a proven process for gaining a deep understanding of yourself, a good sense of the purpose and direction you want in life, and how to become the sort of person you want and need to be to live that way. John reveals the three foundational principles of purposeful living that will help you take control of your own life rather than letting life and other people control you.

Including action guides and exercises, Purposeful outlines the steps to help you live a fulfilled lifea life of purpose, direction, and meaningwhatever that is for you. Its about living the sort of life you want to live by being the sort of person you want to be.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Balboa Press AU
• Release date: Sep 19, 2016
• ISBN: 9781504304146

John Carroll

John Carroll is currently Director, Geostorage Processing Engineering for Gas Liquids Engineering, Ltd. in Calgary. With more than 20 years of experience, he supports other engineers with software problems and provides information involving fluid properties, hydrates and phase equilibria. Prior to that, he has worked for Honeywell, University of Alberta as a seasonal lecturer, and Amoco Canada as a Petroleum Engineer. John has published a couple of books, sits on three editorial advisory boards, and he has authored/co-authored more than 60 papers. He has trained many engineers on natural gas throughout the world, and is a member of several associations including SPE, AIChE, and GPAC. John earned a Bachelor of Science (with Distinction) and a Doctorate of Philosophy, both in Chemical Engineering from the University of Alberta. He is a registered professional engineer in the province of Alberta and New Brunswick, Canada.

Book preview

Copyright © 2016 John Carroll.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced by any means, graphic, electronic, or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, taping or by any information storage retrieval system without the written permission of the author except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Balboa Press

A Division of Hay House

1663 Liberty Drive

Bloomington, IN 47403

www.balboapress.com.au

1 [phone]

Because of the dynamic nature of the Internet, any web addresses or links contained in this book may have changed since publication and may no longer be valid. The views expressed in this work are solely those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of the publisher, and the publisher hereby disclaims any responsibility for them.

The author of this book does not dispense medical advice or prescribe the use of any technique as a form of treatment for physical, emotional, or medical problems without the advice of a physician, either directly or indirectly. The intent of the author is only to offer information of a general nature to help you in your quest for emotional and spiritual well-being. In the event you use any of the information in this book for yourself, which is your constitutional right, the author and the publisher assume no responsibility for your actions.

Any people depicted in stock imagery provided by Thinkstock are models, and such images are being used for illustrative purposes only.

Certain stock imagery © Thinkstock.

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0413-9 (sc)

ISBN: 978-1-5043-0414-6 (e)

Balboa Press rev. date: 09/15/2016

CONTENTS

Setting The Scene

Life Lessons from Africa

Why You Should Read This Book

Take a Little Time to Think

How to Use This Book

Honesty and Courage

Success is a Personal Thing

How the Program Works

Principle 1:    Have Clear Purpose

What’s Important?

Determining Direction

Values and Principles – Your Personal Code of Conduct

How Do You Want to be Remembered?

What’s It All About?

The 5 Pillars of Purpose

Aligning Purpose with Values

How Will Living Your Life Purpose Affect Other People?

Principle 2:    Have Clear Perceptions

We All See Things Differently

First, Know Yourself

Perception is Everything

How do You See Yourself?

Linking Personal Image with Life Purpose

How Would You Like to See Yourself?

Promoting the Right Self-Perceptions

Promoting the Right Perceptions with Others

Principle 3:   Have Clear Priorities

We All Make Choices

Clarity, Consistency, Persistence

Time to Take Action

Developing a Priorities Action Plan (PAP)

Setting Core Goals

Setting Annual Priorities

Setting Monthly Priorities

Setting Weekly and Daily Priorities

Maintaining the PAP Process

Handling Curveballs and Rocks

Forming the Right Habits

A Few Final Tips

Wrapping Up

Get in Touch

For Sue, Jamie and Sarah

SETTING THE SCENE

Life Lessons from Africa

Africa is a strange place to grow up. It’s a continent of paradox. The beauty is astounding, but it’s the scene of some of the world’s ugliest tragedies and atrocities. It’s rich in natural resources, but is host to inconceivable poverty and great human suffering. It nurtures abundant life, but will turn round and kill you in the blink of an eye. You can learn a lot from paradox.

