Finding Your Deeper Purpose
Discover how your worst can bring out your best.
Psychotherapist and pastor and gentle wisdom whisperer to top business leaders, Dr Harv Powers talks about why growth happens when you hit the bottom. His specialty - core transformational change - focuses on when your success turns to failure, when your shiny life gets messy and when those uglies you’ve been trying to hide bring you to your knees (literally and figuratively).
These crises can, in fact, be where we break through.
Harv offers some guide posts along this bumpy, rough patch, pointing to the hope that can come out of embracing the bottom as a turning point that can ultimately reveal your strengths, deeper purpose and unleash your greatest potential.
In addition, Harv and Anne talk about the Imago Dei (image of god) that is inside all of us. Yes, all of us, and how it is a kind of harmonic frequency, allowing you to hear and feel the presence of the Divine.
Included in the main episode — and as a stand-alone episode — is the PRACTICE: A Meditation Prayer for Spiritual Connection as a guided prayer and deeply peaceful meditation, led by Dr Harv Powers.
About Dr. Harv Powers
Dr. Harvey Powers is a man of many talents — pastor, clinical psychologist, professor and author — and experienced guide to leaders, CEOs, couples and individuals around the world as they navigate the often messy and difficult chapters of change.
He is currently the president and founder of The Redimere Group, a faith-based non-profit that focuses on leadership development and transformational processes for faith based leaders, emerging and re-emerging leaders. He is a sought after as a speaker, trainer, mentor, and consultant for ministry and business leaders.
Dr. Powers is a licensed clinical psychologist, an ordained minister and currently serves as an adjunct faculty member of Denver Seminary, Gordon Conwell Theological Seminary and has received training in Emotionally Focused Therapy, EMDR trauma therapy, and biofeedback.
Also, check out his work at Redimere Counseling
Harv’s latest book is Redemptive Leadership: Unleashing Your Greatest Influence.
“Redemptive leadership rests on the hope that out of the ashes of our lives, transcendent influence emerges.”
EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Kinds of change
Level one is tweaking, level two is this transformational, world shifting, internally driven kind of catalytic change.
The most transformational times — counter-intuitively — come out of the crisis points in our lives. The old framework just doesn't work anymore.
Most transformations come out of the crisis points in our lives where we come to the end of ourselves.
The idea of redemption is when something good comes from difficult change that we couldn't anticipate.
We all look and long for the six steps of the transformational process. It never works that way.
We don't need to go seeking crises. If you're pumping blood, breathing air, rubbing shoulders with each other and living with yourself you will deal with some form of crisis.
Accepting guidance
We need transformational guides.
We all need guides during difficult times to not only support us and validate us, but also to point the way a little.
“God is looking for broken people when he wants anything done. He takes up people who have come to the end of themselves.” Quotation from Harry Ironside, appearing in the book Redemptive Leadership, by Dr Harv Powers.
Why would you need a crisis to become more humble? Success - in whatever our endeavors are - never breeds humility.
Humility is not low self esteem. Humility comes from the old English, the word humus or the earth. Humility is the idea of being grounded in real reality.
That's the nature of transformation: As I change on the core, I live in the world in a different way.
You're not as alone as you think you are. It's so easy to feel isolated, like we're the only ones. It's just that we all wear a mask and don't reveal that we too have been there.
There's always hope even when we can't see it. Very often when we're at those inflection points, we have tunnel vision and we can't see the hope. That's why we need others' eyes to help us see. And sometimes we need others' arms to lift our own arms up through those times.
Tuning into the Divine
There is this deeper place where there is a reflection and a likeness about who we are created to be at the core.
When you have a chance encounter with someone, they might say something that becomes powerful in your life and you can't get it off your mind. It's exactly what you need to hear. That is God working through another person to reach us.
God is pinging us. It's kind of like hearing true pitch. If you've ever been close to a tuning fork and someone pings it, it's not only that you hear the auditory part of that, but you actually feel it in you.
There is inherently a spiritual place inside all of us. Not just some of us.
Life is a blank canvas and we are in partnership with each other and God
Try to tune out the external, tune into the internal.
Allow us to quiet our strategic mind and begin to listen to a deeper place inside of us.
We might feel that God's got it all in his hands, he's already figured it out. We might feel we’re down here filling in the blanks of a predetermined path, but actually we're co-creating.
Those people who went into the desert, kind of isolated themselves to try to connect with God in a different way. And they came back from the desert transformed or shifted.
Father, we open our hearts, our hands and our minds. Please meet us. We pray. Amen.
EPISODE BREAKDOWN
[00:01:00] Harv on how he became a psychologist and a pastor interested in leadership.
[00:02:01] From rural West Virginia to the inner city of Philadelphia. Imagine- the first time hearing classical music, going to an art museum, to a huge church with a great choir, hearing Handel's Messiah for the first time.
[00:03:10] How do we facilitate core changes? How can we guide and catalyze change?
[00:05:50] Level one change is tweaking, level two is this transformational world shifting internally driven kind of catalytic change.
[00:06:20] Most transformations come out of the crisis points in our lives where we come to the end of ourselves. Often there are losses but it's actually produced something that is very valuable to us and often helps us find our greater purpose in the world.
[00:08:30] Harv on how to get from stumbling and hoping to transformation.
[00:09:11] Les Miserables is a great story of both transformation and redemption. Harv summarizes the story beginning with, “There's this moment where he saves another prisoner's life through his strength.”
[00:12:52] We need transformational guides. And they can be formal guides, or it could be a good friend. Sometimes we can also have a guide in the form of reading. People who've written about their experiences, authors who resonate with us.
[00:16:01] Exploring the concept of humility.
[00:19:20] There's always a wonderful feeling being around certain people who have a state of groundedness.
[00:19:40] What it means when God is pinging you.
[00:20:30] Harv explores the term “Imago Dei” which is a Latin term used by theologians starting very early in the Christian tradition to talk about the image of God in us. There is this deeper place where there is a reflection and a likeness about who we are created to be at the core.
[00:22:20] There is a spiritual harmonic in us. It takes practice to tune in to that place inside of us.
[00:22:40] There's a line from a poem by Elizabeth Barrett, it reads, “Life is crammed full of the divine.”
[00:24:42] God works through others, painting or creating the harmonic.
[00:25:41] Will your purpose be revealed? Do you open up the safe and inside there is the blueprint that says, here you go, this is what you're supposed to do with your life?
[00:27:50] Referencing Ephesians 2:10 “For we are his workmanship created in Christ Jesus for good works that he has created beforehand that we should walk in them.” The term workmanship is the Greek word poema that we get our English word poem from.
[00:30:30] Life is a blank canvas and we are in partnership with each other and God, arising out of that Imago Dei, we get to create our lives. And that's where the beautiful things happen that we relate to in each other.
[00:31:30] Michael Jordan talks about his flow state. So not only is he there with the ball, but God is right there too.
[00:33:10] To tap into that harmonic, that Imago Dei, to sense the ability to co-create with God. Here's how you get started.
[00:36:00] Harv shares what he wishes we all knew.
[00:37:20] Harv is imagining he has 10 seconds in utter privacy to share thoughts with listeners, check out what he shares.
[00:38:52] Harv leads a prayer- inviting us to try to tune out the external and tune into the internal.