Why and How to Identify your Purpose
Plus a powerful podcast appearance
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🎧 New Podcast Appearance🎙️
Over the summer, I recorded an episode on my good friend Mike Trugman’s podcast, Mike’s Search for Meaning.
I hadn’t thought about it for several months, and listened back to it last week in advance of it’s release on Sunday.
My god was I happy with it.
Mike is familiar with the Conscious Leadership world and has been a direct observer of my journey. He asked me amazing questions and gave me the space to run far and wide in my answers. He reflected back the messiness of the journey and gave me space to talk about my own.
If you’re curious about Conscious Leadership, using consciousness and awareness tools for your growth and development, or hearing directly about the messy process that this work is, I can’t imagine having created a better resource at this point in the journey.
We also dove deep into:
Why Consciousness or “inner” work is essential to leaders, and is not the same as business coaching or developing managerial or leadership skills
Signs you may or may not be ready for this type of work
What is Emotional Intelligence, why develop it, and what makes an Emotionally Intelligent Leader
Above the Line and Below the Line, and why it’s so important to be honest about it
How Enneagram typing has been transformative for me
Why you shouldn’t go through the motions
Working with your Inner Critic
How to use your Judgments and Appreciation of others to Accelerate your growth and transformation
What we mean by Unconscious Commitments and how to use them
If you’re curious, here are a few clips that Mike pulled:
The Messiness of Learning New Patterns
Exploring my Relationship to Approval
How to Intelligently Work with Anger
Give it a Listen on your favorite platform below:
Apple
Spotify
YouTube
Onto more good stuff!
Why and How to Find your Purpose 🌟
A new way to think about Purpose
To be honest, I didn’t get purpose work at all in my 20’s.
It felt so big picture, so abstract. I didn’t understand how it could be informative or useful in my day-to-day life.
That all shifted when Jim Dethmer of the Conscious Leadership Group presented me with a radically different way to think about purpose.
The principles I learned from him:
We get to define our purpose, and that definition gets to change. It’s not about finding a lifelong purpose, but the purpose you want to be on right now.
Purpose isn’t something to achieve, but something to live. When we treat purpose as an intention instead of a goal, the question we ask is am I on purpose right now?
In this way, purpose includes a direction we want to see the world moving in, but also includes that activities we want to be doing and the characteristics of ourself we want to be expressing as we do them. If one of those characteristics is Intuition, we can be on purpose when we are intuitive regardless of what activities we’re doing.
In the episode, I spoke about this in the mistakes I like to avoid when it comes to purpose:
The True Upside of Purpose: Anti-fragility and Resilience
One of the things that most plagues founders, leaders, and high-performers is over-identification with work.
When you’re over-identified, it’s easy to succumb to the natural ups-and-down of doing anything meaningful.
Identifying your Purpose provides a new, bigger directional anchor. The question shifts from Will I be Succesful in this Endeavor? to Am I living my purpose, right now?
When that happens, success on this day, this week, month, this project, ceases to matter. Purpose is something to be lived right now and over your lifetime, not a place you need to get to.
P.S. I also find that this type of non-attachment supports and increases the likelihood of ultimate success.
In the episode, I used the example of a founder or scientist who wants to cure cancer:
An Exercise for Identifying your Purpose
There was both a specific orientation and a specific method of defining purpose that changed it all for me.
The method I was presented with broke purpose down into three pieces:
Who you’re being
What you’re doing
How you’re moving the world
I shared the specific exercise in the episode.You can watch the clip and have me walk you through it:
Or if you’re more of a reading/writing person, you can use the document here:
Watch/Listen on:
Purpose is a tricky one.
I don’t pretend that this is the best way to use or relate to purpose.
But it’s certainly the most useful orientation to it that I’ve found so far.
If you want to dive into the nitty gritty with us, you can watch/listen on:
Apple
Spotify
YouTube