Grow With Soul Ep. 36: What Does Finding Purpose Really Look Like?
You know how people say that when you're thinking of buying a certain type of car you start to see that car everywhere? Well I'm getting that at the moment with purpose. In the week that my new product, The Purpose Kit is going live, and because of this i'm seeing it everywhere. Personally, I’m glad to see more people talking about purpose - it’s something the world could use a little more of all round. I think people are cottoning on to the fact that in an increasingly saturated market, you need more than pretty visuals to sustain a business. But I’m finding, and maybe you are too, that a lot of the conversation and resources around purpose are very conceptual - there’s a lot of theory, but not a lot of hard examples of what this could actually look like for you and your business. Purpose is a concept and very different for each individual. In this episode I wanted to bring purpose to life a little bit, to look at the concepts around purpose but to talk through how they've shown up for me in my business from the beginning and how I continue to use it, so that you can see how it works practically as well as conceptually
Here's what we talk about in this episode:
The Purpose Kit
The concept of Purpose
What is Purpose?
How I found my Purpose
The Three pillars of Purpose
Knowing your Why and your core Values
Having an impact and knowing your strengths
Underestimating ourselves
Understanding your Purpose
What fulfils you?
Links and resources we discuss:
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Read the episode transcript:
Hello and welcome to episode 36 of Grow with Soul. I’ve had a little bit of an unplanned, but also very necessary, break from the podcast over the last couple of weeks. I’ve been rethinking the structure a little bit and just feeling like it needed a bit of a change up, and a bit of variety to keep fresh. So today is a different kind of episode, and a sign of the way things are going to go; at least, I’m going to test to see how this way goes down.
So what I’m going to be doing from now on is to still retain the interview shows and the coaching shows, but have them go out fortnightly, and in between have shorter episodes with me, so less than half an hour, just solo shows talking through some key topics, having some pep talks, deep diving into things that I know people struggle with. And so, yes, this is the first one of this new style of episode.
Do let me know whether you hate it (preferably a DM rather than leave a review) but yeah let me know if this works for you, if it’s an improvement, if you prefer the old style of doing it. I’m hoping by interspersing these kind of shows in between it makes it more sustainable for me so I don’t have to take too many breaks because I’ve run out of guests to interview. Let’s get on with the show.
Today I wanted to talk about purpose. So you know how people say that when you’re thinking of buying a certain type of car you start to see that car everywhere? Well I’m getting that at the moment with purpose. In the week that my new product, The Purpose Kit is going live, and because of this I’m seeing it everywhere. Personally, I’m glad to see more people talking about purpose – it’s something the world could use a little more of all round. I think people are cottoning on to the fact that in an increasingly saturated market, you need more than pretty visuals to sustain a business. But I’m finding, and maybe you are too, that a lot of the conversation and resources around purpose are very conceptual – there’s a lot of theory, but not a lot of hard examples of what this could actually look like for you and your business. Purpose is a concept and very different for each individual. In this episode I wanted to bring purpose to life a little bit, to look at the concepts around purpose but to talk through how they’ve shown up for me in my business from the beginning and how I continue to use it, so that you can see how it works practically as well as conceptually.
Before we start off, let’s think a little bit about what purpose is. Like, why should I care? Perhaps it would be useful for me to say how I got into purpose and first found out about it, because it was actually, surprisingly, quite a long time ago. It must have been like 2014 or 2015, when I was in my first marketing job and it was my first marketing job I was being paid very little and I had absolutely no prior experience or knowledge whatsoever. Part of my contract is that I would go into training courses, so I went to this training course by a company called Emarketeers, which is actually quite good if you’re in-house and you want to learn about those kind of things. I can’t remember what the course was even about – it might have been about messaging, but in that course they showed us that Simon Sinek video which I now subsequently show to all of my clients, and so they explained purpose as a point from which your messaging can jump off from. And watching that video and seeing how from having a business purpose, everything else flows from that, everything clicked for me for marketing, for the first time, because I was in a situation possibly similar to the one you’re in now where I was reading all this stuff about it and none of it was linked together and you didn’t know what to prioritise. I was struggling with it, and as soon as I discovered the concepts of purpose, it all started to make sense as to how it all worked together.
