Starting with purpose
Feb 07, 2025Purpose is the foundation stone for flourishing leadership. When we understand our purpose—that which we feel called to do—we come into relationship with an unlimited source of creativity, clarity, and collaborative potential.
How can we come to know something as mysterious as our purpose? One way to enter into our purpose is by retracing our biography. Doing so helps us identify life's meaningful events, our highs and lows, and our important relationships. How we experience these parts of our life give us clues into our purpose. Did a particular experience leave us feeling enlivened or drained? What inspired us to make a certain decision? What are we trying to learn through each experience? By taking our biography seriously, we can gain a sense for what it is that is pulling us through life.
When I ask people to share their life story, they often start with where they were born and background information about their family. They then launch into a chronological timeline of their work life, noting the organizations they've worked for and whether those roles resonated with them. Once they're finished, I ask them if there is anything else they want to add. At this point, they inevitably open up about more meaningful life events, like the passing of a family member, a crisis of identity, or a significant relationship.
These additional experiences help illustrate how our purpose lives throughout our life—professional and personal. This is important, because we often only talk about purpose at the group level—within the organizations we spend most of our day working for. That's important and a real thing, organizations have a purpose, too. But too often the focus on group purpose can obscure our own.
By starting with purpose, we bring our whole selves, with all of its energy, to every dimension of life: our self, our friends and family, our work colleagues, nature, and our creative source (however we define it). When we feel like we're whole, we're more likely to think contemplatively, creativity, and collaboratively in the world.
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