The course was on the meaning of life, and how to find it for yourself.  It’s interesting to me that this sort of topic is becoming more in demand not only for personal development but also in organizational growth.  A framework of meaning connecting individual and corporate purpose provides the ultimate in occupational motivation!

I’ve already mentioned the direction of the course in the enigmatically-named blog called 42.  Instead, what I want to do here is share a few insights that I’ve gleaned during the course of my research and the delivery of my course.

• Don’t look for a single sentence answer.  To use some metaphors – don’t think in terms of a shooting a silver-bullet so much as a weaving a web.
• Better to ask,  ‘What is the meaning of my life?’ than ‘What is the meaning of life-in-general?’.  There is no ‘life-in-general’ so  make your answer concrete and specific.  Focus your mind towards people or activities or experiences.
• Try to balance the comic with the tragic.  Too much either way will led to depression.  In fact, I would suggest that a third element is necessary to round off your life-narrative – the fantasy or ‘fairy-tale’.  This leaves space for the magic of creativity and change.
• Everyone has a meaning to life, a personal philosophy.  It may be implicit or explicit, coherent or contradictory.  Best if you become aware of it and then make it what you want.  Otherwise, you are under the power of the imposed meaning of others.
• No-one is a total relativist.  Everyone believes in some standard or follows a way. The issue is how you hold to it.
• Some of the ‘big issues’ of philosophy can have real, everyday implications for how you live and think and feel about yourself.  Freedom versus fate.  The individual versus the collective.  The body versus the mind.  There are some of the issues that drive your engine.  Better pick the ones that help you run the most efficiently.
• Reality is not objective.  All seeing is ‘seeing-as’.  Your perspective on the world becomes your world.  As you construct your worldview, you construct your world.  Your world is the place that you inhabit.  Take responsibility for it!
• Worldviews are detected by the language people use to describe their lives and the stories they tell each other about themselves.  But it works the other way around too.  Language and stories are not just indicators or expressions; they are also the tools you can use to alter your world.  They work from the outside in as well as the inside out.
• Try this image.  Don’t think of yourself looking out at the universe, asking it the question, ‘What is the meaning of my life?’  Think of you, standing at the center, with the universe asking the question to you, ‘What is the meaning of your life?’  What will you say?  The universe waits to see.  (Or for advances students, what if you universe whispered to you, ‘You are the meaning of the universe, you are the answer to the question.’)

In writing these points I’ve used a mixture of metaphors and questions.  They are some of the most powerful tools in the making of meaning.  But, first of all, know yourself! Self-awareness is not only the beginning of Emotional Intelligence; it is the beginning of all personal meaning.  Use whatever means you can to achieve this goal: self-assessment instruments (Briggs-Myers Type Indicator, Enneagram of Personality, Character Strengths and Virtues, learning styles), journaling, meditation and mindfulness training, whatever.

Then, take responsibility! Be pro-active!  This ain’t just for philosophers.  Or rather, since we’re all philosophers, seekers after wisdom, it’s up to all of us.  For the making of meaning is a task that makes us human.

Thankfully, only humans attended my course.

I teach and coach communication skills.  Notice the word ‘skills’.  Not gifts, talents, or even aptitudes.  Skills.  As such, they are ‘learnable’ by anyone.

As a trainer, I can show people, step-by-step, how to make presentations, negotiate, or run a meeting.  I can demonstrate the way to make a first impression, write a report, and persuade your listeners… as well as listen to them.

I believe very strongly in the ‘anyone can do it’ philosophy of learning.  But there was always one skill about which I hesitated.  Charisma.  It’s such a slippery concept to start with.  We can generally agree on a few people who have it.  But what ‘it’ is, we can hardly say.

Now the BBC reports on the UK’s first “Charisma Masterclass”.  Click here to see a clip of it in action as well as the thoughts of a reporter who had a try.  A basic premise of the speakers seems to be that we in the UK are too backward at putting ourselves forward, and that we need to learn a few lessons from our cousins across the pond.

No problems from me so far.  I’ve blogged before about my own preference for the American way of doing things when it comes to customer service at least. I also dislike my own penchant for refusing compliments and downplaying achievements.  But is charisma a thing that can be taught?  After all, the word literally means ‘gift’!

If asked to list charismatic people, we might mention Nelson Mendela, Mother Teresa or Richard Branson.  I’m not sure the common denominator here is charm or communication skills.  Sure, there’s a ‘larger than life’ aspect to them.  But it’s not necessarily bound up with them as a person.  I think that it has to do with the cause they espoused and with that I can only call the ‘empire’ they built up.  There is more to them than them.  They belong to something bigger.  They linked in to something great and in turn symbolise it in their own persons.  They have made their own meaning and lived it out.  For me, that’s a major part of what charisma comes down to.

I’m not sure a masterclass can impart that.  It could help you to go about it for yourself.  But I judge that Victor Frankl’s advice is better than most:

“Don’t aim at success – the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side effect of one’s personal dedication to a cause greater than oneself.”

Charisma is a unintentional aura emitted by a  truly successful life.

Giant's Causeway, Northern Ireland

For Friedrich Nietzsche, the basic human motivation was a will to power.  For others, from Freud and Skinner to Tony Robbins, it is a will to pleasure that drives us.

Another man, Victor Frankl, had a different theory, one that was tested in the cold fires of the Nazi concentration camps.  Frankl was a psychotherapist before his incarceration there, and was in the unique position of beign able to live his theories out and observe it in the lives of others in this horrific context.  His classic book, Man’s Search For Meaning, remains one of the greatest works of true ‘self-help’ literature ever penned.  For a good selection of quotes from this book go here.  For an introductory overview try here.

Frankl is only one of the thinkers that I’ll cover in my workshop on Saturday 04/04/2009 at QUB, Belfast called The Main Thing: How to Find Meaning in Your Life.

I’ve given away my own viewpoint in the title – for me our quest for meaning is indeed the main thing.  The main thing that moves us and that gives us rest, that we search for in every tangle with  pleasure or power, that offers us our greatest source of hope, strength, and very identity.

Here’s what the course involves.

“Do you sometimes feel your life lacks sense or significance? Join the club! Our search for meaning is the most basic human drive…and the most misunderstood. A lack of personal meaning leaves you without purpose – powerless, passive, and pessimistic. Learn how to give meaning to your own life by employing a range of practical techniques, from powerful questions to personals stories.”

There are many aspects to the meaning of life – philosophical, religious, scientific, even comic (as astute readers of the title of this blog will appreciate).  We’ll have a look at what these worldviews have to offer us, not so much in terms of their truthfulness but in terms of potential usefulness. But I want to bring the ‘big issues’ down – or is that ‘up’? – to the level of everyday experience, so if you’re not a philosopher, don’t panic!  The answer to the mystery of life, the universe and everything might be more obvious than you think!

To book a place, phone the School of Education (Open Learning) on 028 9097 3539/3323 or email openlearning.education@qub.ac.uk.