So I went back to the office and I did a big presentation on it and everybody was like ‘heh’; they kind of let me go along and make up a purpose for the business but nobody really bought into it, which is fine, but it didn’t kind of put me off at all, I was like ‘nope, you’re wrong, I’m right’. I absolutely believed in that concept, and I used it in my own work, even if nobody else at the business was really using it. I used it for marketing work I was doing, and have continued to use it ever since. I have really developed it through each job that I’ve done, but particularly within my own business, and then teaching other people more and more it’s that I can’t not believe in it as the root of meaning and messaging in a business. I really see the difference it makes, not only to kind of the life of a business and the soul of a business and actually giving it a soul and a little bit of life in it, but also the people who have a purpose and have that as a yardstick to always go back to. I really see the difference in them and the confidence they’ve got to go forward and know what they’re doing and know their purpose and that everything will flow from there and it’ll all make sense to them. I’m a huge purpose convert.
If you look up a definition of purpose you’ll probably find loads of different ones. I’ve certainly found loads, particularly as I was researching this topic, but I’ve actually come up with my own, because none of the ones that I found really felt like what I understood purpose to be. And you know, this is just another example of why purpose is difficult to talk about, because no-one can even agree on a definition, because it means different things to different people. This is the definition that I work with and it’s the one that I work on through the kit.
For me, purpose is the coming together of what you believe, the impact you want to make in the world, and how you can feel most fulfilled.
So you need all three of those in order for your purpose to make sense. If you have one or the other it’s like a tripod; if you take one away, the whole thing falls down. You have to start with what you believe because the impact and your fulfilment are derived from that because they are your core values. If you’re just feeling fulfilled and you’re not making any impact, then no-one else is going to care, so you have to make sure there’s an impact that you’re making. Similarly, if you’re all impact, you’re all service and no fulfilment, that’s not sustainable, so again, the business will fall down. You need those 3 key parts in order to have a purpose that you can use not only for your business but also your whole life as well. They’re the 3 things that we cover in the kit, and that we’re going to cover in this episode.
WHAT DO YOU BELIEVE?
That core ‘why’, the beliefs you hold, the values you hold about the world are the driving force between the other two things; they’re like the very, very centre of your being. The work that fulfils you is derived from what you believe about the world and what your strengths are. The impact you want to have on the world is even more tightly linked to that, because you want to have an impact that helps your values be instilled in the world and helps you make a change.
I think this is the thing that everybody always gets really hung up on, and this is the thing that’s talked about probably the most – what’s your ‘why’? I’ve been there, like ‘I don’t know’, and you can feel almost bad for not having one. But you DO have one, it’s there, you maybe just don’t know how to articulate it, yes, and this is something that a lot of Simon Sinek’s work is based around is that this ‘why’ stuff, you understand it in the part of the brain that doesn’t control language. So you can know how it feels, but not know how to say it out loud. A lot of the work of this is to draw it out into language, so it’s all in there you just don’t know how to express it yet.
First of all, don’t panic, but also, I think because there’s so much razamataz about the ‘why’ out there, we think it has to be something really big and complex, when actually it’s remarkably simple; it’s actually kind of a very primal animal instinct, whereas the fluff around it comes out and kind of the values and things like that but your core ‘why’ can just be something really, really simple. For me, it’s freedom. That’s my core value, you know, that’s what I believe in – it’s that we need to find our own version of what freedom means to us and seize that and live that, whether that’s through a business, or a 9-5 job, whether it’s moving out to a farm in the middle of the country or whether it’s a penthouse apartment; whatever it is, it’s your version of freedom, that’s kind of the meaning of life for me anyway. So for me, that’s my very core ‘why’.
And then obviously that becomes more when you add values to it and how that should be expressed and things like that, that tends to complicate it, but that very basic thing in the middle is simple.
