00:00:06 Sana: Welcome to the Mindful Living podcast listeners, I am Sana, and yes, there's no rush here. There are no five steps or six steps or a checklist to a better life. This is just a quiet space to sit with something that matters. And today we are sitting with something that I believe we all, almost every one of us. We spend so much of our our lives chasing that we look for it out there, maybe in the next role or the next achievement, or in the in the next version of who we are supposed to become. But then what if it was never out there at all? What if the thing that I'm talking about, it only makes sense once we have slowed down enough to make sense of home ourselves first. Okay, take about one second to think about what I'm talking about.

00:01:08 Sana: Okay. So we are talking about purpose and also and also the question underneath purpose. And to help me with this, I am joined by Sumit. But he teaches purpose at Rutgers. He's the founder of my Authentic Story and also his new book, Making Sense of Purpose. It makes this quite radical case that before you can make sense of your purpose, you have to make sense of yourself first. No gurus in his work, just a steady light for the path. So let's welcome our guest, Suny Pat. Welcome to the show. It's really an honor having you here.

00:01:53 Suneet Bhatt: Thank you so much. It's great to be here. And I just love the way you set this up in the introduction, which is why I was so excited to be here. Thanks for having me.

00:02:02 Sana: Thank you. Thank you so much. That really means a lot. And before we talk about the book or, talk about the work that you're doing at Rutgers and all, all about your body of work, I'm very sure our listeners, in fact, including myself, um, we would all love to know first this thing that, you know, when you hear the word purpose after all these years of living inside this question. And if you can share that, what exactly made you think about it? Uh, what does it actually feel like to you now? Huge question. But yeah.

00:02:40 Suneet Bhatt: Yeah. What does purpose feel like to me now? I think first and foremost, uh, purpose used to feel really heavy. It used to feel significant. It used to feel like something I was simultaneously, uh, pressured and required to know and find and understand, uh, you know, often, uh, and also something that was really extraordinary and took an extraordinary amount of work to achieve. And to me, we have, and we put purpose on a pedestal. And what I've learned over my journey. And now with the course that I teach at Rutgers University, I also teach that with professionals and with high school students, with the book Making Sense of Purpose, the biggest thing I realized is that purpose is no longer heavy. Purpose is accessible to all of us. It is not on a pedestal. Uh, it is within our reach. Uh, and it is not singular. Uh, and so purpose is a not something you get at through chase and pursuit. It is something you get at through experimentation, uh, iteration and evolution and just practice. And so, you know, purpose has really become demystified to me and something that is just more accessible and practical that I can engage with. And as a result of that, it has shifted from this burden that I carry or have to pursue to something that just fuels me, motivates me, and brings me peace and calm every day.

00:04:28 Sana: HMM. That is an interesting way to describe it, honestly, because one thing that really struck a chord with me, what you shared is the accessibility. You know, because now we almost now everyone is actually talking about purpose.

00:04:43 Suneet Bhatt: But yeah.

00:04:44 Sana: Sometimes it also feels like that there comes a phase in your life. Um, probably okay. When you're just trying to figure out, what your life is going to look, uh, maybe in the present and the future or, uh. Okay, I have, um, I'm going out in the world and trying to set my foot there, trying to get some stability, trying to make my own, you know, just trying to achieve success. So for me right now, this is not the time to even think about purpose. You know, I have to just go and get into that rhythm, um, quote unquote that hustle. And I believe for, for you as well, um, uh, it kind of, uh, looked like success. You know, how, how you frame it like for almost two decades. Um, and, uh, then it kind of came down to a point where you felt this hollowness as well. So, um, how did you feel about that? Uh, what, what made you even think about purpose?

