Earlier this week, I was in the sauna of the gym I go to and I found myself talking about coaching. The only other guy in the sauna asked me what I did for a living. Coaching, I’d said.

But I didn’t want him to think that I was one of the coaches who thought in vague terms about ‘transformation’ or ‘overcoming limiting beliefs’. That’s not how I see coaching at all. So I began talking about coaching’s primary mechanism — about the coach guiding the coachee’s attention so that the coachee systematically applies their capacity for insight to where insight is most needed.

Modern life is complex, I said. To navigate it well requires a great deal of insight. Yet it can be hard giving systematic thought to life’s big issues. So when those issues come to mind, people rarely have useful insights. They tend to have similar thoughts over and over again.

Interesting, the guy said.

And you? What do you do?

He’d recently completed his PhD. He was still working at the university and he’d published three papers. He was doing well. But there was something that he missed from when he was working towards his PhD. Having the PhD to focus on had given him a clear sense of purpose. He’d liked that. It had made it easy to apply himself. It made sense of where he was going and what he was doing with his life.

Once he’d completed his PhD, however, he’d started wondering what was next. He would have liked to have something definite to aim towards again, but he didn’t know what that might be and when he tried to think about it, it was like I’d said. He had the same thoughts over and over again.

I laughed a friendly laugh. The need for purpose! I’d come across it a lot while coaching.

To give him a little context on how purpose works, I started talking about humans as narrative beings. We inhabit our personal life stories. So, like the protagonists in any good story, we need an authentic sense of purpose to motivate our actions. In stories, there is always something substantial that the protagonists want to happen, or to prevent from happening. This propels them on their missions and quests.

Once the mission has been established, stories go on to describe what happens as the protagonist tackles the obstacles that threaten to thwart them. Everything the protagonist does gains its meaning and its significance from the place it has in their overall mission.

As narrative creatures, we too need these big picture ambitions to aim towards.

He seemed interested. He was listening. So I gave him the Coachwise perspective on how coaching can help, starting with getting the coachee to build up a detailed picture of their current situation. I was glad of the guy’s academic background, for it meant I could talk in terms of objective pictures — of what anyone who knew how to look would potentially be able to observe.

Once the objective situation is fully mapped out, I continued, the coach can prompt the coachee to fill in the objective pictures with subjective colour. Value and meaning aren’t observable facets of the universe. They exist inside people’s heads. So they’re subjective. But they’re just as real.

The coaching can explore the coachee’s likes and dislikes, and what they hope for and fear, then start defining what matters most to the coachee and what they’d most like to happen. This is then shaped into a clearly expressed ambition — something equivalent to what completing his PhD had been for the guy. The ambition provides a desirable destination to head towards. It gives shape to a meaningful mission for the coachee to embark upon.

In the final part of the purpose-building process, the coach helps the coachee think strategically about how to best pursue their newly spelt out ambition. There’s always a lot of possible routes to follow. There’s always hazards best avoided and serendipitous opportunities to take advantage off. It’s only when a clear path towards success has been plotted out, and the next steps for the coachee to take have been identified, that the purpose-building process is complete.

I briefly mentioned some of the other things that coaching can help people with — helping them with their personal organisation, and helping them perform well in the arenas where performing well most counts. But what interested the guy was arriving at a big picture clarity. So I left it at that. I’d made the points I wanted to make. And anyway I had to leave. The sauna was hot and I was cooked.

We said friendly goodbyes, then I went off for a shower thinking about big picture clarity and how it really is the most valuable thing coaching can offer a person. Big picture clarity turns life into a set of meaningful adventures in which we travel towards futures that we’d be glad to inhabit. Every step along the way is enriched through its resonance with a meaningful whole.

Without big picture clarity, what is life?