Tim Kelley

If you ask someone what is your purpose, you're in effect asking them why are you here? Why do you exist? That's what that question means. NLP trained people, which I am not, will tell you that the brain does very bad things when you ask it why questions. It creates this like vapor lock. Being able to answer the question, why are you here? and articulately is actually fairly rare because the brain doesn't produce useful information when you ask the person that question. In my world, in my system at the True Purpose Institute, we actually deal with four different types of purpose statements. To me, purpose is the answer to the question, why are you here? Why do you exist? That's what purpose means. But there's more than one way of answering that question. We actually teach four different ways. One type of purpose statement is a mission. The other three begin with the one that is repeatable, which is something called a blessing. Number three is something called essence, and that's the being state of your purpose. The fourth is message, which is what you were sent to tell the rest of us.

He started out at MIT with a BS in mathematics, but he went on to found a company called the True Purpose Institute. When I was in college I studied orienteering, which is basically running around the woods with a map and a compass trying to figure out where you're going. When I was in the Navy I was an expert navigator. When I became a consultant, I focused on helping organizations find their vision and find their purpose. All of those are different ways of helping people find their path. I've learned as a commanding officer in the Navy and got a lot of great leadership training from the military the importance of walking the talk and taking my own medicine. People talk about how I address very murky spiritual topics in a very straightforward, logical, step by step way. The True Purpose process is very methodical and works over 90 percent of the time if the practitioner knows what they're doing.

That's a method I call ask and wait, which is what I did, and it took over 20 years for me to find my purpose. I don't recommend it. I was finding various people's purposes for several years. This was 20 years ago, after finding my own and realizing that it was purposeful for me to help other people find their purpose. Along the way I received the instruction, okay, now only do it for leaders. After focusing on leaders and doing that for a while, I received the instruction, okay, now focus on world leaders. That was, I don't know, some five or eight years ago that I got that instruction. The language, helping or excuse me, guiding leaders to create heaven on earth came out of me trying to figure out how to articulate my purpose, which I understood very well internally, in ways that others could understand. But the focus on leaders has been around for a while. That's been more than 15 years that I've really focused on helping leaders find their purpose.

I've learned as a commanding officer in the Navy and got a lot of great leadership training from the military the importance of walking the talk and taking my own medicine. I'm constantly in the process of honing, evaluating, and updating my purpose over time and trying to find bigger, more effective, more challenging, more impactful ways of living that purpose. To enact this, I founded something called the True Purpose Institute. I had been teaching workshops about purpose for years, very early on started training coaches and consultants to find other people's purpose. Then other people showed up who wanted to teach. We now have a bunch of people teaching this work all around the world, helping thousands and thousands of people find their purpose, and training thousands of coaches, consultants, and therapists to find others' purpose. We have teachers in South America and North America. We've had people teach in Israel, workshops in China and Japan, in Europe and the Netherlands in particular. People all over the place in the process of learning to find the purpose of organizations.

Is the fast solution always the best one? Of course not, but is it the one we choose most? Probably. In his talk, Tim Kelley shows us how our decision making process can sometimes lead to childish behaviour and make countries behave like kids. Tim Kelley is a global change agent and internationally renowned expert on new paradigm systems and methods. He works with top leaders in many fields and countries to transform and evolve organizations, markets and industries. His client list includes top leaders and executive teams from such companies as Alibaba, ING, Oracle, Nabisco and Price Waterhouse Coopers, as well as government ministers, presidential candidates and leaders of international NGOs. Tim has trained over 1000 consultants, therapists and coaches in his methods. He is the author of True Purpose and the best-selling coauthor of three other books. His methodologies have been featured internationally in magazines, newspapers and on television. Tim has commanded military organizations, including an amphibious assault craft unit, and is a retired Naval Reserve officer. He holds a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from MIT. This talk was given at a TEDx event using the TED conference format but independently organized by a local community. Learn more at https://www.ted.com/tedx Ask