00:05:46 Suneet Bhatt: Yeah. Great question. I mean, I think I spent a good twenty, Twenty five years believing and chasing external factors. So whether it was titles, whether it was accomplishments, whether it was, uh, income, uh, whatever it was, I spent a lot of time chasing those things and I found myself in a pretty consistent cycle after a while, which is I would join a new company and more and more at an executive level, I would come in and we would do amazing work. And what was really resonant for me was that even though we were doing good work, the work didn't feel good to me. It felt hollow. And so after a while, uh, I would blame the work as opposed to my choice and my decision to join that work. And I would go chase the next thing so I'd run away from it. Sometimes I would get fired, sometimes I would resign. Uh, I would have all the excuses in the world. I would self-sabotage, um, simply because I knew in my heart of hearts that the work I was doing was never going to fulfill me. Uh, but instead of reckoning with that, I would jump to the next thing. And so the excitement would be there at the beginning. And then as soon as the substance was required to sustain me, uh, and the, the, you know, the freshness and the newness and the excitement of that, you know, new opportunity wore off. Uh, before I could confront my reality of I wasn't doing the work I loved doing, I would just skip and jump to the next thing. Well, after my last full time gig, which, you know, we built an amazing company. We achieved some extraordinary milestones. Uh, you know, when I left that I left heartbroken, right? I was on the cusp of some major personal milestones. Uh, and, uh, when I left that, I realized that I needed to stop running. And one of the benefits of having an extraordinary partner is my wife, Priya looked at me and said, you've kind of done enough. You need to stop chasing all these jobs for all the wrong reasons. You just pay attention to the things you love and focus on the things you love. We're good. We got you. But you need to focus on the things you love. And so when I left that job, I was, you know, I had to really make sense of who I was. You know, all the purpose frameworks that are out there, you know, there's so much amazing content out there. Let me be clear. You say everyone's talking about purpose, but in every conversation on purpose, everyone makes a fundamental assumption, when they give you a framework and they give you a playbook, or they give you a roadmap, they assume that you have done the work to know what makes you and matters to you, who you are, so that you're answering those questions and completing that work in a way that's authentic to yourself. But nobody gives you the space and grace to actually and the playbook to actually make sense of who you are first. And so you can fill out that playbook. But if you're doing it from a place of fear of financial insecurity, uh, of personal dissatisfaction, of unhappiness, you know, we are naturally hard wired for negativity bias. If you don't offset that negativity bias, then you're not filling out the answers to those questions in a way that really authentically tethers it to yourself. What I say is when people go looking for purpose. Uh, they do it from a place without self-awareness. And that's the equivalent of going shopping. Grocery shopping while hungry. Right? You're not going to make smart decisions. You're just not. The worst thing to do when you go grocery shopping is go hungry. You're going to make irrational decisions based on a food deficit and a hunger pang, as opposed to coming at it from a place of abundance and clarity. You're not going to make healthy decisions, right? You're going to make rash ones. And so I first did the work on myself. I spent an extraordinary amount of time taking assessments, getting to know myself. And what I also realized was I first started by looking outside. I would ask people for feedback on me, but if I don't know myself and I'm not well anchored in who I am, all of that external feedback was just going to give me whiplash. It was going to make me thrash. So I stopped asking other people and I just explored myself ten fifteen different ways. I'm a complex human being. We are all complex beings. And I realized that no single assessment was ever going to fully explain me, but it was going to give me some insight on who I am. And if I stacked enough of those insights together, I would start to find through lines what are my strengths, what makes me happy, what gives me confidence, what gives me energy? What makes me proud? What are my motivations? What are my behaviours? Where do I get stuck? Right. Um, and when I line all those up and stack them on top of each other, you start to find through lines, you start to find patterns. And it's in those patterns that you start to understand confidently and clearly who you are, what makes you, what matters to you. So you can start approaching purpose. And the last thing I'll say is, you know, I teach a class on purpose. We have fifteen lectures over the course of a semester. The course is called Find and Evolve Your Purpose. We do not talk about purpose until class fifteen. Every class up to that is helping the students get a lens and a perspective on who they are. And then we start connecting the dots and lacing it together. And that's what I translated into my book. Um, hopefully that, that I gave you a long winded answer to a complex and sophisticated question.

