What is a Good Life? #69
What is a Good Life? #69
A Life Of Purpose & Possibility with Dave Gray
On the 69th episode of the What is a Good Life? podcast, I am delighted to introduce our guest, Dave Gray. Dave is the author of Gamestorming, Liminal Thinking: Create the Change You Want by Changing the Way You Think, and The Connected Company. He is also an artist, an entrepreneur, and a possibilitarian. After selling his company, XPlane, in 2022, Dave established The School of the Possible, an experimental learning community through which he helps people create work that is meaningful and matters to them.
In this episode, Dave shares with us his journey of finding purpose and meaning in his life, from the sense of belonging he felt at art school, to identifying and honouring his true nature, and noticing moments in life where he felt he was in the right place, at the right time, with the right people. He emphasises the importance of relationships and community in identifying our own uniqueness and the energy he experiences when in creative communities. Dave also underscores the significance of possibility and supporting others with their creativity.
This episode will give you much to consider regarding finding more purpose, meaning, and cultivating greater awareness around your own true nature. While Dave's breadth of experience, creativity, and curiosity, are wonderful examples of what is possible when we fully engage with our true nature.
The weekly clip from the podcast (4 mins), my weekly reflection (3 mins), the full podcast (56 mins), and the weekly questions all follow below.
1. Weekly Clip from the Podcast
2. My weekly reflection
In the clip above Dave makes the connection between identifying more meaning and purpose in our lives through the process of identifying our true nature.
The more people I interview around this question - over 200 people, at this stage - the more I recognise that so many of our problems or what we lack in our lives stem from us not being our natural selves.
Consider this: how can we expect to have genuine connections if we're trying to be something we're not? How can we understand what's important to us if we're first trying to conform to others' expectations?
Many of us fear acknowledging who or what we are experiencing - our emotional landscape, thoughts, judgments, feelings, desires—anything other than simply being perceived as good. We spend more time constructing an idea of what we are rather than being what we are.
Instead of embracing our wildness, incoherence, contradictions, and paradoxes—which are natural to us—we often opt for a safer, more predictable version to present to others.
Trying to figure out what we want or what is important to us when we are only engaging with a part of ourselves and not all of us will naturally turn out to be problematic.
A big contributor to our not knowing is also the insufficient time we spend alone, truly with ourselves and without distraction. I’m not suggesting we need to meditate or be isolated, but that we need space to hear and observe our feelings, needs, and desires.
In my experience, discovering what we want has more to do with listening, patience, and noticing than with doing and planning. Many of us also need practice in prioritising our own needs and being comfortable with solitude to create openings for new images to emerge.
While many people will blame the busyness of work for why they don’t understand what they’d like to do with their lives, I also look as curiously at our lives outside of work. How many appointments we arrange, how complicit we all are in leaving no space in each other’s lives by inviting everyone to every conceivable event.
If I had to say one greatly overlooked aspect of aligning with our own nature, it would be the capacity to say “no.” Keeping up the same cadence of appointments of a society that seems a little lost in terms of meaning, values, and purpose, will most likely lead to the same experience of confusion and lacking clarity.
Another aspect of our current culture that does not give us space for both an earnest and fruitful investigation of meaning and purpose is our discomfort with uncertainty, and our willingness to simply sit in it and to wait.
Waiting need not be passive, it may involve experimenting and trying several things, however our rush to say we now have an answer often halts the experiment or investigation before it has fully began.
Whether with coaching clients, interviews, or general conversations, I see this rush to go from not knowing to having an answer, by answering a questionnaire, by doing a weekend course or a coaching program, and often people just fall back on what society currently proclaims to value.
For example people who have no idea what they presently want to do may jump to something topical like sustainability rather than wait for their own answer to emerge. While certain topics are important, if it isn’t really your answer, the same dis-ease will emerge again.
If I were to reflect on my own path, a willingness to admit a not knowing to myself and to others was hugely important in keeping my lines of inquiry and experiments open. It wasn’t always the most comfortable feeling in a society that generally is pretending to know, while not seeming very content, but my concern was not for comfort but greater understanding and a sense of my natural self.
As ever none of this is a prescription for what you need to do next, rather a pointing to patterns or experiences I feel are noteworthy. However, the idea that we can contentedly navigate this life without aligning more with who we are or acknowledging what we don’t know would completely fly in the face of my experience of a good life. What’s more they are two things that bring more aliveness to my life than almost anything else.
When it comes to what you value or what you want to do with your life, what are you willing to admit you don’t know?
3. Full Episode - A Life Of Purpose & Possibility with Dave Gray - What is a Good Life? #69
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4. This week’s Questions
When is the last time you felt you were in the right place, at the right time, with the right people?
What in your life right now feels most aligned with your true nature and what feels most incongruent?
About Me
I am a Coach based in Berlin, via Dublin, Ireland. I left behind a 15-year career in Capital Markets after I became extremely curious around answering some of the bigger questions in life. I started this project in 2021, for which I’ve now interviewed around 200 people, to provide people with the space to reflect on their own lives and to create content that would spark people’s own inquiry into this question. I am also trying to share more genuine expressions of the human experience, beyond the facades we typically project.
If you would like to work with me for individual or executive team coaching or executive silent retreats, or you simply want to get in touch, here’s my email and LinkedIn.