Last night my wife and I had some friends over for dinner and one said, “I’ve decided that I hate working. I love the pay and the benefits, but I hate working — especially with people who won’t make decisions when THAT’S their role in the company.”
Now there’s several things to unpack here, but I want to start with her not really liking her job and just working for money. Yes, we all need basic sustenance to survive, but most of us have choices beyond that about what we want to do for a living — and I encouraged her to think about what she really wants to do to leave her mark on the world and find a way to get paid to do THAT.
There’s an old adage, “If you do what you really love, you’ll never work a day of your life.“ While that’s not really true because there will always be those days that you just have to struggle through, the reality is that you can usually find joy in it if you really know your purpose and repeat it like a mantra to remind yourself why you’re doing what you do.
My purpose, my mission, is this:
Uplift intentional leaders of innovative organizations making the world a better place for generations to come.
You see, five years ago I started working as an executive coach, and three years ago I became a Vistage Chair, and in beginning my second career I started to feel that I needed to really understand my WHY. I needed to have a purpose, a mission, that drives me, inspires me, so I know why I do what I do, who I really want to help and magnify in this world, so that I don’t suffer those demotivated days or feel like I’m just selling my services to make a paycheck.
In the Vistage Chair Academy, we had to write our individual WHY statements to understand our core motivations, but it was easy for me to let that statement drift into the background and ultimately be forgotten as I struggled to get my practice off the ground. Before long, I was just focused on “the work”. But after a year or so I found The Greater Purpose Approach, a program for Chairs by Suzanne Livingston whose purpose is to work with Chairs to do the hard, introspective, deep digging and rebuilding to help us discover our purpose and realize our potential greater impact on the world. And just recently at Chair World, our yearly Vistage conference for Chairs, Brendon Burchard was the highly energetic and motivational closing keynote speaker. I decided to read his books, High Performance Habits and The 6 Habits of Growth where he emphasizes that knowing your purpose and meditating on it throughout the day is key to staying focused. Staying mindful of your WHY is important so that you’re working on the right priorities and even showing up as the person you want to be as you plan your work, attend meetings, get things done, and even spend time with your family. If you do it right and stay focused on your WHY, it’s life changing.
Now that I’ve discovered my purpose, and practice the habit of meditating on it at key times throughout the day, I get inspired — fired up, even! — about everything from selecting who I want to work with next, to preparing for meetings with them, to helping them understand their paths and work around their obstacles, to reflecting on their decisions and accomplishments and celebrating their wins!
Let me break down the elements of my purpose statement so you can understand my WHY:
- Work with intentional leaders — those who aren’t just reacting to changing market dynamics or stresses in the workplace but instead are intentionally choosing their goals and how to build their organizations to pursue them.
- Of innovative organizations — companies, non-profits, and even government orgs who are actively thinking about how to do things differently, whether it’s through applying technology, inventing novel methods, or taking a drastically different approach to their work than others have to date so they’re not just doing things “the way they’ve always been done.”
- Making the world a better place — they’re thinking of their impact on the world and not just “doing it to make money.” Yes, every organization has to manage money — it’s the life blood of an organization. But money and profits are just one system in an organism with many facets that are ultimately having a greater impact than just making the shareholders rich. This can take a thousand different forms, but you know it when you’ve got it.
- For generations to come — thinking about the long-term effects on our children and their children, or on our employees’ and other constituents’ children. When we imagine the future we’re making, we can visualize the impact we’re having in enabling them to change the world for the better.
Now every leader and every organization will have a different personal purpose or mission statement, so if you have one or have been thinking about what really drives you — what fires you up — I’d love to hear it! Please share it in the comments or message me. At the very least, we’ll celebrate it. But maybe we can work together to achieve it. Or if you’re struggling, maybe I can help you distill it and make it clearer so you and your org can really focus. In any case, we leaders usually don’t talk about our purpose and missions enough, so let’s make it front and center!
This article was first published in my LinkedIn newsletter, Feeding the Flame. Read the original.