Pam King: Hello, dear listeners. Before the episode gets going today, I wanted to take a moment to ask a favor. Here, at the end of this launch season of WithinFour, we’re running a very short listener survey. You can find the link in our show notes, or you can be old school and type in your browser, WithinFour. The Thrive Center dot org backslash podcast.
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How does where you’ve been contribute to where you’re going? How does your story shape your sense of purpose? Developmental psychologist Bill Damon has spent his career studying the human lifespan and has found both in his research and personal experience that by courageously accepting Exploring our personal histories will stay on a path toward purpose and peace.
Bill Damon: The life review is a way of going back in a systematic way into your past and looking for things that you’ve never understood, mysteries. And I had a big mystery in mind, which is who is my father anyway? Who was this guy? What was he like? Why did he abandon us? Why did he never return home? So I had a big mystery to uncover.
I did this in a way that I consider to be in scientific context, a case study of myself, and I write in the book about the psychology of the life review, the psychology of purpose as we develop in the later periods of life, and how I found this to be a growth experience in my own life. Purpose has a transcendent, beyond the self dimension to it.
It’s not only about, finding a meaningful self development or self advancement. It also is an effort to contribute to the world in some way that that is beyond the self. And that’s what gives purpose. It’s special power.
Pam King: I’m Dr. Pam King, and you’re listening to with, and for podcasts that explores the depths of psychological science and spiritual wisdom to offer practical guidance towards spiritual health, wholeness, and thriving on purpose. It’s
common for us to hang on to so much from our past. Regret, remorse, guilt, shame, rumination, unforgiveness. How should people regard their past? Can we reframe and redeem? Bill Damon has spent his career studying the human lifespan, and for almost 30 years at Stanford University’s Center on Adolescence.
Since the 1970s, he’s been conducting research that has shaped our understanding of human growth and thriving. Bill is not only one of the world’s most revered experts on adolescent and moral development, but he is a person near and dear to me. My time working with and being mentored by Bill for a two year postdoc with him at Stanford altered the trajectory of my career and shaped my sense of identity and purpose.
In the last 20 years, Bill has systematically studied purpose, operationalized it, meaning he can measure it, and studied the ebbs and flows of it. He has spawned a whole new field of study. It’s infiltrated the business world, education, and even parenting. In fact, it’s one of my favorite taglines for describing thriving.
Living life on purpose. As invigorating as it is to say, It’s complicated and can be elusive. Bill is so helpful at breaking it down in this episode. He defines purpose as an enduring life goal that is both meaningful to oneself, but also makes a difference beyond the self. He also speaks to the valuable role of faith and beliefs in something bigger than oneself in mustering the courage required to live deeply.
And most recently, he’s building a new area of study around life review. He articulates a process that he’s developed for investigating and kind of interrogating your life and your past for clues about your direction and purpose. Bill shares invulnerably about his own discoveries regarding mystery in his own upbringing that has shed new light on the latest chapter in his life.
and his wife Anne’s work have been a profound influence on me, especially for helping me see the significance of identity, ethics, and purpose as key facets of spiritual health and thriving. I am so grateful for Bill and Anne. And for an for their years of both mentorship and friendship
In this conversation with Bill Damon, we discuss positive youth development and the opportunities of childhood and adolescence, the practice of a life review and how to look at our past in ways that lead to a healthy and fruitful future. The definition of purpose. and how it plays a central role in human thriving.
And he explains how charting a past purpose took a very personal turn for him when he came to learn about the father he never knew, and how that impacted his life and his perspective on thriving at 60 years old. In that context, we discuss the emotional connections between courage and curiosity, particularly when it comes to pursuing self understanding.
and exploring our sense of purpose and a life of thriving.
Bill, what an honor to have you on. On the show for me, this is a great privilege. You have been a beloved mentor turned friend. So I am thrilled to have you on the show. Thank you for joining us.
Bill Damon: Well, thank you, Pam. It’s just a delight to be with you. And, uh, and everything you just said was music to my ears because you, you, you’re one of the great students.
So it’s been my privilege to, to, to Get to know over the years.
Pam King: Bill has spent years studying purpose at every stage of the human lifespan, from the very young to the very old, but he doesn’t come at purpose from just one self centered perspective. Human purpose for an individual interacts with so many other factors, social and political factors, family dynamics, technological developments, and moral perspectives, and furthermore, religious experiences and faith traditions.
Bill makes an effort to hold this complex web together and see how it shapes our sense of identity, purpose, and thriving. You’ve always had an eye and a really great perspective on society as a whole. And I have always perceived you to be a person who is interested in what kind of human development is necessary to enable people, in my word, to thrive.
And contribute to a flourishing society. And I think that’s something that you and I really both have in common.
Bill Damon: Absolutely. Both of us. I think are serious about our scientific work and we publish in journals and do research that’s well designed and all of that. But I think that for both of us, the reason that we do the work comes from our interest in young people, in their potential to develop the kind of people they want to become and the kind of people that benefit society.
And that, takes us beyond the laboratory and beyond the classroom into the community and the world of the world as young people grow up and as they move through life. And being interested in the whole lifespan means that you follow people as they begin to build families, as they meet the workplace, as they become citizens.
and everything that happens in life. So in a sense, there are very broad boundaries for us to understand the kinds of things that we need to understand in order to do our work. Absolutely. The other thing that we have in common is that we’re both interested in beliefs and in faith and in the role of, in the role of people’s sense of where they belong in the whole Cosmos even.
So I think that the whole idea of faith development and spirituality, that’s something that that psychology has been slow to embrace as a discipline. But it’s happening now. It’s happening partly because of the work that you’ve done. It’s an important part of being human. That’s what we really unites our work is that we’re interested in the whole person, not just only cognitive development or perceptual development or a person’s emotional regulation.
I mean, all of that’s important, but we’re interested in everything and how it all goes together. And if you’re interested in everything, you also have to be explore people’s deepest beliefs about the meaning of life and their spirituality and all of the things pioneering work on at Fuller.