For me, having individuals living their purpose is insufficient. The reason is that a lot of the power and structure that we live in, that benefits us tremendously and also creates harm, is held by systems. By systems I mean things like companies, governments, laws, and the internet. Those systems have a tremendous amount of power, and those systems reflect and act from the consciousness that was used to create them. To me, it's insufficient to have evolved, purposeful people in unevolved, unpurposeful systems and declare victory. That doesn't work for me and I don't think it would work for the world either. In addition to having lots of people living their purpose, we need purposeful companies, purposeful countries and governments, and purposeful systems. What's the purpose of the internet? Good question. Is it living that purpose? I'm not sure because I don't know what its purpose is. But challenging business, government, religion, science, art, and the media to know and live up to their purposes, I think, would create a vastly better world. The two countries I've worked with so far unofficially, I look forward to doing it officially, are Colombia, right after they signed the peace agreement with the narco terrorists and ended years of conflict in Colombia. The other country I worked on was Israel, and I would love to make that project official because they really need it.

Living my purpose has had other effects. I've learned as a commanding officer in the Navy and got a lot of great leadership training from the military the importance of walking the talk and taking my own medicine. I'm constantly in the process of honing, evaluating, and updating my purpose over time and trying to find bigger, more effective, more challenging, more impactful ways of living that purpose. Which means I make myself nervous a lot. The sources where I get my information about my purpose make me very nervous with the demands they place on me, which is why I'm going after country purposes. Part of me wishes I were just working with companies all the time, finding their purpose. That would be so much easier than going out to try to find countries that want to find their purpose. No one's doing that. That's a completely new market. I have to go create the idea in people's minds before they would even want to hire me to do it. Huge project. But really interesting, super purposeful. For me, modeling the courage to keep leaning into bigger and more challenging versions of my purpose has been really inspiring to the people in my community.

Heaven on earth means what's the best world that you could possibly imagine and let's go for something slightly better than that, which would include a world that works for everyone but not limited to. In order to qualify as heaven on earth, it would have to have a lot of other interesting features beyond just working for everyone. When I envision this, when I visualize it in my mind, like what does heaven on earth look like? To me, it looks like a park with happy people walking around in it. There's technology, there's nature, there's buildings, there's trees, and it's all working together. I'll tell you another of my purpose statements. I told you message is one of the aspects of purpose in my system. Well, my message is the time to create heaven on earth is now. We have been willing to accept excuses from ourselves and others about why it can't be done. We are out of time, and there is no reason why we cannot create heaven on earth right now.

It's easy to confuse purpose with profession. But a purpose could be manifested through multiple different professions. Three different people in the same profession could be manifesting three different purposes through that same profession. A profession is a set of skills and activities. A purpose is a why. It doesn't follow that there's a one-to-one correlation between purposes and professions. There is a many-to-many relationship. With myself, for example, the purpose I discovered when I discovered my purpose was to show people the way. When I was in college I studied orienteering, which is basically running around the woods with a map and a compass trying to figure out where you're going. When I was in the Navy I was an expert navigator. When I became a consultant, I focused on helping organizations find their vision and find their purpose. All of those are different ways of helping people find their path, of showing them the way. I'm a ways map editor. All of those are purposeful activities for me because they're all different ways of showing people the way. I give great driving directions. When I used to interview MIT students from certain schools who wanted to go to MIT, I was their interviewer. I would take that opportunity to counsel them about how to decide which school to go to. All of those activities are purposeful and lead to completely different professions, but are all expressions of the same purpose.

