If you are questioning your career choices and not in love with your job right now, you are far from alone. The great resignation is well documented but you don't need to push the nuclear button to back get your work mojo.
Starting with why and connecting to your purpose are all the rage at the moment but there are great reasons for that. Having an idea of your purpose in life and how it connects to your work is crucial to feeling motivated and can bring a whole host of benefits.
And if you can't or don't want to change your job at the moment, being clear on your purpose can allow you to reconnect with your current work and open up huge possibilities for enjoying it more.
Defining your purpose
Take a moment to answer these three simple questions:
What do you do?
Who do you do it for?
How do they benefit?
That's your purpose statement and it brings together your skills and abilities, the people you serve and the impact you have on the world - these all core elements of of a meaningful purpose. Lots of companies frame their purpose in this way and it works for people too.
You can see my purpose in the opening lines of the bio on my website. If you want a bit inspiration watch Adam Leipzig's excellent TED Talk on the topic. I genuinely advise taking the 5 minutes needed to have a go at this and see what you create. Even a scratchy first effort will be an enlightening experience. One tip, frame your purpose clearly but keep it broad - it's not an expression of your job, it's the deeper underlying why.
How does knowing my purpose help?
I believe knowing your purpose, or getting closer and clearer to what you believe it is, brings a huge number of practical benefits. Here are just a few.
Options and choice
When you can cast a clear purpose for your life and work, lots more options open up for how to achieve it. If my purpose is to educate the young to transform their life chances, I can be a teacher, but I can also find huge number of avenues outside the classroom to do that.
As well as options, you now have a way of choosing between opportunities that come your way. Each time you can ask, does this serve my purpose or does it distract? Letting go of something is hard, but it's a lot easier if you have firm conviction of why it's right or wrong for you.
You can also start to see ways to evolve your current work or role to build in more of what speaks to your real purpose. A frustrated accounted may realise their purpose is to make sure under-represented groups have access to the funds and resources they need - they can start to look for the people right next to them who need what they you can offer.
Making the drudgery enjoyable
Mastery of anything requires a lot of hard, often unglamorous work - the drudgery of preparation, practice and administration. If you find these things less enjoyable and avoid them your performance and ultimate enjoyment of what you do will suffer.
By framing each one as building block to achieving your overarching purpose you can find a greater love for these things. This can also allow you to fall back in love with your current work. A conscious choice to see drudgery as a critical part of achieving your purpose can bring back that loving feeling.
Dealing with setbacks and failures
One of the things you will notice about a well crafted purpose is that it is directed towards other people. It's important to enjoy what you do, and being great at it also helps, but I believe it will start to feel hollow if you don't have a purpose that connects you to the rest of the world in a deeper way.
It's this aspect of purpose that brings an inner drive of intrinsic motivation that keeps you going when things get tough. I am realistic that providing financially for yourself and others has to come first, but bringing that together with a purpose delivering something the world needs is a recipe for long term success and motivation.
If you want to go deeper on that, Susan Wolf's short book Meaning in Life and What it Matters may be a really useful and thought provoking read.
And finally...
What if you take a good look at what you do, who you do it for and how they benefit and you don't like it? Or you can see a big gap between what do you do now and what you want to do?
This is a good thing - you have take a really important step in bringing yourself closer to making your unique and powerful contribution to the world.
If you are in position to start making some changes you can start to look for ways of getting more of the right work in to your life, or even think about changing your line of work entirely.
If major changes aren't possible right now, I would advise looking for the small ways you can start to align your daily activities to your purpose - both in work and outside - giving thanks for each small victory along the way. And when the time is right to make a bigger shift, you now have a much clear idea of what is gong to work for you.
Pinnacle Coaching and Development is a specialist career, leadership and personal development business. Contact me to find out more.
コメント