Pam King: Thank you.
And I’m so glad you brought that up because I was so excited to talk about life review and purpose and context of the cosmos. And you have always had a posture that I think is well captured in a quote by one of our mutual late friends, John Gardner, who said, what we have before us is breathtaking opportunities disguised as problems.
And I always thought that was an amazing quote. And I’ve always appreciated how you have had a very pioneering, positive attitude towards youth, towards human development and towards society. And you’ve always looked to understand what can go right with people. Rather than just understand what goes wrong with them.
If our personal histories matter, we might as well start at the beginning. I think young people have always needed a grounded sense of purpose to lead them on a path to thriving. Psychologist Peter Benson was well known for his work in positive youth development. He regularly taught that every young person has a story to tell.
spark and mature adults can come alongside these young people to stoke that spark, helping it to catch fire and reach its full potential.
Bill Damon: The other great mentor, even though he was sort of my age, uh, was Peter Benson. Peter was really the father of positive youth development. He was very early in recognizing, and this was back in the 1990s, that most of the media coverage of young people and the popular view was that young people are a problem that we have to deal with.
And it was a sympathetic view. People cared about young people, and they wanted to keep them out of trouble, they wanted to help them grow, them with things that young people were worried about or anxious about. But always seeing the problems of young people blinds us sometimes to their strengths and what Peter called their assets.
And young people have so much to offer to. The world, it seems obvious now, but if you really looked at the news coverage back when Peter was beginning his work, you would see that it was one story after another of how many homicides, uh, young people commit, how many drug abusers, how many early teen pregnancies, how many suicides.
I mean, just one story after another. And of course, people were concerned and wanted to help these young people out. But what was not being covered was. how creative young people are and how noble their aspirations are and their talents and talents from every sector of society, not just the people that you would think are well educated or elite.
Every young person, and this was a quote from Peter, every young person has a spark and What we need to do is recognize that and help the young person embrace that and develop the potential. And in my own life also, I had an earlier story as to why I even got into developmental psychology as a calling.
Uh, I did, social work in New York for a couple of years after college. And I was assigned as an advisor to some youth groups from very tough neighborhoods. And I had a chance to see them, how much they knew and how smart they were and talented they were. And psychology at the time was not recognizing that.
So I went back to grad school and I did some work, uh, initially on positive justice. Trying to show how much young people actually knew and contributed and believed and how many positive aspirations, uh, young people from all sectors had. So that, that’s a deep part of my own history.
Pam King: Bill, I’ve never heard that story.
Thank you for sharing that. Well, and I love just to fast forward through your career a bit from social work in New York City to the time we journeyed quite actively together when you start developing this field of purpose. Looking at ways to understand and examine and research and eventually promote how young people from all sectors of society can have a good offense, can pursue something that is meaningful and not just keep them out of trouble, but provide them with a meaningful life. So tell us about how you understand purpose. People use that word a lot these days.
Bill Damon: Yes, and thank you for mentioning that people use it in all kinds of ways. Of course, it’s a common word in our vernacular, which means that people don’t often pay a lot of attention to using it in a scientific way or a way that is necessarily crystal clearly defined.
But that’s something that we need to do when we’re doing science, is actually find a way to give every concept its own special meaning. I always use medicine as an example. If you do medical practice or science, you don’t want to use the same word for kidney and spleen. Because, gee, you know, you wouldn’t really want to go into surgery with a doctor that considered those to be kind of the same thing.
Pam King: Now when Bill uses the word purpose, he’s using it in a careful way. We have to lay out careful definitions in order to make scientific progress when researching a concept. He identifies several essential elements of purpose. It’s enduring and long term. It’s a personal commitment and it’s meaningful to the self.
And it transcends the individual.
Bill Damon: And purpose is used, uh, in the vernacular, often synonymous with meaning. The phrase, Oh, I want to have a life of meaning and purpose is very common. Kind of as if they’re the same kind of thing or not really thinking, how are they different? And passion is another word that people go back and forth.
Well, you know, my child has a purpose and her passion is this. And again, It’s not the same thing. Each of these words have their own meaning, and they ought to, and that’s how we study them. So purpose, and we’ve worked very hard on a definition of purpose that captures what’s unique about it. So purpose has a number of elements that are really important to understand.
One is that it’s enduring. It’s long term. It doesn’t mean it has a defined number of days or weeks or months, but it’s not a single shot act. For example, if you jump in a river to save a drowning child, that’s a heroic thing to do, but it’s not your purpose in life because you, you, you did it once. So it’s purpose is endur.
It’s a commitment, it’s enduring commitment, and it’s a commitment that has two essential qualities. One is that it is. meaningful. You believe in it. It is meaningful to you. And that means that nobody can order you to do it. Uh, and that is a purpose. Again, if people order you to do things, sometimes you have to do that, do them.
You need to stop at red lights when you’re driving. If you’re a child, you need to do homework, but it’s not a purpose unless you own it yourself, unless you really believe in it. And, um, have a commitment to it. And the second thing, and this is very important, is that it’s more than just a meaningful engagement.
We have a lot of meaningful engagements, and I don’t want to diminish how important they are. We can go to a movie that’s a very meaningful, or a ballet, or read a poem, or do all kinds of things that are meaningful. But a purpose, in addition to being meaningful, is very important, An attempt to accomplish something that’s of consequence to the world beyond the self.
It’s not all about you. Um, One of the, uh, great lines in a, uh, in a theological book about purpose, Rick Warren’s, uh, Purpose Driven Life, which was, uh, a book written before we actually started our scientific research on purpose. It has a great first line. One of the great first lines in books, I think, which is, It’s not all about you, which I think captures the sense that purpose has a transcendent beyond the self dimension to it.
