Discover Your Two-Word Purpose In 3 Minutes! With Kevin McCarthy
Are you drifting through life unaware of your purpose? On-Purpose Partners is an online tool that gives you your two-word purpose in 3 minutes. Chad’s guest in this episode is Kevin McCarthy, the Chief Leadership Officer of On-Purpose Partners. Kevin discusses with Chad how the two words are God’s branding on you. You’ve had it with you since birth. It’s your spiritual DNA! Tune in and be on-purpose!
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Discover Your Two-Word Purpose In 3 Minutes! With Kevin McCarthy
I’m here with somebody who you will find so much wisdom in. This gentleman has had a longer career, almost probably than I’ve been alive, maybe not quite at On-Purpose Partners. He told me the story of how in 1988 and then 1990, he had his first big talk on this at the Gallery of Homes in Florida in Winter Park. Kevin, it’s fabulous to have you on the show. Thank you for being here. It’s great to have you.
Thank you. If you like it, you can write me at KevinMcCarthy@On-Purpose.com. If you don’t like it, write Congressman Kevin McCarthy in Washington, DC at the Rayburn Building. I’m not the same person. Everybody always gets to be confused with Kevin McCarthy, who’s the House Minority Leader.
It looks like you’ve done some work with Vistage, also the National Speaker Association. What a cool career you’ve had and we’re going to dig into that. Before we do, I like to rewind the tape for our readers because I think a lot of who we are as human beings and as God’s child when you’re younger, you’re unfiltered. The world hasn’t made an impact on you yet. When you wake up every day, bright-eyed and bushy-tailed to do something that gives you the direction of what your real purpose in life is. I like to ask that question. When you’re very young, 6, 7, 8 years old, can you remember, what were some of your first memories of what you were passionate about then?
I like to play a lot. My mother was a school teacher and she would take me to school with her. She taught girls Physical Ed in middle school. She would bring me to school with her from time to time. I would go over to the boys’ side and I would do gym all day long from six grades, pre-kindergarten, and all of that. I liked playing Army in the Woods with my brother and friends. I have an older brother, Bob, who’s two years older. We would run around. Back then, kids ran pretty loose and pretty free, where now it’s not quite as safe to do that or it’s perceived to be less safe, but we ran in the mornings. During the summers, we’d get out and we’d come back whenever we showed up. It’s a different world back then.
You get out, play, hang out, sports a little bit. What sports were you into?
We played Wiffle ball in the backyard. We threw footballs. We’ve shot basketballs. We ran. Later in life, I became a tennis player and taught the game professionally for a number of years, but at that point, I didn’t know what a tennis racket probably was. If it was a bat or ball or anything round that we could roll or throw, we were doing it.
I remember in North Carolina, we had woods in the back and my son, who was 10, 12 years old would run out for miles and be gone for hours and that wasn’t too long ago. I still think there are places in the country that have those areas where we are like, “Go on. We’ll see you at dusk.” If you think about whether it’s playing Army in the Woods or tennis or those sporting events, what’s the common thread? If you think about then to now, sometimes people talk about team sports and being with other people or sometimes it’s individual. What was it about those times that you find that it’s still a passion for you in what you’re doing?
A lot of it has to do with imagination, creativity, and thinking. Even though I’m rather traditionally and classically educated in the sense of I have an undergraduate degree. I went from high school, an undergraduate degree in Business and Economics with a Major in Finance. I then went on and got an MBA. I still like to think that it’s my creativity and my ability to see things differently than what the expression is out of the box but I never saw much of a box. I always was very true to myself in that regard and I think that independent streak has stayed with me.
It probably comes back to the ability to get into my mind and play and work. When it comes to extroversion-introversion, I’m right in the middle. I love being with people, yet I’m very happy to sit in my office and just work away on writing a book or thinking about something or creating a strategic plan for a client or thinking through the various other sorts of things that may be going on. I’m comfortable in both worlds, the introvert-extrovert and that goes back to that little kid, Kevin.
I saw on your website On-Purpose, is it a StrengthsFinder or if someone were to do the 3 to 5-minute exercise there, what would they expect to get out of that?
ONPURPOSE.me is an online tool where if somebody is wondering about their purpose in life, they’re going to walk away with a two-word purpose statement. If you think about StrengthsFinder as describing the qualities of who you are, some of the strengths that you have. The purpose is to help you understand why you exist from a Christian worldview. It’s your identity in Christ or another way to think about it is God’s will for your life but these are broad Christian concepts. Where when you have a two-word purpose statement, it gives you a very specific understanding of how are you uniquely called and designed to give expression to your purpose or how to know your unique identity in Christ or your unique expression of God’s will. Calling is something that in the workplace, we think about that as a mission on what you’re going to go do your calling is related to that but even your calling is informed by your purpose.
