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Pierre Basson

Executive Coach and Profitability Expert, helping business leaders to find and leverage their Sweet Spot in business and life. Zoning you in on what produces your best results with least effort - at all times. Creator of the 7 Secret Sweet Spots in Life book.
May
06

Finding Life Purpose in Business

By Pierre Basson - Business Profitability Consultant · Comments (1)

Nice to have you back again! Sign up for my free newsletter and 7 Business Sweet Spot Report. Thanks for visiting!

Finding life purpose has several aspects. Firstly, knowing what is important to you, secondly knowing the contexts in which you want to express your purpose, and thirdly having a sense of direction to guide you. These ingredients are wrapped up in a clear concise personal mission statement. This captures a vision that inspires and guides you to the most fulfilling business career you can have.

So let’s start in the beginning shall we…

What is the point of finding life purpose?

It is nothing short of an answer to the age old question, ‘what is the meaning of life’. It may not be the answer but it is an answer!

It is our personal answer to this poignant question, that informs our desire to do something that really matters with our life. Remember though that your mission is a journey not a goal. It is not something that you can and must achieve so much as something that you are, and something that you can be experiencing every moment of your life.

Who do you want to Be?

Some of us only experience this clarity for brief moments in our lives. In athletics or music or art or drama it has been described as being in flow, being in the moment or being in the zone. It’s hitting the sweet spot, that place of seemingly effortless peak performance. It’s that sensation of being completely aware of and connected to everything around you. It feels almost timeless or seeing life in slow motion.

Finding your life purpose for business has both an inner and an outer component. Looking inward you discover and incubate value. The external things you do and have are the specific context in which you choose to live out your inner purpose. This context is your outer purpose, this is where by looking outside yourself you discover powerful perspective on yourself and all around you.

Your values and principles are your essence, and together with your passions define what it means to be you. Becoming aware of your own true core values is critical when it comes to finding and living out your mission. Your values are define what is most important, and hence most meaningful to you. From this meaning you can draw inspiration, significance and motivation for daily life.

What do you want to Achieve?

Your vision for your life will determine what you consciously do to live out your values. It is possible to live out your set of values in many different vocations. The prison guard, the artist and the engineer can all do ‘love’. However, if your passions and talents lie in being a artist then you will not be fulfilled by doing an engineering career.

I like what Nick Williams says,
“Our true purpose and vocation lies where we find the intersection of our gifts and talents and the needs of the world and our fellow beings”

It is likely that you are already using some of your talents and gifts. Stop and survey yourself to find where you are currently most talented and most passionate. Think and write down all the ways you can think of to express these in ways that touch the needs of the world. Wherever you meet a need you can earn a reward, financial or otherwise.

* What are you really talented at?
* What comes to you easily? Skills? Understandings? Knowledge?
* What are you most passionate about?
* People come to you for what? Advice? Care? Motivation? Action? Perspective?
* Would you still want to do what you are doing, if you had to do it for free?
* In what ways can you contribute the most? Money? Service? Leadership?

Trying to follow your life purpose in an unsuitable business career will leave you frustrated, and drained of energy. To take back you life, you will need to identify the contexts favorable to living out your life purpose.

What do you want to Have?

The next vital ingredient in your life purpose is about setting direction.

Maxwell Maltz said of goal directed living … “A bicycle maintains its poise and equilibrium only as long as it is going forward towards something. In the same way, we are engineered as goal-seeking mechanism. We find no real satisfaction or happiness in life without big obstacles to conquer and meaningful goals to achieve.”

Career objectives are targets to move towards, they provide a sense of direction. These are about the stuff you want to have. An important boundary element of goal setting is to ensure that you define the conditions under which the goal is to be achieved. Which values you are pursuing and which values you will not violate en route, and what you are willing to sacrifice to get there.

You may want to start or lead a big corporation but you may not like the impact on your home-life. Finding life purpose needs a big picture focus. When your values and talents are aligned the resulting life goals will both inspire and fulfill you.

Creative visualization is a helpful method for designing your career. This way you can “try on” your goals and “see” how well they fit, before you commit to them. If after a while they lose their appeal, they were probably not truly aligned with your values and abilities.

Setting the right goals and then facilitating their achievement will give you a clear sense of direction. As each goal is reached, keep setting new ones, using to the same criteria. Your Life Purpose momentum will grow and your mission will become more and more believable and achievable.

Unifying Your Life Purpose

People interact with their lives on three levels. 1) What they are, 2) what they do, and 3) what they have. We all are “being, doing and having” all the time. Their is no one that supersedes the other, we must be all three at once.

Finding your life purpose is a continuous process of optimizing and harmonizing these three areas. The development of this is more a step by step evolution rather than a nice curve. Keep growing in self-knowledge on each level, continually refining your mission statement.

