When it comes to finding your purpose in life, what you are meant to be doing with passion and pleasure, our society is still at odds with making this a priority in the educational system. Even in the modernized world of today children are struggling with finding their calling and what they are good at. Meanwhile the curriculum is getting plumper as days pass by and teachers feel more powerless or entitled. In the book Finding your Element. How to discover Your Talents and Passion and Transform your life, Lou Aronica and Ken Robinson want to get to the bottom of the thing: how do you find your Element, the thing that you are good at and that you can happily call your life’s mission?
First of all , Ken tries to make us understand how finding this element feels: “being in your own Element is like that. It’s about doing something that feels so completely natural to you, that resonates so strongly with you, that you feel that this is who you really are” , “being in your Element gives you energy” . So when you find what you really like to do with your life you feel good, you feel energized. You can’t wait to get out of bed and get to work or to school. How many of today’s individuals can say that they look forward to monday morning?
Ken and Lou make an excellent job in pinpointing the fact that finding what is your life mission is a matter of analysing multiple factors. First you need to reserve alone time in order to cut down the noise : “to find your Element you have to get to know yourself better. You have to spend time with yourself, apart from other people’s opinions of you” , “you need to try new activities, visit new places and meet new people". Schools are noisy and crowded environments where children with unique needs and talents work individually and sometimes in groups after the same curriculum while being handed the same tasks. A personalized way of teaching would be more appropiate as children are unique and they have different learning styles. As Ken beautifully notices : “there are two ways in which formal education often gets in the way of finding your Element. The first is that most systems of education operate on a very narrow view of aptitudes. The second is that they often disregard the different ways in which individuals actually learn”.
Our schools are not the right places where one is encouraged to think outside of the box and find what is really pleasant and fun to do: “many children are bored and restless in school not because they have a condition but because they are children and what they are required to do is actually boring”. Unfortunately children are filled with joy and elation when school ends. In a similar manner they grow up and end up as adults who are filled with the same job when a week’s work is finally done. The week-ends become much needed respite time when people try to muster the strenght to do it all over again on Monday. It is impossible to be happy in such conditions . What is quite tragic is that from an early age some children are made to believe that they are not good at anything because of a very constricting school environment. Finding your Element is like digging in the soil and looking for deeply buried treasures. This process needs time and invidual attention. Many children lack this environment at school where everything has to happen under a certain pattern. Disciplines like mathematics, science and language are seen as prioritary and if a child is not good at them it is often seen as a weakness. Ken mentions that “these days, anyone whose real strenghts lie outside the restricted field of academic work can find being at school a dispiriting experience and emerge from it wondering if they have any significant aptitudes at all” . If these institutions where we send our children to bloom are actually killing their chances at finding their Element, why do we keep sending them there? It is a very sad and scary image of continuing to do things in the same way expecting a different result. But this educational experiment is done with live human beings whose chance to discover what they are truly good at is being killed from inception. We need to rethink schools and the way we do education if we want to build a society where people are genuinely happy to work. In the current situation the perspective is quite gloomy: “According to one study, almost half of the adults in the United States have little enthusiasm for life and are not actively or productively engaged in the world” . All of these adults were once children , going to kindergarten, then teenagers going to highschool and later on adults taking their MBA. Why nobody taught them to discover their own gifts and work in accordance with their life’s purpose?
I believe that one of the most important skills that children should be taught in school is learning how to think and what kind of questions they should ask themselves. Teaching the valuable art of introspection is a tool of power that will help a child rise into a strong adult with a capacity to self-reflection. Ken Robinson gives us a list of powerful questions that act like a guide in helping us find our purpose in life, our elements. Yes, elements because we can have more than one talent that we choose to develop into a paid activity that brings us joy. I mention a couple of the questions that Ken Robinson suggested in his book:
what are you good at?
what’s your learning style?
what do you love and what do you love about it?
One of the most important things you can do as you try to find your Element is to pay careful attention to your emotional states. Is there something you do that constantly elevates your spirits? When do you experience stretches of real joy?
do you like what you do each day?
someone once said that whenever you see the dates of someone’s life the most importand part is the dash in the middle. What did they do to fill the dash? It’s a good question to ask yourself
These are only a small part of the questions that an adult can use to help himself to find the way to his purpose. There are three basic principles that I have found very useful as a guide in the pursuit of purpose and these principles are Ken’s suggestion: your life is unique, you create your own life and life is organic. So there is no simple linear road to get you to your Element . It will be a bumpy ride. There is though a clear sign that you are not on your path: a feeling of heaviness - “one of the clearest ways of knowing that you are not in your Element is if your spirit is constantly heavy”. Now I dare to look at the environment that schools build for children: so many of them are being primed with feeling bad about school as being the norm. It is ok to feel like mathematics is impossible and nasty. Is it ok to dim down the painter in you in order to learn verbs better? Is it ok to stop fidgeting and sit to do mathematics to dim down the dancer in you? The big curriculum is of little service to the broad talents that children uniquely have. Forcing all children to sit still for one discipline when their inner nature and natural abilities long for a different activity is harmful and depressing. Ken says that “if you know what your Element is, you can only ignore it by damping down the parts of you to which it appeals. The result can be a dull spiritual ache that holds you back where there should be an impulse of energy that drives you forward” . No wonder that most people , children and adults, are unhappy! Ignoring what your natural abilities are and performing an activity that forces you to forget about what you like is the recipe for disaster, not for education. I believe that a tailored experience of learning and teaching should be mandatory if we are to save our children from the dread of going to school and our adults from the dread of going to work.
Another essential key aspect about education is the fact that we need to be taught that it is a lifelong process. It is not about getting the diploma in order to get the high-paid job. It is not about finally getting over with. A love for learning has to be instilled from an early and and also children and adults need to know that it is alright and normal to change. We are being sold the idea that we will grow old by doing one kind of activity as a paid job. This is flawed and obsolete. With the speed that technology is evolving right now, children from today might change three or more domains of activity in their lifetime. So mastering the art of finding your elements is more important than ever before. Ken Robinson beautifully states this idea by saying that “this fourth trimester concept is a powerful metaphor for living our lives in an optimal way. Just as a baby is not really ‘done’ when it comes from its mother’s womb, none of us have finished the act of growing and evolving even as we head toward physical maturity. No matter how in the zone you might feel yourself to be right now, there’s a good chance that your best and most rewarding work is still ahead of you” . Our educational system and working place systems need to teach human being just that: that the best is still ahead of them and that finding your Element is about, as Ken states it, finding yourself .