The biggest problem I had once I was really clear on what my purpose was and what it meant, which happened later, really was fear, fear and resistance. That is very common. If the purpose is very accurate, it will usually also be very intimidating. If you're really nervous about your purpose, frightened of it, don't want to tell anybody about it, it's almost certainly correct. Now, this is 20 years ago. No one was talking about purpose in business. I was one of the first to be talking about purpose in business. I was terrified of people's reactions. I was terrified of how business people would react. I was terrified of how evangelical Christians would react. I was terrified of all sorts of things. And that's very normal, to have a lot of fear. First about knowing the purpose and then, once the purpose is known, fear about living it and about doing it. It took me, when I wrote the book True Purpose, probably two years longer than it needed to, to publish it because of my fear and how difficult it was for me to focus on doing the steps to get the book out there. The biggest problem with that is fear, just like I said before, fear of talking to it and learning your purpose. The prospect of having the Holy Spirit, your Buddha nature, or your spirit guide tell you in no uncertain terms what your purpose is terrifies most people.

So, my advice if you're looking for your purpose is to get help. The reason is that if you try to do it by yourself, it could take forever. You might never find it. That's a method I call ask and wait, which is what I did, and it took over 20 years for me to find my purpose. I don't recommend it. For some reason, people have an imagination that they ought to be able to find their own purpose on their own. They don't think that they should be able to perform brain surgery on themselves. They don't think that they know how to fly a plane or play a piano unless they're trained to do it. But for some reason, people imagine that they ought to be able to figure out their purpose with no training and no help whatsoever. I have no idea why that is, but I'm here to tell you that's not how it works. Get qualified help. Get someone who really knows how to find people's purposes, and ideally someone who does that for a living, to help you with yours. Just like if you needed brain surgery, you would find someone whose job is brain surgery, who does it successfully over and over again. Why wouldn't you want someone qualified and skilled to help you find your purpose so you don't have to wait 20 years like I did?

With myself, for example, the purpose I discovered when I discovered my purpose was to show people the way. That was the original purpose statement I learned initially in a dream, which I wrote about in my book True Purpose, and then later by other means, which we can talk about. The dream that I had where I initially learned my purpose was very short and it's the only dream I've ever had where there were no visuals. I was asleep and it's pitch black and I hear a booming voice say, 'Your purpose is to help others find their path.' And then I woke up and that was the entire dream. It lasted a couple of seconds tops. I've never forgotten it and I never will. Then I had to try to figure out what to do with that, which is, of course, a whole other problem with purpose. That was the initial moment in which my purpose became clear to me. I so didn't know what to do with it that I had to find that purpose again a couple of years later, another way, which is actually not uncommon. When people learn their purpose, they so don't know what to do about it that they sort of put the genie back in the bottle, and then it pops back up again later.

True Purpose: 12 Strategies for Discovering the Difference You Are Meant to Make [Tim Kelley] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. True Purpose: 12 Strategies for Discovering the Difference You Are Meant to Make

As global transformation accelerates, more individuals and organizations are called to participate in creating a new world. Many institutions and structures that once served society well are now outdated and in desperate need of change. The awareness of this fundamental global shift is increasing over time. Many feel they can do nothing but witness the changes, while others feel called to take direct action in creating and facilitating this great transformation. Read more ...

If you're in that category, the other method, the preferred method, how I got it both in my dream and later, is to have something that already knows your purpose explain it to you. Notice I said something, not someone. An interesting question for you is who or what in your universe should already know what your purpose is even if you don't? That could be a part of yourself, your heart, your gut, your intuition, your higher self, your true self, whatever term makes sense to you. Or it could be something external. It could be something external and spiritual or religious, like God, Jesus, the Holy Spirit, Allah, Buddha, or the universe. Or it could be something completely non-spiritual. Could be a dead relative. Could be your spirit animal if you're into Native American traditions. The question is based on your beliefs, nobody else's. At the True Purpose Institute, we teach people how to communicate with that thing. How to communicate with your dead grandmother, your heart, or God, and have God tell you, 'This is your purpose, glad you asked.' Then we test it. We have twelve tests for telling whether it's a purpose or not. We have about forty tests for telling whether it's really God talking, or the universe, or whatever it is that you choose. The best method, the one that has the highest odds of success doing it completely on your own, is to do it in writing. I would write out: Tim: 'Hey, Inner Truth, are you there?' Inner Truth: 'Sure, I'm always here.' This kind of back-and-forth works best when you write names in front of every line.