And it’s not only about finding a meaningful engagement or self development or self advancement. It also is an effort to contribute to the world in some way that, that is beyond the self. So purpose. Is all of those things. And that’s what gives purpose its special power. It’s a power that means that purposeful people accomplish a lot because they are dedicated.
to something beyond the self. And for themselves, it’s been associated in research with a lot of personal benefits, some of which are obvious. If you’re purposeful, you’re highly motivated, you’re energetic, you’re less self absorbed because you’re believing in something beyond the self. And, and so there is a sense that it’s a way To provide a fulfilling experience, uh, an experience that gives you the sense that you are becoming the person you want to be because you’re pursuing something that you believe in and you’re committed to it and you’re making a difference in the world.
Pam King: It’s really amazing for me to, you know, review now quite a bit of research on purpose and to see that purpose almost becomes a, it’s like a thriving cascade upward or promotes a thriving trajectory where people who are purposeful. And pursue their purpose, reinforce a sense of agency, reinforce a sense of confidence, they draw people that are like minded and purposeful and supportive around them.
Bill Damon: Yes. I mean, I’m really glad you said it that way. I think you captured exactly right, which is, it’s a kind of a catalyst. It makes things happen because of the dedication, the energy and the commitment. But I always say it’s not the total answer to life. It’s one capacity that we have. And there’s a lot of things that purpose does not do, or at least does not do by itself.
It might catalyze those things. It’s important again to draw the distinction between purpose and other essential life capacities. So for one thing, purpose doesn’t necessarily bring ethics with it. Purpose is a dedicated commitment, but there have been. People who have been purposeful throughout history, who are so dedicated to their purpose that they become kind of zealots and they cut corners.
They pursue what they consider to be purposeful ends by using unethical means. It’s okay to lie or, you know, cheat or steal in order to accomplish the purpose. And that’s not all right in an ethical sense. So purpose needs, in addition, ethics. And that’s something different. It doesn’t bring ethics with it.
And the other thing that purpose doesn’t accomplish necessarily is that’s another positive psychology benefit or, or goal that, you know, we love to see people happy. There are a lot of purposeful people that are so dedicated that they’re living a purposeful life. Difficult lives. And, and maybe they’re so involved in purposes that, that get them involved in the misery that people, that they’re trying to help with, that they feel unhappy a lot of the time.
So purpose does not bring happiness automatically. It. I think contributes to a sense of fulfillment in life and gratification and a lot of other virtues that like gratitude and so on that can certainly bring positive psychology benefits, but it is not a royal road to happiness in and of itself. So I wanted to point that out.
The purpose is not a silver bullet or the answer to life in and of itself. It’s one character strength you Purposefulness that contributes and catalyzes a lot of other things.
Pam King: I think this is incredibly fascinating. Even while purpose brings so much to an individual’s life, it doesn’t do everything by itself. A sense of purpose isn’t a replacement for a moral code and it doesn’t automatically lead to bliss or happiness. That’s really well said and it’s really helpful to hold that in context that it’s part of what a life’s essential features.
Bill Damon: That’s right. In character, you know, there are a lot of virtues that go into character development, and each of them has its own developmental trajectory, you know, ranging from curiosity, to grit, to compassion, to fair mindedness. I mean, all of these are important, and purposefulness is one that’s important, but the character is a collection of Virtues and, and each of these are habits that take a long time to develop and, and we never get all the way there.
Uh, I’ve never met any saints in life that are perfect in every possible way. We all have things to learn at every age. Uh, so, uh, it’s an ongoing story of human development. It is.
Pam King: And that’s saying a lot, because you have intentionally interviewed highly moral people or moral exemplars. So you have met some pretty saint like or saintly people.
Bill Damon: Yeah, I admire them tremendously, but they will be the first to say that they have struggles themselves with things that they feel that they need to improve in their lives.
Pam King: I’ll just share. So it, you know, I have watched you closely, read your work closely, been deeply shaped by you and other developmental psychologists.
And another part of my intellectual input is theology and also some philosophical traditions. And as I have pursued and persisted to understand thriving, one of the ways I conceptualize thriving is growing and adapting towards one’s purpose. And I try and I often draw on what I think is kind of a meta concept of telos, which is the Greek word for purpose or completion or goal.
And when I break up this concept of telos, I often think of to pursue telos, we need to grow as individuals into our uniqueness, follow our sparks. Understand them, but we need to balance that with relational growth and our relationality and who we’re connected with and who we’re contributing to. And lastly, we also need that aspirational development, which includes those ethical ideals, our spiritual values, our spiritual motivations, and I locate purpose kind of at the intersection of that individual relational and aspirational growth.
Bill Damon: Yeah. And you’ve just really explained why purpose keeps developing. It’s a life. span developmental capacity because, and I think when normally it begins in adolescence, uh, we have purpose exemplars who are younger, like prodigies kind of thing, who are children of age eight or nine, but normally it begins when the, uh, brain develops the capacity to look ahead and think, uh, About the kind of person I want to be.
Purpose is not complete, even as it begins developing, even as a young person finds something to commit to, there’s still a lot of things to learn.
Pam King: This is to see purpose in a truly developmental way. That purpose is never really complete. The story of your spark is still being written. And as we age, we keep learning, not just about the world, but also about ourselves. So the work of purpose is not only for the very young. Stoking your spark can and must continue well into our adulthood.
Bill’s most recent book presents a way of looking at the past, called Life Review. A term coined by psychiatrist and gerontologist Robert Butler. Butler is known for exploring the past. understanding of aging and the factors that lead to psychological health well into our final years. The life review process involves investigating and reframing our lives through a deeper look at the people and events that preceded us.
and brought us into the world, helping shape who we’ve been, who we are, and who we’re becoming. So a round of golf with my father. I think I’ll just want to start by asking, purpose is so forward looking, and now you’re talking about life review. How do purpose and life review connect? And then let’s dig in on life review.
Bill Damon: Yeah, and that forward looking point, what I learned through this process of the investigation I did for the book was I learned to complete my idea of purpose in a way that I hadn’t done before. Of course, it’s forward looking, that’s one of the primary characteristics of purpose. But what I learned is that forward looking doesn’t mean that you ignore the past or deny it, which I had done for much too much of my career and my personal life.
