Finding Your Own North Star

Finding Your Own North Star: Claiming the Life You Were Meant to Live by Martha Beck. Three Rivers Press, New York (2001).

Consider reading this if you really don’t know what makes you tick at this point in your life.

The main premise:  Martha Beck uses the structure of Dante’s The Divine Comedy and the stages of a hero’s tale to guide the reader from a sense of disconnectedness with themselves towards discovering an authentic path for their lives. She describes her own experiences and that of her coaching clients and provides brief exercises in each chapter to bring us along.

I love this book because Martha Beck lays out a do-able, thoughtful process for self-reflection that is the foundation of a change-process towards one’s true path. Here are just a few of her concepts that are worth checking out: differentiating between the “essential self” and the “social self”; reconnecting with our emotions as useful inputs; noticing, narrowing, and naming what we really want in order imagine possibilities for our lives.

This book informs our pursuit of purpose in life because we simply cannot live with self-grounded purpose if we’ve lost touch with who we really are. Because we change over our life course, sometimes it’s important to revisit some basics about who we are and what we most want in the real circumstances of our present lives.

Martha Beck is a life coach, contributor to the Oprah magazine, and author of at least 10 books related to personal growth.  Beyond her impressive professional credentials, her writing is informed by her own compelling stories of leaving the Mormon church, parenting a child with Down’s Syndrome, and realizing that her hard-wrought PhD from Harvard was at-odds with the life she really wanted.

What about you? Consider sharing a recommendation and something about how it has helped you live with purpose.