In preparation for this call, I had planned to fill it out, then I said, “I’m not going to be able to do it in time.” That will be on my shortlist of things to do before the day is through. That is huge.
It’s powerful because the two words you can almost think of it as a personal brand, but not a brand in the sense that we think of as a trade name or a brand like that but it’s almost like it’s God’s branding on you, think of it as spiritual DNA. It is who you are. It came with birth in that sense, much like your physical DNA came. You have this spiritual DNA that also exists once you understand that, much like we’re beginning to unravel the human genome and understanding DNA and all of the thing.
That it opens up enormous opportunities that have always been there, but it’s suddenly opened up this large body of work of exploration and understanding in a much the same way when somebody begins to understand their two-word purpose. It opens up a whole body of understanding and information about their lives and how they can begin to put that to use in a more powerful way. That was always there but they didn’t know how to tap it. Now, they can tap into their purpose.
Two-Word Purpose: Understanding your two-word purpose opens up a whole body of information about your life.
We were at an executive retreat in Winter Park, Colorado and there was a picture of a fingerprint in the living room. It was all Bible verses that made up the fingerprint. I was at this event for 2 or 3 days and I broke down in tears in the back row going, “I get it. Everybody has a purpose in life.” I went and bought one and framed it. Now it’s in my house, the same one. Whether it’s a snowflake, every snowflake is unique. Your fingerprint is unique and figuring out what that is. Now that illumination was turned on years ago, I went to my dad’s house, my parents’ house. My dad gives me this old hockey stick from when I was a kid and it comes rushing back. It’s like, “Wait a minute. It was the exact stick I held.”
I was so good at competitiveness that I’d score 10, 12 goals, the other team gets two because of defense and offense, but that wasn’t enough. Being competitive and winning was my lane, however, showing other people how to also be competitive was very important to me. I remember that we had a girl on our team and not a lot of teams had a mix of boys and girls at that age and ours was a mixed team. I picked her and I said, “You crashed the goal. I’m going to drive it straight down. I’m going to dump it off to you and I want you to score.”
We started doing that one, two punch. Then we flipped the script and said, “Now I want you to drive down and I’m going to crash the goal.” I didn’t want her to think like, “I’m giving you the easy job. That was to show you how to run the play.” It was so fun to be able to first learn it yourself and then show other people how to use that competitiveness. It would be very curious if my purpose comes out with competitive in the term somewhere or not.
It probably won’t, but that’s probably a character quality or a value that you’re expressing that’s there. Although what I hear you saying is at some level, you appreciate or enjoy being a guide. You’re in that sense you were guiding or mentoring in that regard in much like what you’re doing with Living A Better Story is guiding people.
The next question I like to ask Kevin is around the speed bumps in life that at the time may look like the biggest mountain you’ve ever had to cross. You’d seem to have discovered religion and Christianity. What challenges did you face in life that you’re comfortable sharing and how’d you get through that?
I came to Christ in my early 30s. Now I had grown up in a home where Christianity. My father was Catholic. My mother was not Catholic. Back when my parents got married in 1950, a Catholic who married outside of the faith was ex-communicated. My father was not allowed to take communion. He was a devout Catholic and my mother said, “If a church won’t accept me or will reject you because you’re marrying somebody you love, then I don’t want to be a part of that church.” My mother is a strong-willed woman. She’s 94 and still alive. She is an independent, strong type. We didn’t get raised in the church, but we weren’t opposed to the church. It was there.
It wasn’t until I ended up getting married. I sat down with my wife. I was a strategy guy, goal setting and all of those sorts of things. I said to her, “What would you like for our marriage?” She said, “Do you want to know?” I said, “Yeah. What would be your most important thing to see?” “I’d like to have our Christian marriage.” I said, “I don’t know what that is.” She said, “I don’t know what it is either.” We started attending a church, All Saints, Episcopal Church in Winter Park, Florida. We were married and because I’d been a student of self-help and literature, I’d been searching, everything but the church. When I sat in the back of All Saint Episcopal Church, I listened to Art Dasher, who was the interim director at the time, preach.
