Brought to you by Jeff Thoren, DVM, ACC  

More and more people are asking themselves where they’re going, what they’re going to do with the rest of their lives, and what really matters to them.

Success in life is often measured in external ways, but there's an internal measure of success, and it's called fulfillment. Fulfillment comes from realizing your talents, adding value and living by your values. Fulfillment comes from integrity, from being who you are and expressing who you are as fully as possible. It doesn't have to do with your job description or the specifics of your work. It has to do with how you bring yourself to your work, regardless of what that work is.

Are you living and deciding on purpose? In this edition of our newsletter, we’ll look at some practical guidelines for making purposeful decisions.

Here’s this month’s feature ...

Are You Deciding On Purpose by Alan M. Webber

An extended interview with author, coach and consultant, Richard Leider - Fast Company, Issue 13, January 1998

Highlights from the article:

• Answer these two questions, and answer them honestly: What do you want? And how will you know when you get it? Your answers will help you evaluate what’s really important to you, what you’re really committed to, and why? Your answers will also help you with the answer to one more important question: Are you willing to pay the price and do the hard work required to achieve your goals?
    

• Know and express your gifts and talents. Everyone has some unique talent, something within them that they have to contribute. The healthiest senior citizens continue to explore their gifts and abilities, long after they’ve left the workplace.
    

• Answer the ultimate question. The ultimate question is, What is your vision of the good life? In this culture, there's a tendency to talk about the good life in consumerist terms. It's all external. We measure the good life by the car we drive, the Scotch we drink, the designer brand we wear, the community we live in. Rather than having the outside world create it for you, the good life should be defined from the inside out. It involves four elements:

1. Living in a place where you feel you belong

2. Being with the people you love

3. Having relationships that are working - including your relationship with yourself

4. Doing work you believe in, in an environment that fits who you are

• Use this formula for good career decisions. Here’s a very simple formula that lays out the critical factors to consider when you're making a career choice: T + P + E x V.

T stands for talent, and it's where you should begin. Very simply, the questions are, What are your strengths and weaknesses? How can you focus on your strengths and manage your weaknesses? Most people aren't using their talents. They didn't choose their career; their career chose them.

P stands for passion, or for purpose. Talents develop best in the context of interest. Put your talents to work on some area of need that you believe in. Choosing your work is your chance to do something more meaningful than getting up in the morning, putting in your time, doing what it takes to pay the bills.

E stands for environment: What work environment best suits your style, your temperament, your values? Make sure you are working in an environment that permits you to truly express yourself.

V stands for vision - how you see the rest of your life. Talent, purpose, and environment are all about work style and work choice. Vision describes how work fits into the rest of your life. Where do you want to live? How much money is enough? How important are your relationships? What are you doing to stay healthy?

• Make your decisions the way senior citizens wish they had. Senior citizens who are asked to look back over their lives and talk about what they’ve learned will, almost without exception, share the same things.  If they could live their lives over again ...

1. They would be more reflective. They got so caught up in the doing, they say, that they often lost sight of the meaning. Usually it took a crisis for them to look at their lives in perspective and try to reestablish the context. Looking back, they wish they had stopped at regular intervals to look at the big picture.

2. They would take more risks. In relationships, they would have been more courageous. And in expressing their creative side, they would have taken more chances. Oliver Wendell Holmes said, "Most of us go to our graves with our music still inside us." Many of these people felt that, despite their successes, their music was still inside them. Almost all of them said that they felt most alive when they took risks. Just being busy from business made them numb. Aliveness came with learning, growing, stretching, exploring.

3. They would understand what really gave them fulfillment. That’s the power of purpose: doing something that contributes to life, adding value to life beyond yourself. Purpose is always outside yourself, beyond your ego or your financial self-interest.

  
For the full text article, go to ...
http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/13/ldrplus.html

   
Are You Working On Purpose?

What does meaningful work mean to you? How important is it for you to do work that is meaningful to you? Your score on the following quiz gives you an idea of your current power of purpose at work.

For each of the statements below, rate how true it is for you. A “5” means you strongly agree that statement describes you while a “1” means you strongly disagree.

1. I wake up most Mondays feeling energized to go to work.

2. I have deep energy - feel a personal calling - for my work.

3. I am clear about how I measure my success as a person.

4. I use my gifts to add real value to people’s lives.

5. I work with people who honor the values I value.

6. I speak my truth in my work.

7. I experience true joy in my work.

8. I make a living doing what I most love to do.

9. I speak my purpose in one clear sentence.

10. I go to sleep most nights feeling that “this was a well-lived day.”

*Source: Richard Leider's Power of Purpose Quiz available at www.inventuregroup.com

 
Next Month

Management and leadership books are naturally preoccupied with the search for behaviors, tools, techniques, and practices that can be exported and imitated elsewhere. However, organizational excellence tends not to be a function of imitation. It tends to be a function of origination. We are all invited to enter the fundamental state of leadership - a creative personal state that gives rise to a creative collective state, i.e. a productive community.

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