00:12:25 Sana: and definitely it couldn't be explained, uh, in maybe just two or three lines because, and that's why it's, um, very, very different and something interesting than, than the usual, discussions or conversations that we hear around purpose or the stories that, You know, when we try to understand what is our purpose, um, we kind of think, oh, I love doing this or I love doing that. This is for what I am made or this is exactly what I'm, I'm born for. You know, we just try to look out for different options, you know, just as you perfectly gave an analogy there that, you know, you know, shopping while we are hungry. So it's more like this impulsive sometimes it's, um, this quick, uh, decision. And then, um, if we face some kind of challenge or, or maybe, you know, we, we fail at that we kind of regret or we get into that loophole of, of judging ourselves. So, um, yeah, I, I totally get that. And that's also where, you know, going back to something, what you mentioned, and I really, really kind of resonated with it is the accessibility that it's not only for someone who has achieved in their lives. And then now they're trying to understand what is their purpose. But before even getting into the the practicality of our lives, it's about understanding yourself. So that is something I really find interesting here.

00:13:58 Suneet Bhatt: Yeah. I mean, let me tell you, one of the things that made me realize I needed to take the work I had done for myself and codify it and share it. I was doing executive coaching, and I had a friend reach out to me and say, Sidney, I have a friend who's going through a life transition. Can you speak to this gentleman? And I said, sure, for a friend. Happy to do it. I looked this gentleman up and what I came to understand was, uh, he was sixty seven years old. He had exited multiple businesses. So he was financially wealthy. Uh, and more than secure, he had an extraordinary and exceptional relationship with his wife. So healthy marriage. He was a, you know, a pillar and a mentor to his children who adored him. Uh, and, uh, he was a leader in his community. So you look at all those things, that is the broadest definition of success, right? He is incredible with his family, incredible in his community, and has, uh, extraordinary financial and commercial success. We get on the phone and I say, so tell me what we're talking about. Tell me about why we're introduced. And he said, I don't know why I'm here. Sixty seven years old and all of that success. And my reaction was, and this is how I start the book, if you don't know why you're here, then none of us do. But what was fascinating about the conversation was he we just spent a few hours just reliving and walking through his journey. And what was powerful was as he took the time. And I say, as I gave him the space to reflect and the grace to work through his own narrative, he was able to articulate all of the success and accomplishment that he had and exited the conversation, feeling reconnected to who he was and having clarity on what he wanted to do next. And so that has to happen first, right? If we keep chasing everything, one of the biggest mistakes we make is we don't lock in our moments of happiness, our moments of accomplishment, our moments of gratitude, or moments of success. I mentioned negativity bias, right? So as human beings, we are hard wired for negativity bias. We feel it physiologically somewhere between two to five times if we were to quantify it. What we feel a positive stimuli. We feel negative stimuli. Two to five times. So if I were to say, tell me something bad that happened to you yesterday, you would probably be able to articulate it in stunning detail. If I were to say, tell me something good that happened to you, it would likely be a lot shorter, a lot faster, and a lot less depth. And that's part of the problem is purpose. And I say this about happiness too. They don't start with predictions, they start with reflections. And when we do that correctly, we naturally get clearer and feel better. Who we are, where we are, what we've accomplished, which then makes the outreach and outstretched hand to what's next. It's just a much shorter distance, right? Because we've elevated our foundation and locked it in.

00:17:39 Sana: Mhm.

00:17:40 Speaker 3: Wow. And that's a.

00:17:41 Sana: Really good example you gave there.

00:17:43 Speaker 3: Yeah.

00:17:45 Sana: Very interesting example. and, also at the heart of your work. Um. And I believe you already gave a brilliant example to support this, but, out of curiosity, I, I see that there's this image of a mirror here, uh, like a very honest and also at the same time, a kind reflection of who we really are. So what does it actually look like to start making sense of ourselves, you know, before we ever even think about or reach toward purpose?

