PURPOSE AND FULFILLMENT
PURPOSE
Purpose is how we are personally motivated to create value. While we all generate purpose from a wide range of sources, people tend to have specific preferences in how they find purpose based on their own psychological profile.
Your personal purpose, often articulated in a purpose statement, has three drivers.
- Who do you want to impact? Based on our psychological profile, we gain meaning from making an impact at different elevations - individual, organization, or society.
- Why do you want to make an impact? Our motivation to make an impact is based on our core values which drive how we see a just or fair world. Do seek to cultivate harmony or karma?
- How do you make an impact? Based on our talents, we different approaches to solving problems and making an impact. Our purpose is about using these abilities to make an impact in every part of our lives.
Purpose is not about a cause. It is about your intrinsic motivations, talents, and values. Your purpose can therefore be applied to any goal, job, or role. In other words, purpose is a verb, not a noun.
FULFILLMENT
Fulfillment is a feeling people have when we are living with a sense of purpose, in alignment with our intrinsic motivations. The feeling is biologically generated by the neurochemicals oxytocin and dopamine, which reward behaviors that we have evolved to value for our survival.
To be fulfilled we need to use our personal purpose to crafting our lives to optimize for the three sources of fulfillment.
- You have meaningful relationships.
- You’re making an impact that matters to you.
- You’re growing as a person.
If those three are occurring and you have the space to recognize them, that creates a sense of fulfillment.
DEVELOPING PURPOSE
Purpose Mindset
The greatest predictor of fulfillment at work that we have found is Mindset. A Purpose Mindset is a set of beliefs that enable us to optimize our lives to be fulfilled and in services to people and the planet.
People with a Purpose Mindset believe:
- Work and school can be meaningful and valuable parts of our lives.
- Work is a place we seek to make a positive impact in the world.
People with a Transactional Mindset believe:
- Work and school are a means to an end - to make money and/or prove ourselves.
- School and work are places where we secure our financial and social status in the world.
Purpose Mindset can be cultivated in people, but becomes much harder to change once a Transactional Mindset takes hold.
Self-Awareness: Knowing Our Purpose
People who know what fulfills them are far more likely to be fulfilled. The greater your awareness about your purpose, the more proactive you can be in crafting your life.
We create meaning when we connect our experiences to feelings, patterns, and insights about ourselves. If you don’t process and store experiences, they not only fail to produce meaning, they likely just deplete you. In the end, you become burnt out. Connecting your experiences converts them into energy that fuels us the next day and beyond.
When we are aware of our purpose, it creates what psychologists call, scaffolding. It is a means for more easily connecting an experience to something meaningful to you and being able to relate it to other experiences.