But What I really learned, which I think made me a better psychologist, as well as better able to understand myself, was, well, I quote Faulkner actually, a wonderful phrase that he has in his work, which is, The past is not dead, it is not even past. In other words, it’s part of who we are. And so there’s no use in denying it or trying to escape it.
And I’d always taken a don’t look back perspective. And I have a much, I think, more complete view that you don’t have to get, you shouldn’t get hung up on the past or let the past be an obstacle, but you can think about the past as kind of a treasure house of information about yourself and the world that you can bring forward.
And so you can have a forward looking. understanding of the past. And that is part of the whole understanding that provides us with what, what Erickson wrote about as ego integrity, as a sense of, we really know who we are and who we’re meant to be and who we’re destined to be and who we want to be. So I’ve filled in my idea of purpose.
to be not only forward looking but also include a dimension of understanding the past in a forward looking way.
Pam King: That’s really profound. This concept of life review became personal to Bill. Now with many fruitful decades under his belt and the wisdom to show for it, and having guided people down the path to purpose for so many years, he himself As a boy, he grew up without a father and knew very little about him, and in fact, was under the impression that he had died when Bill was just a child.
But then Bill discovered this was not the case. His father had actually lived for many years. Before passing and this new information became an invitation to understand his life in a new way, to keep growing and understanding himself in light of who his father was and in light of the new emotional realities that were exhumed.
Bill Damon: The story of how I got interested in life review and interested in this whole journey into the past was I grew up without a father. I was always. told when I was a child that he was quote, missing in World War II. He was serving in Germany in the army. I and everybody around me, my teachers and my school records all had that he was killed in action in World War II.
When I became an adult in college, I found out differently that he was actually still alive. And I put two and two together and figured that meant he abandoned my mother and myself, which is true. And I had no interest in following up or anything else. I didn’t want to identify with this guy. I figured he was a scoundrel.
And so whenever any clues came up about what he was like, I just ignored them. And I never even saw a picture of him until I was in my sixties. The reason I saw a picture of him finally was my daughter. When my older daughter got interested in the grandfather that nobody ever spoke about. My father was dead at the time, but I was in my early sixties and I got very interested at that time.
I was ready to hear it and I was not threatened by it. So I engaged in, and I learned about a process that was developed by Robert Butler, a great psychiatrist who was actually the first director of our National Institute of Aging. He was a legendary. He’s Not alive now anymore either, but he wrote a Pulitzer Prize winning book on aging and he was the person that invented the term ageism actually, a real public figure.
Early in his life when he was a practicing psychiatrist and a researcher, he developed a method called life review. And the life review very simply is a way of going back in a systematic way into your past and your ancestry, and looking for things that you. never understood mysteries. And I had a big mystery in mind, which is who is my father?
Anyway, who was this guy? What was he like? Uh, what kind of a life did he have? Why did he abandon us? Why did he never return home? So I had a big mystery to uncover, but also finding out things about your own life, your school records, anything you could find that would give you more of an understanding of how you became the person you are today, especially with a view towards.
What is it in your life that you can retain as something that you would like to continue building upon? Which brings in purpose. So what have you found purpose in your past? What did your parents find purpose in, your ancestors? So I did this for myself. I describe my book as a case study of one, namely me, although there’s also a case study of my father, who was no longer alive, that I did for him.
And I, located some colleagues of my father’s who served with him in the army and then the diplomatic corps. I got to know or interviewed his second wife. Uh, he married a French ballerina and he joined the diplomatic corps and they were stationed in Thailand. And I turned out I have two half sisters who are wonderful people who I got to know.
And so I found out about my father through interviewing all of these people. And My own life, I talk to my uncle. an aunt, uh, who are not alive anymore either, but I got to them in time. Unfortunately, my mother was dead by then, so I could never have the conversations with her that I wished I’d had. And that’s one of the messages of the book, which is, have the conversations with the people while they’re still alive before it’s too late.
But the book is about my discovering what happened to my father, how that affected me in lots of different ways that I never understood, and what it means for my present life and my future life. And as I said, I did this in a way that I considered to be in scientific context, the case study of myself.
And I write in the book about the psychology of the life review, the psychology of purpose as we develop in the later periods of life and and how I found this to be a growth experience in my own life.
Pam King: Making a case study of ourselves that is so rich and full of potential for us who are on our path towards spiritual health and thriving.
But to learn so much about your past at 60 years old. Old presents a unique opportunity, and it can be a challenge to integrate all of the different emotions and experiences that come up. But Bill was able to inhabit a new role for himself and his family. And by getting curious and sleuthing out information about his father, he gained a mechanism for that challenging integration process.
The book is fascinating in that it is very instructive and practical, giving advice on how to connect. So I’m going to tell you a story about how you can conduct a life review, like guidelines, but it’s this incredible story that you’re revealing of this father who disappeared. And as one of your former students, I remember you said, Pam, I have to tell you something.
My father’s turned up and just the glee on your face, but also knowing how hard. to learn that this father that you thought was dead was for sure alive. I can’t imagine what that was like for you.
Bill Damon: Right. One of my regrets is that I did bat away all this information all those years. And so I never got around to meeting him while he was still alive.
And I was obviously resistant to it. And when I got that wake up call from my daughter, she called and she said, Dad, I don’t know if this is going to upset you or not, but I think maybe you can handle it. You know, you’re 60 years old. She dug up information on the internet that she then told me about. She dug up an oral history from the United States Information Agency.
And my father appeared in that because that was his job as a diplomat for that organization. And he was prominent in this oral history. And there was lots of information about him that was very dramatic. He, Got to know the king and queen of Thailand. He had this military history, a lot of significant things.
The one thing that captured me right away and was very revealing was the statement in the history that he was a great golfer. And I learned something about myself as well as about him when I noticed my reaction to that, which is to be honest, that was what really got my emotions. And they were not positive emotions.
