Look At the Way These Teens Found Their Sense of Purpose

What should I do with my life?
That is a daunting question for many teenagers, and also for many adults, but one that is not insurmountable, as we discovered in the essay presentations for the GGSC Purpose Challenge Scholarship Contest.
In collaboration with Santa Monica-based consulting firm ProSocial and researcher Kendall Cotton-Bronk, we created the Purpose Challenge Toolkit, a series of online exercises designed and tested by Cotton-Bronk that help students determine their purpose. Seniors who completed the exercises in the toolkit were invited to submit essays describing their purpose. They could win scholarships ranging from $ 5,000 to $ 25,000.
Researchers define the purpose as a personally significant long-term goal that will have a positive impact on the world at large. In other words, earning a lot of money to live a life of luxury is not a purpose, in the scientific sense. However, earning enough money to support your family and help others is a purpose. For adolescents, the purpose is related to academic success, perseverance, resilience and the belief that schoolwork is manageable. In fact, discovering who we want to be and what we want to achieve are the key tasks of adolescent development.
Choosing six exemplary trials of nearly 3,000 entries was a difficult task, to say the least. The courage, creativity and passion that resonate in each essay were deeply moving and inspiring. However, more than anything, we realized that the future of our world is in good hands. Here are four perspectives of the winning essays on how teens can develop a sense of purpose.
Look inside
Researchers of the purpose are quick to point out that no one can tell you what their purpose is. Not parents, not teachers, nobody. That's why the Purpose Challenge Toolkit exercises ask students to consider things like their strengths and values, their vision of an ideal world and how they see themselves at 40: all the questions that encourage the Reflection and self-awareness, both can help to determine one's purpose.
Tyler, a winner of the Washington state contest that runs "Festivals of Hope" that serve 5,500 people in need, wrote about the impact of this kind of reflection:
The Challenge then asks how he would use a magic wand to continue with this purpose, but I think the first steps begin little by little. My service is just the beginning of the much greater impact I will have. ... [My work with the Festivals of Hope] has given me a sense of purpose for my life. My purpose is to live as a service leader, and my ultimate goal is to create a sustainable solution to a modern problem such as hunger, poverty or homelessness.
Involve
According to a study of nearly 12,000 adolescents and young adults, 25 percent of young people have an idea of the kind of purpose they would like to have, but they are not sure where to start. This is where adults can help.
Providing opportunities for young people to try new activities and help them develop entrepreneurial skills is fundamental to fostering the discovery of a purpose. The first allows adolescents to explore different interests, which later can become a purpose, while the second provides them with the knowledge necessary to achieve that purpose.
Accompanying her grandmother on visits to her doctor from an early age made Mariah, another Cleveland winner, aware of the inequalities in the health care system for African Americans.
"I sat in the waiting rooms reading medical pamphlets and idolizing doctors in white coats," he writes. "They symbolized well-being, trust and everything I hoped to be. However, my grandmother had a different idea about the profession and believed that she was being given below-normal medical care. His frequent criticism forced me to question his beliefs about science and his sanity. "
However, this experience motivated Mariah not only to volunteer in a medical setting, but also to conduct research at the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, focusing on the genetic differences in African Americans and how these differences affect the probability of cancer. And now, Mariah knows that her purpose is advancing.
The unsatisfactory level of cultural competence, ethnic sensitivity and biomedical research to understand the African-American health landscape cultivated my dedication to serve my community as a physician and researcher. I want to eliminate disparities in health by compassionately helping families and by demonstrating that culturally competent and ethnically sensitive physicians are available to help.
Think about who you want to be.
What kind of person do you want to be? Creating a vision for yourself goes hand in hand with understanding what you want to do.
As young people develop their identity, who they want to be or, more specifically, the values with which they want to engage, they try different roles and personalities as they discover their place in the world. Research suggests that participating in potentially useful activities can help teens with this process as they discover how their skills can help the world, ultimately discovering what is meaningful to them.
By: Preeti Narula
Content: https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/how_these_teens_found_their_purpose_in_life