I was like, “This is the core literature. Everything else I’ve been reading on the self-help literature is a derivative of this Bible.” For me, the Bible was an intellectual understanding. That was in ’84, then on February 14, 1986, is when Jesus went from my head to my heart, so I gave that as a background by saying, “On February 14, 1986, is when Jesus went from my head to my heart but by 1987, I was deep into a business relationship.” I was the president of a real estate development company called United States Properties, which was another guy. We were partners. He was fifteen years older and we ended up in the midst of a business divorce.
I, for all intents purposes, was bankrupt financially but my faith was so alive. Spiritually I was not bankrupt. Spiritually I was living in abundance. Financially, I was behind the eight balls like you couldn’t believe. It was during that time where I recognized that it was truly my faith. In fact, I always get this scripture term turned around but it’s where your heart is your treasure will be or where your treasure is your heart will be, whichever. I always get it mixed up.
I realized that my treasure had been in money and now my treasure was in Christ. That washed a peace over me that was remarkable because of the challenges that I was going through. I didn’t declare bankruptcy, but I did eliminate some of the challenges of that relationship, but most of all, the power of that was taken off of me. I gave it up and Christ stepped in and fulfilled that in a beautiful way. That’s really that story. It was all for good. I think of it as they talk about tempering steel, making it stronger. That was a tempering that I needed at a very youthful stage of my development spiritually as a Christian.
It’s amazing how many conversations I have like these were that the toughest thing that they’ve ever had to go through becomes the galvanizing moment. I talked to this amazing woman, Michelle, whose mother somehow got the family into a cult when she was at a very young age. For years from age 8 to 13 or maybe 14, and yet she still held her Christian faith and the pastor was somehow involved. Talk about a hard mountain to face and yet she made it through. She found some ways and they ended up getting out of the cult. Now she’s doing everything she does in memory of her mother because her mom had some tough things as a kid. Now she’s created this ministry to help other women tell their stories.
She’s on number 56 of people that have been on the show telling their story. For the readers, if you’re going through something that feels the toughest thing you could imagine, now imagine your mom is in a cult and you’re part of it. Now, imagine you’re business went upside down and you’re near bankruptcy. Imagine all these other situations. The silver lining and the moral of the story are the same thing that I hear over and over again. That’s faith in Jesus.
That’s interesting because one of the things that I found with an On-Purpose message that I have is that most of the people that are looking for purpose are usually in the midst of a transition of some sort. About many years ago, I bought the domain name, tough shift. I, about 1.5 years or so ago, I developed out a program called Tough Shift. I’m writing a book on it, a booklet is probably a better way to describe it but the premise of that is this whenever you’re in the midst of a tough shift, that whenever you can articulate it as, “This is a tough shift.” It takes away a lot of the power of personalizing it.
You’re able to take it, put it over there and understand that in a cycle of my life, this is a season I’m in. That I will get through this, with the whole tough shift, there is a process and a means to get through that and purposes at the core of that. If you don’t know your purpose in life or if you think life is meaningless or you think that life is over for me, which is these are false words that come into our brains and into our spirit. They are lies. It’s the ability to look at it and say, “I am going to get through this tough shift.” Life is the day you’re born is your first tough shift and the last tough shift is the day you die.
Two-Word Purpose: Let people make their choices. Don't judge them.
Again, think about it even from a Christian worldview. Death is the ultimate healing. There is a good side to death that we often fail to realize that death is the passageway into heaven. I’ve always said, “I’m not afraid of death. I am afraid of dying.” It’s the process of getting to death that scares the living out of me at times, but because I don’t want to have cancer, I don’t want to have all these sorts of things that we imagine or dementia. The process of dying is one that is frightening for me. Again, my faith sustains me in the midst of that. I look at it and say, “If that’s the way God has me go out, that’s the way I go out.”
It’s interesting because if I think of my personal shift, seventeen Zoom meetings on Friday and of that, probably 30% were business-related and 70% were shows, recordings and other things that I’m following God’s lead on. The shift of leaving the other life behind, what I'm talking to myself is, “That’s not really true.” I’m not leaving a life behind. I’m using the skills that I’ve created or that were given to me and learned over years of experience and putting them in one degree in a different lane for the glory of God.
It’s like going through that tough shift, even though that sounds like, “That’s not a big deal.” It is because it can have an impact on your earnings potential. That’s what Michelle talked about. She’s been following it. She goes, “I haven’t pulled an income in years, but I know it’s the right thing that I’m doing right now.” Being that level of on-purpose and knowing your purpose, the bigger the why the bigger the try is the term that I’ve heard before for that.