Waves of resentment passed over me because I said to myself, you know, I love golf. I never had, I could never afford a lesson when I was young. Why couldn’t this guy have come around once at least to teach me how to play golf? He’s a great golfer. And that was the canary in the coal mine for me that revealed to me that I had a lot of emotions that I needed to deal with that I had neglected or even worse kind of denied all those years.
And that motivated me, it propelled me to do this life review where I could find out about him. And the reason the book is called A Round of Golf With My Father was one of the exercises I did by getting to know my father’s side of the family. A cousin on my father’s side discovered my father’s old golf clubs in his garage in Rhode Island.
My wonderful cousin sent me those golf clubs. In the bag of golf clubs was a scorecard filled out by my father, playing on the country club he used to play on. I got connections to get on the country club. I took his scorecard there and I played against his scorecard on that country club, kind of pretending that he was there with me.
And it was an amazingly, uh, redemptive experience. I, of course, admired his skill as I noticed how he carved holes that were very difficult and that kind of thing. And that was a bit symbolic. Of course, I had a lot of other examples of that in reading about his military records and some courageous thing he did.
But the bottom line is I found things to admire in his life. I never forgot the great irresponsible thing he did, which was abandon and My mother and me, which was very painful, and I had to get over that and find a way to kind of forgive that, but The redemptive experience was finding things about him that I could understand.
I could understand why he didn’t come back. I could understand more about him as a young man. He was 21 years old when I was married, which was very young. He was over in Europe. And I found things that he did that were actually very admirable and responsible, including raising a wonderful second family.
And, uh, and that, gave me a lot to work with in my effort to find a redemptive aspect to this experience of growing up without a father.
Pam King: That is all so profound. I’m so grateful that you had the resources and intelligence and knowledge to do this systematic review that enabled you to find good, spend some time grieving the hard and the bad, and weave together renewed vision on your own purpose and understanding of your own life.
That’s it. That must have been very rewarding and fulfilling, but not easy.
Bill Damon: Well, you’re right. And there were difficult moments for sure, especially when I confronted the mistakes I made in, in not trying to do this earlier, uh, because I, I could have gotten to know that whole side of my family better and, uh, lots of other benefits that, uh, and maybe resolve some of these emotional issues much earlier in my life.
But I will say this, before anybody feels too sorry for me, this was not a grim, painful exercise. I was just fascinated by all of the information I dug up. I dug up Books that my father appeared in, his history books, I dug up his testimony at a very dramatic war crimes trial where he was, he was a witness.
I found out that he went to the same school I went to so I could find his school records, letters from my grandparents about my father to the school. This was magical. It was so fascinating to be an amateur family historian in this way. This was not a emotionally threatening, grim undertaking. This was just a fascinating journey that I went through that brought me into historical archives, meeting amazing people.
So the whole thing was actually delightful and fascinating. There were moments that I had of confronting some painful things. So I won’t deny that. But this was nothing to feel sorry for, nothing to pity. I, it was, I was so fortunate and grateful that I had a chance to do this. So,
Pam King: I hear a lot of curiosity that prompted this inquiry and journey, and you are a very positive person.
What was it about the heart emotion that ignited this process for you?
Bill Damon: Most of my reaction was not angry or bitter or resentful. I think the gulf canary in the coal mine was that it Symbolize a lot of hard things that I had to figure out when I was young as a young man or an adolescent about how to be, how to grow up and become a man.
I didn’t have a father around to, to provide a model of and to become a father myself, you know, I had to learn how to shave myself. I mean, just the little things that dads do, if you’re lucky enough to have a dad that, you know, that is at home and pays attention to you. Uh, that I missed. And I think the golf symbolized that to me and it stood for dozens of other things on a regular basis that I had to learn myself and figure out myself.
And I had to find other role models. So it, which I did actively camp counselors, sports coaches, teachers, older relatives. So, so, and I did find another, a number of father figures that filled that in for me. But I had to be very active in, in getting that filled in, uh, and I think I did resent that. And so that was what the gulf resentment symbolized for me was my whole effort to figure out how to grow up.
Uh, and then I didn’t have anybody at home to do that. So I had to go around and search around for people that could kind of show me the way.
Pam King: It’s really helpful in some of the practical approaches to thriving that I often consider are the role of emotions and that attuning to motions of delight or joy can help us hone in on those sparks or those things that bring us purpose in a meaningful way, but also attuning to those hard emotions, regret, remorse, anger can also attune us to those things that are going wrong or have gone wrong and that they can be really important signposts to really prominent factors in our lives that we should consider.
Bill Damon: Oh, that’s a, that’s a great way to put it, Pam. Yeah, that’s helpful to me. I loved what you just said. Yeah, that’s very nice. I think you’re right. And, uh, that helps me kind of really get my mind around this.
Pam King: You said something that I just thought was so beautiful and I wanted to elaborate it on your family or on your father when they said you’re not, we’re surprised you’re not more bitter and that you’re not blaming him.
What came to mind was in this process, you move from potentially blaming your dad to claiming your dad. And how integral claiming this unknown father who abandoned you to gaming, golf, playing a game of golf with him even, like, just has brought so much wholeness and how important it is. for integration and identity to attune to who might we be blaming and how do we need to claim them?
Bill Damon: Wow. That’s fabulous. Yeah. What a great review of the book. In other words, I think you captured in very eloquent, poetic language, exactly what I, what I did and what I tried to do. So that’s lovely. I love the way you just put that. And that’s very nice. You’re moving me along to further understanding what I actually did in this book.
You know, when I decided to call the book a round of golf with my father, that was taking a little bit of a risk because it is a psychology book and a more general kind of thing, but I, that did really capture that one moment that to me was such a emblematic event going out on that beautiful golf course that he used to play on and kind of imagining that I had been there with him, that I think you’re exactly right.
That was my way of kind of claiming him at last as somebody that would have taken me out on that golf course, even though it was just in my mind. But after all the important things are in your mind, right?
Pam King: One of the cardinal virtues of Greco Roman philosophy, courage, is a core human character strength or virtue. It’s recognized universally Yeah. As part of what it means to flourish and thrive and cultivate a virtuous and beautiful life. And really, courage is linked to fear and asks us, how do we manage our fears?