It’s quite often built from experience and how our experiences through life have shaped us and nature, nurture, all those things. When I think back to the hot summer that I was stuck in an office, I was working out my notice at my job before I went self employed, and my memories of that time are just having a head full of business. I was listening to podcasts during the day because I was doing some data entry stuff, I was going out for walks on my lunchtime and dreaming and daydreaming of things, and also, and kind of unintentionally, I was thinking a lot about what doing this meant in the broader scheme of things, and also what it was that I thought I was escaping from. What I mean by that was that I remember being conscious at the time of the feeling of almost a political act; to be going self employed. I was very conscious of the system that was at work in terms of not only employment, but in terms of big business and corporate political funding. This was 2017, so we were a year into Trump, a year into Brexit, and kind of knowing how horrifying both of those two things were, it really felt like an opportunity to be opting out of a system that wasn’t working. It was a chance to be contributing to a new system that was kind of bypassing ‘the man’, and was female led, and it was about all of us making a system where we worked for ourselves, we bought from each other, and didn’t buy into that broader, very masculine, very oppressive world order. Really, that’s about freedom, and it was about that feeling of freedom and that was really important to me for myself, but also for others. That’s what I wanted to see in the world, that’s what I believed the world needed, and so how the business developed really stemmed from that feeling.
THE IMPACT YOU WANT TO MAKE ON THE WORLD
This is something people really struggle with because no impact seems big enough, particularly in the world that we live in, where there are environmental, political, and humanitarian crisis every day, the world over. It feels like nothing is big enough to even consider pursuing, when there’s all these other things that are wrong with the world. And I totally get that, and it’s something that I think about too, but not every impact has to be world shattering. Little things have a domino effect. So you can make an impact on someone who makes an impact on someone else who makes an impact on someone else, and then suddenly the world’s a better place. So to really come to terms with what your impact is and accept that, and to believe in that, and believe in the power of it is really important.
Another part of why people struggle with this is that you have to admit that you have something to give. You have to admit that you have a strength that can benefit the world, that can benefit another human being, and that’s not comfortable for a lot of us. A lot of us have been told it’s not feminine, or it’s not the done thing, to accept yourself as being good at something, and so suppress that and to be modest and to shrug it off. To actually say ‘this is the impact I’m going to have on the world because I’m really good at this’ again is actually quite almost a political act of believing in yourself.
So they’re the two things we kind of need to navigate, and also that we underestimate ourselves in that, and we lose the human in the numbers. We think ‘oh wow, my mailing list has only got like 50 people on it and that person’s got 10K people on their list, so what’s the point?’ 50 people!? 50 people that you can actually have an impact on! And I know people say this all the time like ‘Ooh, imagine a room with 50 people in it’ and it can sound kind of annoying, but the numbers are nothing but ego. Don’t lose sight of the human impact that you can make, the impact on individual people that you can make, because when you think about it in those terms, it’s so much more inspiring than just chasing those numbers, and a number isn’t impact, a difference to a human being is. So to hold on to that, and god, I know it’s really difficult, and there are days where you’re going to feel bummed out about the numbers, and that’s fine, but on the whole, keep focused on the human impact.
Again, going back to my story and how that showed up for me is that I had that driving core ‘why’ of freedom, and so I started out wanting to make other people’s businesses grow. When I started out, I actually had like a million services. I had a whole load of coaching packages, and then I was going to do freelance marketing on this, and consulting on that, and I was going to be doing the work of making people’s businesses grow. But that wasn’t really playing best to my strengths, I’m much more of a thinker than I am a doer, and I realised that people want to grow their own businesses, they don’t want someone to come in and grow it for them, so that wasn’t the best impact I could be having on these people to help them achieve their freedom, their version of freedom. Me coming in and doing it for them wasn’t going to fulfil that purpose.
So over time, that impact has been refined, and so moving from wanting to practically do the work to grow the business, I was like ‘right, I’m going to teach people to do it’ and I got very into the things I was going to teach, and it was really practical and they were going to do this certain method of doing things. But then again it refined, and now I’m in a place where I realise the best impact I can have is on somebody’s belief in themselves to grow their business and their understanding of what’s possible.
What I’ve learned through working with people is that a lot of people know what they’re doing, they just don’t believe they’re allowed to do it, or they don’t believe that because they’ve thought it that it can be right, or the right way of doing things. I very much see that the impact I can have now, and the best thing that I can do is to give people the tools and the ideas, and let them create their own version of their marketing, their business, their freedom, their way of life; help them create from that. I guess all this to say that understanding your purpose in this way can take time; it takes trial and error, and that’s okay, and also to give it more thought than what’s obvious. I think this is something we see a lot where there’s almost trend based causes at the moment which is kind of easy to say ‘ooh yeah, I’m all about that’. But actually to dig deeper, keep digging deeper, keep practicing it and to be like ‘actually is this really where I best sit, where I best serve?’