That’s why purpose is such an important part because it’s giving you that sense of why. It’s what most people think of as the why is what they want to do, but the purpose is the I am. It’s that sense of being which gives power to. It’s the powering process. It’s the energy behind the crusade or the mission that one might find themselves on.
We’re going to Phoenix very soon and in a couple of days, in fact, and there’s going to be two of the at-risk teens who graduated from high school that did that against all odds. They’re presenting their 30 minutes of, “This is what I did.” If you had 30 minutes with two kids who graduated from a school that are at-risk teens in Arizona, would you have them do the ONPURPOSE.me or what would you do if you had 30 minutes with kids like that?
The nice part about the ONPURPOSE.me is that would be the first three minutes. Then I might spend ten minutes with them refining it, but I have a tool that’s a fun tool. What you’re describing reminds me of years ago, I did a speaking engagement for an inner city ministry here in Orlando called Frontline Outreach. I had 30 Inner City kids at 8:00 in the morning on a Saturday morning. You can imagine they were thrilled to be there, but I have a tool called the Discovery Guide. It’s at DiscoveryGuide.net and what it comes down to is it’s a process, that comes out of my first book The On-Purpose Person. It’s called a Want List and Tournament so what I would do is have them write down 32 things that they want for their life.
If you think of a tennis tournament, it is in brackets. They would then put these things into 32. Again, DiscoveryGuide.net has the forms for all this as well as the instructions. If you write down 32 things you want and it could be more, if there are 64 or 80, bigger brackets or what I do is I have people break them into categories. It would be a health bracket, a career bracket, a finance bracket, a family bracket. There are seven different brackets that you can do and you can do more, but you would say, “What do you want for your life?” You have them go through this and write it out, put it into a tennis tournament, then you have them select which is most important.
You can do that exercise fairly fast. What it does is it comes out to what their top want is. You can then run the tournament in reverse and say, “If this is your top want, then what are the two things you can do to make that happen?” What you’re doing is you’re going from very broad concepts to a very narrow specific. This is specifically of that. This is what’s most important, therefore you can then take that and build that out. This idea of going from very broad to very narrow and from narrow to deep.
It’s the old concept of instead of being a mile wide and an inch deep, this is the way that you get to below that to where you’re a mile deep and an inch wide, but within that inch wide, you also are able to continually then broaden it out. That’s the way that one develops a niche or an understanding of life. Life is frankly for somebody that young, they’re going to go through a lot of those cycles, but if they understand the process because the first time they do it, they’re going to come through very thick as the way I describe it. They’re not going to get to that very narrow point. The purpose statement will put an edge on it for them then they take it out.
I somehow discovered not through somebody showing me, but if I was looking at career choices, I’d put five in the columns and then I’d put in the rows, the 10 or 12 different areas that mattered, then I’d put a score in each one and it would spit out at the bottom, “This is where you’re meant to be next.” Those things changed to your point. Like, “Do I want to learn in this job? Do I want a good manager, quality of life?” All these different decision points, but I love the bracketing. That could be done on a whiteboard quite easily or here’s your pizza white paper. Let’s do this for the next ten minutes.
You can use Post-it Notes. Put it up on Post-it Notes on a window, “Here’s boom, boom.” Throw them all up there, then get the ideas and write them out on a Post-it Note and then take those things and put them randomly up on a window, a bit like a big window, then say which one’s more important and why? This is where you as the mentor can be helpful. Let them make their choices and don’t judge them. “Why is that more important?” As they’re expressing it, if you make note, what you’re going to see if they’re going to be revealing their values. Because as they choose what’s most important, it’s what they value and suddenly, what will come out of it is not only a more immediate plan for something that they can focus on because most of us struggle with focus, me included.
It’s what they can focus on and what they value around that in terms of what they’re not willing to compromise about themselves. You’ll see that the values that will come out are going to be things like truth or family. All these different things are going to come out and you’ll also see some negative things that come out. Whenever they choose something over something else you ask them, “Why didn’t that one advance?” There are some things that they’re going to learn about themselves that maybe could be coaching opportunities is exactly the way they look at it. In other words, whenever I did this with these young men, it was all boys because that’s what the group was.
They put a fine woman. What was interesting is as they chose, all of a sudden, a fine woman didn’t matter as much. Interestingly enough these kids chose a relationship with Christ. I was stunned, a room full of inner city youth who basically processed, “I want to be in the NBA. I want to have a big car. I want a fancy house. I want a fine woman. I want this, I want that,” and when they boil all of that down, it came down to a relationship with Christ. If you think about the scripture, it’s saying, “All of these things will be added unto you.”
