Leading With Purpose - Part 2

What does it really mean to be purpose-led? 

What does it really mean to have a genuine sense of fulfilment and purpose at work? 

This is what we’re all after, isn’t it? And it’s where I left off in my last post. Having created a purpose-led organisation, Social Bite, I found out the hard way the brutal truth that it is still possible to run yourself into the ground and feel pretty unfulfilled by where you work. Having great colleagues at Social Bite is what kept me going most weeks. But I felt distant and unimportant to the good work we were doing and to the decision-making process. I wondered if what we were doing was enough… a lot. The bigger we grew the less of a sense I had of where we were going and how we should get there. Various board members over the years seemed to think they had the answers. Others never really stated an opinion at all, claiming to be facilitators of the process, removing themselves entirely from the steering and responsibility I thought they were there for. Meanwhile, others seemed to complicate board room politics by stating different opinions to different people and ultimately voting with the majority. And of course, there were some who were just awesome and who selflessly gave of their experience and even had real conversations with me. People are people. As a young woman who had no idea how this stuff was supposed to work, and who only a few board members took any real interest in at all, this was all pretty confusing on more than one occasion. So, I discovered just that: No matter what industry you go into, what board you participate in or what organisation you start - people are people. And sometimes, people disappoint you - especially when the shit hits the fan. 

So what can be done? With young people seeking purpose over profit more than ever and the ‘Great Resignation’ exemplifying that professionals across every industry are fed up of feeling unfulfilled at work, it’s a crucial question for us as leaders to be asking ourselves. I found myself pondering this question over the last few years, with my own journey of self-exploration and search for meaning beginning years before I left Social Bite with my time at the organisation bringing up all sorts of challenging philosophical dilemmas. These dilemmas included all sorts of things including being aggressively tweeted prior to an event I was supposed to be speaking at by a group of protesters who’d be outside the venue that evening, challenging me as to whether I would dare cross their picket line, and other strangers who’d tweet after I’d appeared on Good Morning Britain to promote one of the royal visits because we were serving meat in our sandwiches - therefore how could we truly be socially conscious?! So, as I left Social Bite where I’d faced the many and varied internal quandaries that come with being somewhat responsible for a purpose-led organisation, now with time on my hands, I got really curious. What can be done? Can people work with purpose, with values and with integrity in a way that actually fulfils them? Maybe even empowers them? And how?

Having retrained as a professional business coach, with a focus on purpose and fulfilment, the coachy-coach in me wants to first of all point out that the mindset I laid out above of “sometimes, people disappoint you” is extremely unhelpful to any sort of progress. This is a hard pill to swallow. Victimhood, while painful, becomes pointless after a certain period of time, because it gets in the way of you having any sense of control of your own life, when the fact is, the only thing you have control over is YOUR life. But in order to be authentic, I have to be honest and own that this is where I have been, and where I’ve been stuck for some time in the past. The space of victimhood, blaming, questioning and resenting. And the reality is this space is where lots of my clients are when they come to me (whether they realise it yet or not), and I know that I will find myself there again on the road ahead of me as long as I am human. People are feeling this. Whether you’ve started a social enterprise that rose to success, helped hundreds of people who were homeless and hung out with celebrities or not. We are in search of this thing, this sense of belonging, of being in the right place and being valuable to the world, being respected by the people around us and part of a meaningful community... but there’s no road map for this, no lesson on it in school and no simple and universally accepted step-by-step plan out there that shows us how to find it. 

Perhaps that’s because it’s such a new concept - seeking fulfilment from work instead of it just being about practicality, the kind of practicality that was somewhat more essential in the days of our parents and our parent’s parents. And perhaps it’s also because of the era we find ourselves in now. We have high-speed internet, contactless phone payments, social media apps with an “endless scroll” feature, more TV channels and streaming services than anyone actually needs, with bingeable TV programmes coming out of our ears and absolutely everything else that has made our time here on this planet so comfortable yet ironically so, so disconnected from each other. Comfort is the killer of creativity, and creativity is the human instinct for progress. We need to feel a sense of progress to be happy - it’s in our neurobiology. People are feeling this lacking in their lives: Stuck in a rut, or a comfort zone that keeps them from exploring their full potential and any sort of liberation from this quiet dissatisfaction with their lives.

As I started to begin a whole new growth path in my own career the last few years and moved into a role that required me to be able to coach, mentor and guide people through their professional and personal endeavours, I’ve been amazed at how much information is actually out there to support this journey these days. Countless books claiming to be the master of getting you what you want, podcasts, therapies, retreats, bodywork, breathwork, food plans, scientific research, spiritual research - it’s overwhelming, but it is actually all out there. Personally, I don’t believe there’s one winning school of thought, although I do favour a combination of a few methods I’ve found to work better than others with myself and my clients. But it’s only logical that it’s about different strokes for different folks. It’s my job to have plenty of these tools at my disposal so I can help my clients find whatever it is they’re really in search of using whatever practises work best for them individually. Because unfortunately, most people with full-time jobs or businesses to run, especially professionals with kids, don’t have the time or energy to go on an explorative journey that could last for years at a time (if they want lasting effects), to discover the true nature of the human spirit or how to find fulfilment and align with their higher purpose. It’s not realistic for most people. 

That’s where a coach comes in... the alternative of course is that you quit your job and go on your own journey of self-discovery, values, purpose and personal and professional growth. If you decide to take this path then get in touch so we can grab a coffee and compare notes! There’s plenty of room for more people in this field and it’s a beautiful (if sometimes extremely confronting) adventure! Assuming that for now, you’re after some of the highlights and not about to quit your job and uproot your life, here is just one of the fascinating things I’ve discovered.

First of all, purpose and fulfilment are not new-age or fluffy concepts that we’ve made up. It’s as old as time itself, which of course many ancient philosophies and religious texts teach us. In fact, it’s probably our abandonment of these principles and the rise of dogmatic institutions and economics that has landed us in this mess. We’ve always had a search for a higher purpose and meaning inside of us. And thanks to modern-day advances in scientific research, specifically neurobiology, and thanks to that neuroscientific research being so available to us now (here’s lookin’ at you, Andrew Huberman!) we’re beginning to be able to actually track this stuff in our brains and our nervous systems. And with that knowledge and understanding, we can begin to actively make choices that liberate us. As a professional coach and personal growth enthusiast, I was interested in learning about the neuroscience behind having goals and how we can maximise our brain’s potential for setting and achieving them effectively. I was shocked (or was I?!) when I discovered that a sense of purpose is baked right into the neurobiology of motivation and achieving our goals. Any goal. Like meeting our targets at work, getting a promotion or switching job roles altogether. So what does this sense of purpose actually look like in your brain when you’re trying to achieve something?

In the next and final post in this series, I’ll share the specific neurobiology behind having a sense of purpose, and how we really can actually find true meaning in our professional and personal lives, so we can lean into it and begin to understand what it actually means to lead with purpose.