Taking a hero's journey to find your purpose

Sean McCormick always knew that he was good at helping people. Even at an early age, he was the person friends and family turned to for advice and to confide in. But it took a little conversation with the universe to focus this energy into a career and purpose—one that would eventually take shape just outside Seattle, Washington, where McCormick now works as a life coach.

“I was getting a little burned out by owning and operating a brick-and-mortar business, which is really challenging,” McCormick says. “I got into the float tank one night and I asked the universe ‘what’s next for me?’”

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It didn’t take long for the universe to respond with an unambiguous answer. The next day, McCormick heard from a friend who had really turned his life around with the help of a life coach. “What’s a life coach?” McCormick wondered. Later that day, he heard from his sister-in-law, who was on her way to Mexico to get a certification as a yoga instructor and a life coach. That same night, McCormick’s wife told him about a colleague who was crushing it in her professional and personal life. The colleague was getting fit, going back to school, and had recently received a raise. Her employers believed in her so much that they planned to get her — a life coach.

McCormick got the message. “I go, come on. Okay, all right. I give, I give.”

Now McCormick works with people who are looking to optimize their lives and clarify their purpose. He coaches across four key areas: personal development (“think Tony Robbins,” McCormick says), health and overall wellness, career optimization, and spiritual development, which he says looks different for everybody. When I ask McCormick if he emphasizes balance in life, he says balance is a tricky word.

“If you’re a team lead or an executive, you’ve signed up for imbalance,” McCormick says. “You’ve volunteered for it. You’ve chased it.”

Balance is also a deeply individualized concept. “It means something different for everybody based on their lifestyle or their role or their aptitude,” he says.

McCormick’s coaching approach is therefore similarly individualized, and he’s done the research to help match people to personally effective strategies.

“I have had the pleasure of being able to explore hundreds and hundreds of modalities,” McCormick says. “Maybe it’s Taoism. Maybe it’s red-light therapy. Maybe it’s EFT and tapping.”

That last one was new to me. It stands for Emotional Freedom Technique and involves touching or tapping specific points on your body while addressing negative emotions. McCormick uses a wide variety of such tools in his mission to elevate consciousness and deepen the spirit.

Purpose requires cultivation, introspection, and in my strong opinion, experiences that are profound and everlasting.
Sean McCormick

“That’s what I’m here for,” he says. “That’s what I signed up for. That’s what I execute toward.”

While McCormick’s job is deeply integrated with his life purpose, he says that’s not a common scenario.

“It’s very rare for someone’s life purpose to also be their job,” he tells me.

He says that you can be purposeful in your job and perform at a high level and yet not be focused on your life purpose. You may still ask yourself why you’re here, why you do what you do, and who you really are. These are questions that people over 50 frequently ask themselves, McCormick says, in part so that they don’t wake up at 70 and consider a potentially more alarming question: what have I been doing?

“Purpose requires cultivation, introspection, and in my strong opinion, experiences that are profound and everlasting,” McCormick says.

To that end, McCormick recommends that the people he coaches go on a hero’s journey. He’s a fan and student of Jospeh Campbell, who famously wrote about the hero’s journey in The Hero with a Thousand Faces (1949). The hero’s journey goes something like this: a common person is drawn into an adventure that leads them away from home and into the unknown, where they complete various challenges and are forever changed by the experience.

What qualifies as a hero’s journey varies by individual, but each requires a kind of courage, one that removes a person from the comfortable and familiar. McCormick says the benefits are well worth the discomfort.

“But if you do take the hero’s journey and have the courage to step away, you get to wipe the slate clean and come back with fresh eyes.”

It’s a kind of rebooting for the brain, and reworking of routine. Another kind of rebooting that McCormick advocates involves the careful, guided use of psychedelics. He says that psychedelics are the fastest way to change your mind—and he’s not alone. A number of recent studies indicate that psychedelics and dissociative substances—in association with psychotherapy—can help subjects address issues with depression, addiction, PTSD, and anxiety.

Michael Pollan wrote about psychedelic therapy and his own experience with psychoactive compounds in his 2018 best-seller How to Change Your Mind. His conclusion was that psychedelics can lead to a “dissolution of self or ego” which allows people to have “new perspectives on themselves.”

McCormick says that psychedelics aid in his work because they provide access to parts of the brain that are generally suppressed or hidden. “Because all of the stuff that you have in your subconscious comes to the surface where you are forced to face your weaknesses, your traumas, your passions, your orientation in the universe.”

McCormick also cautions that it’s important to get the right professional support when using psychedelics to unearth and investigate one’s subconscious. Following inner or outer journeys, McCormick says his clients often determine that their purpose is about service: to users of a product, inside their community, or within their family.

“Purpose and service are intricately intertwined and the uniting factor between those is people,” McCormick says. “How are you serving people?”

McCormick’s own purpose is clearly service-oriented and he conveys deep enthusiasm about the work he does and the people he helps. That group includes many over 50, who McCormick says are often focused on legacy and family.

“What do you want to leave behind for your children and grandchildren?” he says. “How do you want to be remembered? Family is sort of the lowest hanging fruit when it comes to purpose.”