Living My Purpose Student Assessment is an amazing product that can provide clarity and peace of mind to students and their families at a time when both tend to be in short supply. CEO Mike Adams has developed a series of online assessments for students that is intended to look a student’s personality traits (or “how they are designed”), rather than at their skills and knowledge, in order to predict their college and career success. In other words, whereas much of the testing that many of us would have done in high school would have quizzed us on our likes and dislikes and academic strengths and weaknesses in order to suggest potential college majors and career paths to us, Living My Purpose instead assesses a student’s personality itself (but it’s really so much more than that) in order to determine at what kinds of things she would excel. After all, when are you most likely to stick with something (such as college or a job)? When you’re *enjoying* it! When are you most likely to enjoy your major or your job? When it meshes well with who you are.

So how does Living My Purpose determine what your student will excel at? Through a series of online assessments that results in numerous charts, graphs, and coaching videos (and, ultimately, a personal interpretive coaching session over the phone), your student will find out his or her Unique Life Purpose. In a couple of sentences, your student will be told how they derive meaning and purpose from life in concrete ways. They can then apply this unique life purpose to determining whether or not a particular college or career course will support or thwart that life purpose.

In essence, for $299.99, you receive traits, behaviors, personality, temperament assessments, and interest inventories, access to charts, reports, online coaching, and personal development action item coaching, online interpretive session video access, and one and a half hours of one-on-one coaching (over the phone). The phone coaching session may seem unnecessary to some users, especially when one discovers that a less expensive option (one that doesn’t include a phone coaching session) is available, but I cannot emphasize enough the utility and value of the coaching call. Mike Adams was delightful and knowledgeable during this call. By looking at my daughter’s profile and results, he had her pegged pretty well before even talking to her (he talked to both of us for well over an hour one afternoon on speakerphone). Because Living My Purpose generates so many reports, and because there are so many potential interactions between the different aspects of your person (not personality, but total person, since that’s what Living My Purpose really focuses on), it really was very helpful to have Mike talk us through the entire huge report. We had both already been through it exhaustively (we thought), but we both got so much more out of it with Mike’s expert guidance. I found myself wishing that my husband had been there to hear what he had to say, too. In fact, my daughter took three pages of notes while Mike was talking to us!

My daughter’s (15) Life Purpose is as follows: “You find purpose in your ability to create order, structure, and timelines and manage deadlines, make good better, and see excellence in everything you work on and find connections in the data you objectively quantify. Your purpose in life is realized in the changes you design and initiate and communicated through your ability to solve big picture problems through the use of strategies and structure.” As part of her report, she is told, “Make sure that in your occupation you will be depended upon to win others over, bring change to get things done, and use your ability to learn and strategically use complex theoretical material to solve big picture problems.” In this way, she is able to look at different career options (many of which are presented to her in her report) and assess whether or not they will give her the opportunity to do each of those things (win people over, etc.). It is simply awesome to have those guidelines in place to act as recommendations when considering college majors and future career plans. Your child may think she has a penchant for a particular major, but if her Life Purpose doesn’t have a lot to do with that major, there is an opportunity for a serious conversation about whether or not she would end up experiencing any fulfillment at all in that degree program.

Assessing different career choices is a key place where having Mike coach you personally is a real asset. For instance, Human Resource Manager comes up as my daughter’s top career match, but Mike immediately told my daughter not to put too much stock in that because of how she scored on other assessments, particularly on her need for structure, which tends to take precedence over everything else for her. She already knew that she would not be happy in that job, but she would have likely said that it had to do with her not being much of a people person. It was so helpful to have Mike walk us through everything helping us to prioritize all of the available information, and reminding my daughter to return to the reports time and time again as she continues to confront major decisions in her life.

The reports generated by Living My Purpose do so much more than simply list career matches (for example – there are so many other reports), though. For every career listed by the report (and there are dozens upon dozens, with a corresponding score showing how compatible a match it is), there are several links provided. You can click to find a job description, complete with median salary, projected job growth, and other related statistics. You can click to see all the colleges and universities with degrees plans that support such a career (you can even apply online right then and there). You can watch a short film about that career. You can take notes about what you have learned that will be saved for the next time you log on. You can even search current job openings for that field in your area!

Further, because Living My Purpose addresses the entire person, rather than just one aspect of personality or temperament, you end up with so much material to work with when considering future options. Many people may know to which of the four classic temperaments they most conform. Some may know their Myers-Briggs personality type. Some may have even taken a career aptitude test. What Living My Purpose has done, though, is bring all of those tests (and so much more) under one umbrella to assess the total person in order to try to bring fulfillment to the total person. What a wonderful way to get a child excited about attending college or entering the workforce. Who wouldn’t be excited about fulfilling their Unique Life Purpose?

Listening to my daughter read segments of her report was so much fun. She was essentially reading my husband’s job description. Her report also read like the description of what I would be doing today had I pursued a career in academia after earning my doctorate. It seems that the apple does not fall far from the tree! Mike Adams is really doing something unique and wonderful with his Living My Purpose Student Assessments, and I would wholeheartedly recommend them to anyone, parent or student, homeschooler or any-schooler, who wants to make an effort to conform their life to their Life Purpose.

-Product review by Laura Delgado, The Old Schoolhouse® Magazine, LLC, April, 2017