00:18:22 Suneet Bhatt: Yeah. I think it is your willingness to do the work of self-reflection. But that's a that's a heavy word. And so what we have to do is if I were to say, hey, tell me what I want you to block out an hour and I want you to tell me what makes you happy. Just write about what makes you happy. You would book that hour and then you would have no idea where to start. And so, you know, part of it is understanding the science and psychology of the human experience. And so if you were to start this journey of, uh, you know, towards purpose of self self-awareness, uh, I make people start at the point of origin. I say, first, tell me where you are right now. Let's talk about why you're here and why you're in this conversation. And the reason I do that is the only way to measure progress is to actually identify the point where you started. And we never do that. And as a result of that, we just kind of ignore and gloss over the progress we've made. All the research shows that we instantly start comparing ourselves to our current peer group, and we fail to recognize where we've come from. And then you give people guided exercises, which is what my class does and what the book does. So we start with happiness, right? Happiness is not an outcome of success. Happiness is a precursor to success. All the research shows it. And the reason is when you're happy and when you identify the fact that you're happy. Uh, what it does is you are more likely to persevere in your journey. If something goes wrong, if something doesn't go linearly or straight, and there are no linear journeys, if you're happy, well, then you're more likely to just let that roll, to let it roll off your just roll off your back and say, hey, like I'm good. But if you're not happy and you hit a bump in the road that has a higher probability of derailing you, and I do an exercise called happy, proud, and I Had satisfied, which basically rewires your brain to combat negativity bias. And I give you prompts to answer. I take happiness, but I make it real. What makes you smile? Right. What are things you can do infinitely. If money wasn't a consideration. Right. Uh. And give them prompts and we give them a finite amount of time to answer them. And what happens is they start talking about happy. We decouple that from accomplishment. And then we talk about proud in the sense of confidence building. Do the same level of prompts. And what happens is you look at your through lines between happy, proud, and we do not yet satisfied, which is you're now building your to do list, but you've unloaded all these things and reminded yourself of all the things that make you smile, make you happy, give you energy, give you confidence where you feel growth. When you do that, first, the to do list you build is very different than if I just say, tell me what you have to do. You come at. You come at it from abundance instead of scarcity. And so it's doing a series of those sorts of exercises acknowledging that you need a playbook to follow so you can focus on doing the thinking and the excavating, not the process. Right. And the structure. And if you do that methodically over time, you do again. You do one, two, three. I recommend at least three such exercises because then you can find patterns and throughlines. And what happens is you start building momentum. You're like, you know what? This thing showed up when I talked about happiness, when I talked about confidence, when I talk about strengths and energy, when I talk about my values, when I talk about my dreams, these are some of the things that keep sewing, showing up. And you start seeing those patterns and you build momentum, right? But the most important thing is the space to do the work, the grace to stumble your way through it. Right? And the structure to follow. So you don't get lost in process. You just get, you just get caught up in the journey and the best possible way.

00:22:31 Speaker 3: MM.

00:22:32 Sana: And this is exactly, I believe, one of the most important part here, that it's not about the beginning, but also, kind of staying consistent on that path, you know, because yeah, it is life is unpredictable. And often, um, it can, you know, sometimes, uh, push us towards the old ways or that old emptiness. So what you just shared, I believe it's kind of, you know, um, that how we can stay in that relationship with ourself even if, uh, the, oh, that old emptiness comes back.