This book is very practical and hands-on. It reveals three foundational principles that will, if you follow them through the process in this book, help you live a more meaningful, fulfilling life. It’s already done that for many people. But before we get into the process, I want to give you some background to set the scene so that you know where I’m coming from and understand the stories and examples I use to illustrate some of the points. In particular, I want you to understand why I believe life’s too short and unpredictable to be lived without a strong sense of purpose and direction.

Africa is a vast continent. I grew up in a small town in Zimbabwe, a small landlocked country just to the north of South Africa. It was called Rhodesia when I was growing up. I had an idyllic childhood, despite the fact that the country was in a bloody civil war throughout my childhood and teenage years. I told you it’s a paradoxical place.

Throughout my upbringing, Rhodesia was cut off from the rest of the world by global economic sanctions imposed because of the government’s unilateral declaration of independence from Britain in 1965. I was five years old then. UDI sparked a civil war that erupted and lasted for the next fifteen years.

The town I grew up in, Mutare, then called Umtali, is nestled in a valley on the eastern border with Mozambique. It was right in the thick of the war because Robert Mugabe, who has subsequently ruled the country since independence was brokered in 1980, based his military forces in Mozambique.

We were a stable, middle class family. My mother was a much respected school teacher and my father was a manager with a large forestry and timber company. I had two brothers, one older and one younger. We played a lot of sport, spent carefree days exploring the bushland and hills around the town, and had a menagerie of animals in our backyard. Idyllic.

But the spectre of the war was always lingering in the background. In the innocence of earlier childhood, the tragedy of it passed me by almost unnoticed. Unfortunately, innocence seldom lasts. Nevertheless, it took me over twenty years of my adulthood to realise that life is constantly nudging us. If we don’t listen, it often smacks us hard to make sure we pay attention.

It took the death in action of my older brother, Tony, when I was eighteen, the death of our first child when I was thirty-five and a chronic illness for me to start to listen. I guess I’m a slow learner.

As I say, I spent the first twenty-seven years of my life more or less oblivious to life’s nudges, doing what I thought everyone expected of me. I was always a leader at school. I spent a year in compulsory active military service in the war, got degrees in business and psychology, and landed a sought-after, secure job with Unilever, a large multi-national corporation in South Africa, straight out of university.

I started in marketing, which is where I had wanted to work. I was promoted rapidly within a few years, but the company moved me into sales twice. I hated sales. Three years in and after about a year as an area sales manager, I asked to go back into marketing again. The Sales Director told me that I had no real choice – my career with the company would be in sales, not marketing.

That woke me up a bit. I realised that I wasn’t controlling my own future – other people were. It struck me that my father had lived his entire life controlled by others until he was forcibly retired at age sixty because of an indigenisation policy in the company.

Forced retirement devastated him and he had never really recovered. He had nothing meaningful to fill his days. He tried a few small ventures, but none of them worked. I saw him age ten years in the first three years of his forced retirement. Oddly though, that was despite the fact that he had clearly not been passionate about his job when he was working. Another paradox. But that one’s a worldwide phenomenon. We all need to have some meaning and purpose in life.

So I took a risk and—to the shocked amazement of my parents and some of my friends—resigned from Unilever and, at the age of twenty-seven, left Africa for the first time to go backpacking around the world with a friend.

That started a completely new phase for me, a phase in which I wanted to be in control of my future. I had no real idea of what direction my life would take, though success would be a natural outcome, of course. It always had been in the past.

I didn’t really think about what that success would look like. I think I just wanted to feel I was in control. Twenty years later I realised I still hadn’t been in control at that point – not really. I was just going with the flow, and the flow wasn’t always going in the same direction I should have been.

After three years in England and travelling through Europe, parts of Asia and Australia, I went back to Zimbabwe and decided to get into the advertising game in Harare, the capital city. I’d worked with ad agencies in my job with Unilever and it sounded like a lot of fun. So after a year with a sports marketing company and another year getting some experience with Young and Rubicam, I started my own ad agency with a business partner. I was managing director and Anthony was creative director. The business grew fast. We took on a third partner, Styx, to inject some capital to fund our growth and he became client services director.

I was loving it. I’d met