What Is Your Highest Goal?
You can use the Most Meaningful Thing exercise to get an idea of the highest goal for you. Review your most meaningful activity and the process you used to get to the one word. Look at that one word as a quality that represents you at core. Consider how that quality has operated in your life. See how often it has figured in your various experiences of the highest goal that you may have contemplated earlier in this chapter. Remember crises and turning points in your life, and see how this quality figured in these events. Savor what your life is like when you are living from this quality.
Remember, it is ultimately an experience of resonance with a larger energy. Though people express it in different ways—connecting with God, merging with the absolute, being in flow with the Tao, enlightenment, doing God’s work, being a channel for love and compassion, being conscious at all times, and finding and living from one’s Self—they are talking about the same thing. The highest goal is to have this experience all the time, to become established in it.
Essentially, I’m asking you to state the highest goal in your own words, which might be different from the examples I’ve given here.
Are you ready to make an initial statement of the highest goal for you? Remember, you’ll be exploring your understanding of the highest goal throughout this book and your life. Here, just see what comes up.
Please complete the following sentence:
The highest goal for me is ______________________
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
___________________________________________
Once you’ve written this statement or thought about it, you might share your understanding with someone who has done the same thing. Notice how your statements, however different, are ultimately based on experience that connects them at a deeper level. There might be some nervous laughter and joking about this, because you are thinking and talking about a great, almost transcendent purpose for your life, and this conversation can be uncomfortable at times.
But these conversations usually produce insights into the highest goal. For instance, Steve Piersanti, founder and CEO of Berrett-Koehler Publishing, originally thought his highest goal was the same as his personal and business purpose: “Making a World that Works for All.” But when he did the Most Meaningful Thing exercise, he came up with the word or quality Family. He saw that his highest moments came when he experienced that everyone was part of the same human family. This highest goal sustained him as he built his business around his purpose and as he faced challenges in all parts of his life. I believe Steve’s highest goal led to the diverse, creative and compassionate community that makes up his publishing team, and that makes it possible for his purpose to be realized.
John Renesch, an entrepreneur who became an author of many books (for example, Getting to the Better Future), publisher, keynote speaker, founder of the Presidio Dialogues, and social observer and philosopher, felt quite clearly that his calling was to help people negotiate the jolting paradigm shift in the world of work with exultation rather than misery. He talks about how this has always been his purpose, even before he knew it, even in his entrepreneurial days. But when he did the Most Meaningful Thing exercise, he distilled his experience down to the word Trust. He realized that his trust in God helped him through difficult business and personal times, and supported him in his calling. When he experienced that, he saw that living with that highest goal was the foundation for his work.
I have done the Most Meaningful Thing exercise dozens of times, and the word or quality that comes up for me is some version of Communion (Communication, Connection, Compassion or Community). My work is helping people to live from their inner resources in order to create a world that works for everyone, a world in which people can see themselves and each other with their hearts, a world based on Truth and Love. But the highest goal that underlies that purpose is Communion, that sense of unity and flow that I get when I am living and moving toward the highest goal for me. It helps me see problems as opportunities.