It’s popular to say that having courage doesn’t mean you don’t get afraid. And that’s true, but the question remains for us is how we can cultivate it. How can we become daring and courageous when faced with the daunting, dangerous question of dealing with our past, living up to this moment, and facing the future?
Bill Damon: Well, courage is a character strength. As I said before, it’s one among many, so it doesn’t do everything for you, but it’s another catalyst. I think it was If I’m right, Aristotle, I believe, thought that courage was a really important virtue because it was a hinge or a cardinal virtue that made possible a lot of the other virtues.
Because if you have moral beliefs and your courage, you will walk the walk. You’ll, even if it’s risky. I think courage, it’s an interactive developmental process. People become courageous partly because they grow up in a world where they can feel basic, what Erickson called basic trust. They have some belief in the world that the world will respond, and that has to do with upbringing and that kind of thing, but also with Doing risky things yourself and then, and then seeing that you could, uh, overcome the challenges and rise to the occasion.
And I think that does start young and it’s a habit. It’s all virtues. It’s a habit that you build up. And some of the really courageous people that we’ve interviewed for some of our work, for example, in some, in the book, Some Do Care, they were so courageous that they denied they needed courage to do their great work because it was so much a part of who they were.
They had such a strong moral identity. They couldn’t imagine life without doing these things, even though they were very brave and risky things. And those are people that I just admired. And I thought, wow, what would it be like to be like a person like that?
Pam King: So I could imagine if there are some big issues in my past, some unreconciled, currently unredeemed experiences that I’m not sure I have the courage to, I could practice asking hard questions just about daily life before asking hard questions about the past, but we can build our courage muscles by doing things that we feel are hard now to train to ask those bigger questions of the past.
Bill Damon: I think that’s a nice idea, Pam. I that, I mean, it follows the principle that I definitely believe in, which is that all of these developmental achievements, developing any character strength is a long process and it happens gradually over many years. And you’re absolutely right. Small steps make a big difference.
So I. The idea that you just proposed, that’s very nice. Do things in little ways and then, you know, go as far as you can with that. And then it’s sort of like our great mentor, Mike Chiksam, a high, uh, used to say that development, Takes place in this kind of, uh, zone between boredom and anxiety in a sense that, you know, if, if you don’t do enough, if you don’t try enough new things, you get bored, uh, you don’t want to take on too much, uh, where you get so anxious that you get paralyzed, but a little bit of, uh, anxiety and try, you know, trying to push the boundaries a little in small ways is the path to development of a lot of these very important strengths.
Thanks.
Pam King: So when I think of virtues, I think virtues are very like psychosocial constructs where we need those psychological capacities to face our fears, to emotionally regulate, to even cognitively recognize fear, but we also gather meanings from the world around us. So one situation, something that might be fearful for me may not be fearful for another person.
But I also think with that understanding, we often think of virtues as something we have to embody alone. And I think Western culture would really benefit from realizing we can embody virtues with other people. So if facing my past and asking these questions alone is too much, maybe I can invite someone on that journey to support me in that.
And that can help me be more courageous.
Bill Damon: That makes sense to me. As I said, my only professional contact with this idea of courage was in that work that we did with moral exemplars. But the thing that sticks in my mind was how literally 100 percent of the people denied that they had courage. And these are people that were risking their lives.
That’s something I kind of, that intrigued me. But you know, it’s all kind of speculative at this point.
Pam King: This is not necessarily just about purpose, but you brought up the moral exemplars and their moral identity. I have a hunch that our beliefs and our narrative that we have about our lives and about the cosmos in the world probably has something to do with how people cultivate courage.
I’m wondering if like, I imagine that there is a god or a higher power that’s got my back or that’s going to support me, that might make me feel more courageous.
Bill Damon: Okay, well, that’s great. And that’s that also that insight is compatible with our findings in some do care, among which were that 90 percent of the moral exemplars had some faith, some religious faith or some equivalent to religious faith.
And would say things like the Lord will provide, uh, and that was the basis of their sense of security. Uh, that was how they deferred their worries. So I think your insight, which is that faith is certainly a bridge that helps people sustain themselves and their action, even in the face of what other people would see as daunting risks.
Pam King: Our listeners are really interested in understanding How does psychology shed light on how faith, religion, spirituality are helpful for thriving and enabling us to be contributing citizens? When I think about life review or purpose, I’m curious how you might say, like, how might these be connected to spirituality and faith?
And how might they help us understand how these transcendent domains of life are helpful for humans?
Bill Damon: Yeah, well, purpose is, I think, a very good example because somebody that has a devout faith and really believes that I am here to serve God or something equivalent, it doesn’t have to be at all phrased in that way, and there are a lot of ways.
to talk about that kind of faith, but somebody with that kind of faith really has a ready made purpose, uh, and often a community that shares that purpose, uh, if it’s a really religious community. And so faith as an object of purpose or a source of purpose is a natural, it absolutely is, it is right up there.
Now, I want to say there are, other sources of purpose in addition that are secular, having a family, raising children, having a vocation. Although I will say that even the idea of a vocation and a calling, if you go back far enough, has religious roots because people once believed they were called to God to do whatever they did for a living.
And, and that also gets to one of the point I want to make about purpose before we end, which is purpose is not an elite endeavor. Any vocation at all, no matter what its status level, whatever it is, if you, if you believe in it, if you believe that you’re doing something valuable to people, that is a purpose of calling.
And that idea of a calling has, if you go back far enough, of course has religious roots and that you felt called by God. Now it’s a much more secular thing, but it has the same shape. But anyways, what I’m saying is that faith among all the other sources of purpose, family, vocation, civic life, art. Faith is right up there as being a compelling one, that if you really engage in it, it’s a natural, you’re drawn in, you absolutely have a purpose because it brings you beyond the self.
It brings you into something transcendent that you believe in, that you believe is not all about you, and so faith is absolutely a natural source of purpose among many other sources that are secular.