Two-Word Purpose: How do you go through life without the Christian concept of forgiveness, reconciliation, and repentance?
There’s no chance that we’re here because when God gets involved in these games, he causes this to happen. As I look at ONPURPOSE.me and I see the background, the image here on my green screen is almost precisely the background, probably from a slightly different angle. What a fabulous conversation. We’re getting tight on the time here. I want to ask you one more question to wrap it all up. We’ve already touched on this, but it brings everything together and that is, what role does faith play in your journey? Thinking about what we talked about, how does faith play a role?
What I want to do is say at one point in my life, faith played no role and now, I can’t imagine my life without it. Now, I often introduce myself at speaking engagements by saying, “My name is Kevin McCarthy. I was born on Christmas day. I was educated. I slept under the star of Bethlehem, where I was also educated.” All of that is true. I was born on Christmas day. I did go to Lehigh University in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania and they have a star upon South Mountain, so my fraternity was located right underneath the star of Bethlehem in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. All of that is true, but none of it meant much to me, but I also believe because I was born on Christmas day, that it was a way of God’s reminding me you’re number two. No matter what, you’re never going to get to celebrate your birthday because it’s always my day.
I didn’t take offense to that. I considered it a great honor to have been born on Christmas day. It was always there for me. I can look at it and say, “I cannot imagine what it is like to live without faith, without a relationship with Christ, without the concept of forgiveness.” How do you go through life without the Christian concept of forgiveness and reconciliation and repentance and all that’s involved in that? It is the greatest gift that we have. That we have these redeemed lives, that we live lives of hope and meaning as opposed to lives of hopelessness and meaninglessness. My crusade is to eradicate meaninglessness from this planet by helping people know their purpose in life so that they know their meaning. I like to say, instead of searching and spending their lives searching for purpose, they can invest their lives, giving their purpose expression. That’s giving the expression of who God made them be on this planet.
It’s such an honor to talk with you. My grandfather gave me these ten scribes, if you will, in the handwritten text back in eighth grade when they gave me this cross for my confirmation. It said, “Number one, love the Lord, your God, with all your heart, mind, and soul. Number two, love your neighbor as yourself,” and then there are eight others. I always say, “If you forget the other ten, remember the first two.” Those are the most important but what number two doesn’t say is love your neighbor as yourself, as long as they’re vaccinated or loving your neighbor as yourself, as long as they take the trash in on Tuesday mornings. There are no caveats and that’s where a lot of society’s going wrong and the south is, “I love you if.” When we all realize we’re all part of the same family, whether we’re tall, short, wide, whatever color we are, it doesn’t matter. You’re my brother, you’re my sister and therefore, I’d love you no matter what. Whether you did something wrong, it doesn’t matter. That’s where we need to strive to get in life.
When we realized that our identity can only be from one source and that is our identity in Christ, otherwise, all the other stuff the identity politics and things that are around there that want to put you into a color or a Republican or Democrat or libertarian or green or whatever it may be. All of that is identifiers, but not identity. Identity in Christ is where it’s at. If your identity is in anything else, it’s idolatry. Idolatry is, “Thou shalt have no other Gods before me.” That is the number one commandment. That’s where we get in trouble is we are in violation of commandment number one because we have other Gods before him.
It’s a super deep concept we’ve been talking about. Kevin McCarthy, not the Minority Speaker of the House or whatever government he’s in. This is the other Kevin McCarthy. I would say, check out the website. ONPURPOSE.me is the app and OnPurpose.com is the website. I have a feeling we will be talking again sometime soon, Kevin.
Chad, it is great to be with you. Keep up the good work you’re doing with the show because we all need to be living a better story and you’re guiding the way.
Thank you, everybody, for joining and we’ll catch you on the next episode.
Important Links:
About Kevin McCarthy
On-Purpose Partners is a small team with big dreams.
On-Purpose.com, the 2-word purpose concept and ONPURPOSE.me app, and many related On-Purpose courses are the brainchild of Kevin W. McCarthy, the author of the best-selling book series The On-Purpose Person and The On-Purpose Business Person.
Since the late 1980s, Kevin has pioneered the integration of purpose for life and work and coined “On-Purpose®” as a positive expression for knowing one’s purpose and then aligning your life decisions to give expression to your purpose in life.
On-Purpose.com touches on the fulfillment of Kevin’s vision of “Every Person On-Purpose,” that in the aggregate he calls The On-Purpose Planet. This movement draw upon a crusade to be eradicating meaninglessness from the heart and soul of each and every person.