00:23:10 Suneet Bhatt: Yeah. There's, there's a, there's a really powerful, there's two things that I want to say. And I know we're sort of coming up on time, but there's two things I want to, I want to share there. One, when I talk about purpose, I've done purpose with people who have experienced extraordinary trauma. So there is a story in my book about an amazing woman, César Hernandez, who lost two children inside of a year. And so purpose for her was going to be very different than purpose for someone who just sold a business and was trying to figure out what's next, or a police officer who retired from his career and was looking at what's next. So the most important thing is the book meets you where you are. The the framework and purpose will meet you where you are. Sometimes you just need your purpose for now. Sometimes you need your purpose for a little while and over time, maybe you get to your purpose forever. Like I feel like I've hit my purpose forever with this work and this journey. The second thing is there's a gentleman named Scott Barry Kaufman, who is the preeminent thinker on human potential, and he's also a Maslow expert. And he reimagined based on his research, Maslow's hierarchy of needs. The pyramid is not the way Maslow intended that to be shared. Instead, he imagined it as a sailboat on an ocean where you have the ship and you have the sail. And the reason he says that is, you know, when you're on the ocean. And so you may have a perfect ship, but sometimes the sea may be rocky, the wind may be blowing, the weather may be stormy. And as a result of that, you have to be mindful that if the sail is purpose and if the hull of the ship is stability, there are times where you just have to focus on staying afloat. Right. That's your purpose for now, is just to make sure your boat doesn't take on water. But there are other times where the wind is, the seas are calm, the wind is blowing, and you have to unfurl your sail and seek your purpose. The most important thing is knowing the right time and where you are and being really honest about where you are. What does that mean? If the sea is stormy and it's raining and it's lightning, and you unfurl your sail and try and catch purpose, you may capsize. Your boat may tip. Yeah. And conversely, if the sea is calm and the wind is blowing, but you're afraid to unfurl your sail, you're going to miss the opportunity to find purpose. The only way you can make the right decision and know where you are is to know yourself in that moment. And that's why self-awareness is the most important thing. It's the precursor to any journey on purpose.

00:26:12 Speaker 4: That's beautiful. Beautiful. Super, super. so,

00:26:17 Sana: For anyone, anyone listening who felt something settle in them, um, who would like to find your work or sit with your book, where would you invite them?

00:26:29 Suneet Bhatt: I would tell them they can go to the website for the book, which is making sense of purpose dot com. Uh, and one thing I've done there is I've created a new way of reviewing books on purpose. It's called the purpose radar. It helps you understand, uh, it helps you understand content differently. So for example, atomic habits and Man's Search for meaning both get a four point three on Goodreads. It doesn't help you understand what book you need. If you need a book that's inspiring, well, go to man's search for meaning. If you need a book that is enduring, go to man's search for meaning. But if you need a book that is active and engaging, right. Uh, and you need a book that gives you exercises to do well, then go to atomic habits. You can determine the right book for you based on what you have. So there's about twenty pieces of content up there that I'll keep updating all from my journey. So making sense of purpose is a great is a great place to be. But you can also find me on LinkedIn. That's where I do most of my work. And as of a few days ago, I'm new at this, but I just launched an Instagram on this topic, which is on purpose. Uh, I'm new to that universe, but I'm trying. And so you can find me on the website, on LinkedIn, uh, or now on Instagram.

00:27:55 Speaker 3: Amazing.

00:27:55 Sana: Amazing. Well, I hope that you love doing that on Instagram. But yes, listeners, I'll have all the links mentioned in the show notes and, um, yeah, just find them attached along with this episode. And, uh, thank you for this refreshingly unique take on understanding purpose. But before that, knowing ourselves, understanding ourselves, and it's not, not just handing us answers, but instead handing us a better question. So thank you so much.

00:28:28 Suneet Bhatt: Thank you so much. This was a really fun interview. Uh, I appreciate I can tell that you actually spent time looking up my work. Um, and that means a lot and I really enjoyed the conversation. So thank you so much for having me.

00:28:44 Sana: Thank you. Thank you so much. That really means a lot. And to, yes to you, to all my listeners of the Mindful Living, wherever you are right now, maybe somewhere in the beginning of the day or quiet at the end of the day, you don't need to have it all figured out today or tonight itself. You are allowed to simply sit with yourself in the present, in the presence of yourself exactly as you are, and let that be enough for now. Breathe, rest, and I'll be here again next time on the Mindful Living Show. Thank you so much.