Pam King: So you teach undergrads? and graduates at Stanford University. How do they engage with a life review or how would you encourage them at this stage, younger stage in their life to use life review?
Is it helpful for 20 somethings?
Bill Damon: Oh, I love this. I do think young people, they have a history, they have a life, uh, and there’s a lot they can learn from their past and some of this is related to even the whole idea of a growth mindset. That’s Carol Dweck’s great idea that, you know, if you have a history, let’s say, of not doing well at math, learn from that history in a positive way, rather than saying, oh gee, I’m not good at math.
Say, oh, uh, here’s something that I can work at and, uh, mistakes I can learn from and I can do this. I can move forward by making the right use of the past. So even a, uh, an adolescent can do that. And I haven’t tried my ideas out on students quite yet, but that will come as I develop them. My new course on purpose throughout the lifespan,
Pam King: Reviewing your life. It’s not just something you put on your eventual to do list. It’s a quality of attention. It can become built into a mindset that we can cultivate by approaching every aspect of our stories with curiosity, honesty, acceptance, and a willingness to view all of it as an invitation for growth and wholeness.
Bill and I wrapped our conversation with his own definition of the Thriving, which has both personal and relational dimensions. Okay, well, let me ask you one more question. Love to hear you comment a bit on what is thriving to you.
Bill Damon: Thriving to me is becoming the person that you’ve always dreamed that you want to become, uh, and not in a perfect way.
I think part of it is also giving up the idea that any of us will ever be perfect or know everything or anything like omniscient or omnipotent or any of that, but that you’ve made progress, that you’re making progress. And as long as you’re alive, you’re continuing to make progress. And there’s always that possibility of getting further along the road to becoming the kind of person you want to become, which includes.
Having a role in the world, contributing, leaving something behind. Uh, as Erickson said, I, I am what succeeds me, what endures beyond me. And having that sense that you are doing something that first of all is fulfilling your own personal destiny, that’s the self part. And the other part is that part of that is that you are, you’re contributing something and leaving something behind.
To the world that you believe in that you believe is valuable and you’ve done the best you can. And if you have that feeling you’re doing the best you can, you’re making progress. There’s always something ahead of you that you can do. That to me is thriving.
Pam King: That’s really encouraging. Bill, I want to say thank you.
Bill Damon: Thank you.
Pam King: Your writing is so wonderful and accessible and shapes how people think about purpose, their identity. Now people are more equipped to make more sense of their life and through this life review process, you’ve demonstrated how looking back is so important that as Americans, we always want to move on often, but that we can’t really claim things in our past.
and be good stewards of them, even the hard things that we can learn from and we should learn from. And so thank you for reorienting us towards finding the good in the hard and being purposeful about how we look back.
Bill Damon: Well, thank you so much for that wonderful summary. And that means so much to me, everything that you’ve said, Pam.
So, you have all my gratitude for this great experience that you’ve taken us through.
Pam King: Bill Damon helps us understand the intricacies of purpose and personal identity, not just for ourselves, but in our contribution to the world. The key takeaways that I will carry with me from this conversation are the following.
All of us show up in this world with a spark, and it’s a gift we give to each other. To help fan that spark, Spark into flame. So we might ask ourselves, how am I fanning that flame in others today? We don’t ever have to stop learning about ourselves and the procedure of a life review can facilitate this growth.
And to learn more about the life review process, head to our website at. TheThriveCenter.org. It takes courage and curiosity to confront the difficult or traumatic aspects of our past. Cultivating this courage is an essential virtue of a thriving life. And finally, purpose extends beyond our personal motivations and self made goals to include a wide range of psychological, moral, relational, historical, and spiritual factors.
As the episode wraps up today, I would really appreciate your taking a few moments to fill out our survey and offer feedback on guests you’d love to hear from, topics you’d like to hear covered on thriving in spiritual health, and how we can grow with and for. You can find the survey in the episode show notes.
Or you can type in your browser, thethrivecenter. org backslash podcast. Thanks so much for helping us grow with and for.
With & For is a production of The Thrive Center at Fuller Theological Seminary. This episode featured Bill Damon. This season, new episodes drop every Monday. For more information, visit our website, thethrivecenter.org. Where you’ll find all sorts of resources to support your pursuit of wholeness and a life of thriving on purpose.
I am so grateful to the staff and fellows of the Thrive Center and our With & For podcast team. Jill Westbrook is our Senior Director and Producer. Lauren Kim is our Operations Manager. Wren Jurgensen is our Social Media Graphic Designer. Evan Rosa is our consulting producer. And special thanks to the team at Fuller Studio and the Fuller School of Psychology in Marriage and Family Therapy.
I’m your host, Dr. Pam King. Thank you for listening.
Episode Summary
How does where you’ve been contribute to where you’re going? How does your story shape your sense of purpose? Developmental psychologist William Damon (Stanford University) has spent his career studying the human lifespan, and has found both in his research and personal experience, that by courageously exploring our personal histories, we’ll stay on a path toward purpose and peace.
Show Notes
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"The life review is a way of going back in a systematic way into your past and looking for things that you never understood—mysteries. And I had a big mystery in mine, which was: Who is my father?" We hang on to so much from our past. Regret, remorse, guilt, shame, rumination, unforgiveness… How should we think about our past? Can we reframe and redeem it for the present? Developmental Psychologist William Damon has spent his career studying the human lifespan and for almost 30 years at Stanford University's Center on Adolescence. Since the 1970s, he's been conducting research that has shaped our understanding of human growth and thriving. He’s the author of numerous research articles and several books, including The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, having written widely on character virtues, the moral dimensions of work and vocation, and moral formation for children and adolescents, and more. In the last 20 years, William has systematically studied purpose and how to operationalized it for human thriving. He defines purpose as “an enduring life goal that is both meaningful to oneself, but also makes a difference beyond the self.” But more recently, he's building a new area of study around life review. His latest book is A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present. in it, he articulates a process that he's developed for investigating and kind of interrogating your life and your past for clues about your direction and purpose. William shares vulnerably about his own discoveries regarding mystery and his own upbringing that has shed new light on the latest chapter in his life.In this conversation with William Damon, we discuss:
- Positive youth development and the opportunities of childhood and adolescence.