Don’t miss this important final step. The doing process of taking your vision and committing it to paper is incredibly powerful. It produces clarity, narrows your focus and energizes your commitment to achieve a fulfilling career. Discover more about finding life purpose . It is fundamental to the pursuing a rewarding career in any business.

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Categories : Million Dollar Story, Positioning, Sweet Spot
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May
02

How to Define Your Life Purpose 2

By Pierre Basson - Business Profitability Consultant · Comments (1)

So How do You Intelligently Define Your Life Purpose

I’m going to suggest two different processes for locating your life purpose. Ideally you can use both of them, since each one will help you understand the different aspects of your purpose. Warning – this is going to be a lot of work for you, but the end result will be worth it because you’ll eventually reach a point of powerful clarity. Then it will be far easier to make lasting decisions and take strong action, and you’ll find that your life just seems to work effortlessly once you know and are living in line with your purpose.

If you missed the first process go to How to Intelligently Define Your Purpose 1

Process 2: Rational Intelligence

The second process is to use your reason and logic to work back from your context. The clearer and more accurate your context is observed, the easier this will be. It basically works like this.

To identify your purpose, you basically project your entire context of reality onto yourself. Given your current understanding of your reality, where do you fit in to it? If you buy into the social context that most people seem to, this will be virtually impossible. Social contexts don’t provide sufficient clarity for accurate feedback. At best you may end up with a wishy-washy purpose statement that addresses the basics like making money, having friends, having a family, and being nice to people, but there won’t be much authentic substance to it. If you gave it to someone else to review it, they might come away impressed, but not knowing you any better – it’s too general.

It works like this, and there are no shortcuts
Fuzzy context = fuzzy projection = fuzzy purpose.
Clear context = clear projection = clear purpose.

My context of reality is linked to seeing life as a growth process, then when I project this context onto myself, the result is very simple — I’m a vital participant in the process of my own growth and change.

This is such a simple approach that it’s so easy to miss. In essence you’re really just looking at your overall context of life and projecting those same qualities back onto yourself. This projection becomes your purpose, your true identity, your role in reality.

Imagine a hologram. When you cut off a piece of a hologram, the entire original image is still contained within the smaller piece. Reality is the big hologram, and you’re a piece of it. You inherit all the properties of a bigger reality. Your beliefs about reality become your beliefs about yourself. If your beliefs are accurate and accurately match your environment then, you’ll end up with a sensible, and achievable purpose.

This process will also help you identify problems in your own context because you’ll then notice that something is wrong when you project a false belief onto yourself. It simply does not fit, it does not feel authentic.

For instance, let’s suppose your context of how reality works is whatever the Catholic Church teaches. The result is that when you project this context on yourself, you find that your purpose is to serve God, obey the Church in religious matters, and to strive to be like Jesus, as proclaimed by church leadership.

If you have a null context of reality (nihilism), you get a null purpose. When you project nothing onto X, you get nothing.

If you don’t like the purpose you end up with when applying this method, then what you’re really saying is that you don’t like the context you’re using. This is a conflict you’ll need to resolve. You must either accept the context and the purpose that accompanies it, or you must change the context.

Blending the Two Methods

I think it’s helpful to use both methods for defining your purpose, and then see where they lead you. If your context is sound, you should get similar answers from both of these two approaches. Your emotional and rational intelligences will each phrase your purpose differently though, but you should see that it’s essentially two sides of the same answer. But most of the time that won’t be the case, and the answers will be different, which tells you that your context is incongruent. What this means is that you rationally think about reality in one way, but you emotionally feel it in another way. Perhaps you hold religious beliefs but only apply them sporadically — they aren’t fully integrated across your entire life. You may feel that in your heart that your beliefs are really true, but you don’t think the same about them in your head. In this case you will have to identify the difference, the gap, figure out where it lies, and work on it until you can get both thought and emotions to match or you can find the one that clearly dominates. Use your consciousness to listen to both the emotional side and the rational side, and then be like a negotiator between them, listening in and asking the tough questions of each.

For example, if emotionally you feel that your life purpose is to become an artist or musician, but rationally you think that you should be serving specific people in need, you have to work through this discrepancy by reviewing what your context or surroundings are telling you about it. Remember that your own context is a collection of your beliefs about reality. When you experience a specific conflict like this, it usually reveals a gap in your context, a fuzzy space that you haven’t clarified yet. For instance, you may discover that you have mixed feelings towards the intrinsic value of art and music. You see them as serving people, but another part of you perceives them as a waste of time compared to other pursuits – unproductive. You’ll have to referee over these views.

At this point your purpose is likely to be very abstract and high-level, so in my next post we’ll explore how to break it down into goals, projects, and actions.

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Categories : Positioning, Sweet Spot
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