In the kit we go into this more; I have a free worksheet if you sign up to my mailing list which is about finding your strengths and how they can be impactful, so if this is something you really struggle with, that worksheet might be really useful to you. When you think about impact, think about your strengths, accepting those strengths is a really good place to start off with because you can use those strengths to have value and be impactful.
WHAT WORK LIGHTS YOU UP? WHAT FULFILS YOU?
I say this in the kit – this time 12 months ago or even 6 months ago I would never have included this. I’d never have spoken about it, or thought it was important. But over the last couple of months, I’ve had a real turnaround and really learned that to be doing the work that you enjoy is the only way to sustainably continue to be impactful and to continue to deliver that belief and the value you want to have. It feels indulgent, it feels almost selfish, and that’s what my struggle with it has definitely been, but you can’t carry on doing stuff you don’t like doing, because at the end of the day you’re going to crash and burn out, it’s just not going to work. Whereas it’s not necessarily a ‘what’, but it’s more a ‘how’ actually, it’s not just the ‘what’ you do, it’s the ‘’how you do it, it’s what gets you out of bed everyday.
You know, helping other people to seize freedom doesn’t always get me out of bed everyday, but having a whole day free to write – sometimes that does. This is something we need to work on.
My example on this is very recent, and I kind of go into a blog post from a few months ago called Having an Identity Crisis in my Business, so this was something where I had a lot of revelations in a very short period of time, and I’d always considered my work to be just what I was doing to help other people, and then I had my friend Jessica; she referred to her work as in her body of work, what she stands for, what she talks about, and I was like ‘oh wait, work isn’t just a verb, it can be a noun, it can be the things that you do and why you do them, and the things that you enjoy’. So that was the first thing that got me thinking. Then I started to think about what would get me out of bed everyday. What are the things that I really enjoy about the work that I do? Starting to refine it down, I realised that the things I enjoy the most are sharing ideas, having a lot of variety, and having space and time around what I do, that’s what was really important to me. And then funnily enough at that time, those were the things that I’d really lost. I’d accidentally overbooked all my coaching, so I didn’t have any of that time space, didn’t really have any variety actually, because it was just wall to wall coaching, and yeah, so I was really missing those key things that really lit me up about the work that I did.
That was really where I started to realise I was probably going through a bit of burnout at the end of last year, and I kind of hit on that that was why; I was lopsided in my purpose. I had why I was doing it, I’ve had an impact, but my fulfilment was lost in that, and I was not able to continue to sustain giving that impact, and that I needed to add some fulfilment into it.
And this is something I see all the time with clients actually, particularly the ones that start with ‘I don’t want to do this anymore, this isn’t filling me up, I don’t want to do it, I want to go and do something else’ and a couple of times, well, quite a few times actually, clients have actually circled back to the thing they did in the first place. Because that work did fill them up, it’s just the context in which they were doing it didn’t fill them up. So that’s something to think about; what your priorities are, what you enjoy the most about your work. And really hold onto them, because that’s going to really define your business, and it might mean that the thing that you do is completely different, or the thing that you do is exactly the same. So as an example, say you’re a designer, rather than doing client work 1-2-1, maybe you create assets and sell them on Etsy. It’s the same kind of work, just in a more fulfilling context. It’s the same with me, it’s the same kind of work, it’s still teaching and coaching and creating content, but the context is that there’s less of it but better of it, and it’s channelled in different ways in terms of what fills me up.
They’re the three pillars, your three little legs of the tripod of purpose. It’s difficult, I don’t want to say that it’s not difficult, I don’t want to say that there’s a magic wand that says ‘buy this and you’re going to have your purpose straight away’. It takes work, it takes different levels or work for different people, your entry point is going to be different, but it’s so worth it, it makes everything so much easier, everything flows so much better and you feel that you’re doing work that fulfils you, you feel like you’re having an impact, and you’re doing things in alignment with yourself and what you believe.