- The practice of a life review, and how to look at our past in ways that lead to a healthy and fruitful future.
- The definition of purpose and how it plays a central role in human thriving.
- And he explains how charting a path to purpose took a very personal turn for him when he came to learn about the father he never knew, and how that impacted his life and his perspective on thriving at 60 years old.
- In that context, we discuss the emotional connections between courage and curiosity, particularly when it comes to pursuing self-understanding and exploring our sense of purpose and a life of thriving.
Show Notes
- Get your copy of William Damon's book, A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present
- Read about Bill Damon’s approach to Life Review at the Greater Good Science Center at UC Berkeley
- Stanford - Center on Adolescence
- “How does where you've been contribute to where you're going? How does your story shape your sense of purpose?”
- “I had a big mystery to uncover.”
- “Regret, remorse, guilt, shame, rumination, unforgiveness. How should we regard our past?”
- Living life on purpose
- Definition of Purpose: “an enduring life goal that is both meaningful to oneself, but also makes a difference beyond the self.”
- Pam King introduces William Damon and summarizes the episode
- Studying purpose through lifespan psychology
- Young people and their potential
- Whole person, not just cognitive development.
- John Gardener: “What we have before us is breathtaking opportunities disguised as problems.”
- Peter Benson: “Everyone young person has a spark.”
- Positive youth development
- Youth development: Focusing on strengths and assets rather than character flaws or trouble
- William Damon on a scientific study of purpose
- Enduring and long term
- Personal and meaningful
- Transcendent and beyond the self
- Agency and energy
- Purpose doesn’t do it all—it doesn’t bring ethics or happiness
- “Purpose is not a silver bullet.”
- Purpose is not a replacement for a moral code, or a guarantee of bliss or happiness.”
- “Telos”—Greek for purpose or goal
- “Purpose is a lifespan developmental capacity.”
- “Purpose is never really complete.”
- Life Review and Robert Butler
- Who we’ve been, who we are, and who we’re becoming.
- Forward-looking doesn’t mean you ignore the past.
- William Faulkner: “The past is not dead. It’s not even the past.”
- William Damon reflects on growing up without a father
- “A Round of Golf with My Father”
- What is a life review? A systematic way of looking into your past and history in order to understand who you’ve been and what that means for your present and future.
- How to do a life review
- “Making a case study of yourself”
- Role of difficult emotions in dealing with your past and finding your purpose
- From blaming to claiming to gaming.
- Courage and Fear
- How to develop and cultivate courage
- Aristotle on courage
- Overcoming challenges and the role of courage in leveraging your purpose to thrive
- Small steps make a big difference.
- Moral exemplars and heroes—faith, courage, and self-regard about managing risks, danger, and threat
- Religion and faith as an object or source of purpose
- “Purpose is not an elite endeavor.”
- “It’s not all about you.”
- Purpose, growth mindset and teaching undergraduates life review and purpose
- William Damon reflects on “What is thriving?”
- “Thriving is becoming the person you always dreamed you’d become.”
- Erikson: “I am what succeeds me.”
- Pam King’s Key Takeaways
- All of us show up in this world with a spark, and it's a gift we give to each other to help fan that spark into flame. So we might ask ourselves, how am I fanning that flame in others today?
- We don't ever have to stop learning about ourselves. And the procedure of a life review can facilitate this growth. And to learn more about the life review process, head to our website at thethrivecenter.org.
- It takes courage and curiosity to confront the difficult or traumatic aspects of our past. Cultivating this courage is an essential virtue of a thriving life.
- And finally, purpose extends beyond our personal motivations and self made goals to include a wide range of psychological, moral, relational, historical, and spiritual factors
About William Damon
William Damon is the Director of the Stanford Center on Adolescence, Professor of Education at Stanford University, and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Damon's research explores how people develop purpose and integrity in their work, family, and civic life. Damon's current work focuses on vocational, civic, and entrepreneurial purpose among the young and on purpose in families and schools. He examines how young Americans can be educated to become devoted citizens and successful entrepreneurs. Damon's work has been used in professional training programs in fields such as journalism, law, teaching, and business, and in grades K–12 character education programs. Damon’s most recent books are A Round of Golf with My Father: The New Psychology of Exploring Your Past to Make Peace with Your Present; The Power of Ideals, and Failing Liberty 101. His other books include The Path to Purpose: How Young People Find Their Calling in Life, Taking Philanthropy Seriously, and Greater Expectations, winner of the Parent’s Choice Book Award. Damon was editor in chief of The Handbook of Child Psychology, fifth and sixth editions. He is an elected Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Education, and the American Educational Research Association. Damon has received awards and grants from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, The Andrew Mellon Foundation, the John Templeton Foundation, the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, the Spencer Foundation, the Thrive Foundation for Youth, and the Pew Charitable Trusts. Before coming to Stanford in 1997, Damon was University Professor and director of the Center on the Study of Human Development at Brown University. From 1973 to 1989, Damon served in several academic and administrative positions at Clark University. In 1988, he was Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Puerto Rico, and in 1994–95 he was a fellow at the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences.About the Thrive Center
- Learn more at thethrivecenter.org.
- Follow us on Instagram @thrivecenter
- Follow us on X @thrivecenter
- Follow us on LinkedIn @thethrivecenter
About Dr. Pam King
Dr. Pam King is Executive Director the Thrive Center and is Peter L. Benson Professor of Applied Developmental Science at Fuller School of Psychology & Marriage and Family Therapy. Follow her @drpamking.About With & For
- Host: Pam King
- Senior Director and Producer: Jill Westbrook
- Operations Manager: Lauren Kim
- Social Media Graphic Designer: Wren Juergensen
- Consulting Producer: Evan Rosa
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