Introducing Purpose and Fulfillment

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Welcome to the Fulfilled Leader Podcast , the podcast to strengthen your emotional resilience and find fulfillment at work . I'm your host , jean Balfour , master Certified Coach , with over 5,000 hours one-to-one and tens of thousands of hours in groups . I've coached incredible leaders like you to overcome their biggest work challenges and go on to lead resiliently , finding the type of fulfillment they never knew possible . They are leaders people want to work for and organizations want to hire . In this podcast we have conversations about the psychological and emotional struggles of leadership . You're going to hear neuroscience , psychology , leadership models and evidence-based approaches that all have an impact in helping you be a resilient and fulfilled leader . Every week , you learn ideas and tools that will shift the way you lead and live your life , making change possible . Let's start the show . Hello and welcome to the Fulfilled Leader .

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After four years of the podcast and over a hundred episodes in the coming weeks , I'm revisiting some of the most listened to episodes . I've revised and updated them and I'm re-recording them , and I'm starting with a refreshed Finding your Purpose episode , which people still go back and listen to four years after it was first released . I'm personally fascinated by the idea of purpose and I have been for a very long time . I guess it's part of being a coach , but I also think it's part of my own personal journey . It's because work is so important to me and I'm keenly focused on finding ways to be fulfilled myself and to support others to be fulfilled in work and leadership , and so the very first episode of this podcast was on purpose back in 2021 . And , as I've said , it's one of the most listened to episodes , so it looks like I'm not alone in being curious about purpose . We are , I believe , keen to work out how to be fulfilled at work and aligned with our purpose . In this episode , I'll share new insights and thoughts I have about purpose and I'll revisit some of the steps

My Personal Purpose Journey

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from the first episode . This is a practical episode with different strategies and ideas to help you with your own purpose and fulfillment at work , and these you can use for yourself , but you can also use them with people in your team in your role as a leader .

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Over the last 10 , 20 years , there's been a lot of talk about how we need to know our purpose and we need to be doing work aligned with our purpose , and for some of us , this has been a very natural , easy process , and for some of us it's been a much harder process and it feels a bit vague , a bit hard to work out , a bit of a mystery maybe , and many of you , as leaders , have headed off into your career feeling a passion and drive , wanting to help others to be their best , wanting to lead and grow an organization , but this can get lost in pressure Suddenly . You wonder if this is what it's all about . I've coached many leaders at this pivotal moment , helping them to get back , get back to their core and to reimagine their leadership . We go back and do what we're going to do today and focus on what really matters , making sure that there are moments in every day where this is expressed . So here's a little bit of my own journey .

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I've spent most of my working life in people development and helping people grow , helping people to be more effective leaders and to be more effective colleagues to have more satisfaction in their work , and I've always known that underneath it there was some sense of purpose about personal growth mine and others . But in 2020 , I had a major period of burnout and it led to mild depression and got me really thinking about how I might personally be misaligned with my core purpose and in that moment that some of the reason that I was at burnout was in burnout was because I was out of what I would describe as my lane , and I'm going to talk a bit more about that . I was in somebody else's lane . I was doing somebody else's version of what my purpose in my life was . So I did a lot of exercises and a lot of activity around really circling back to think is there a core purpose for me ? And if I got more aligned with my core purpose , what would my working life be like and how would this impact my energy and my mental health ? And a very curious thing emerged as I went on this journey , and that was that I realized ultimately , my core purpose is what I was doing when I was younger . So when I was about 14 , I was quite young I declared to the world that I was going to be a teacher , a primary school teacher , and that is in fact what I did .

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I left school at 17 . I went to teacher's college . I didn't go to university and by the time I was 20 , I had a classroom of 37-year-olds , which was exhausting and hard work , I can tell you , and I taught little kids for five years and during that time I began to think this is okay , but it feels like there's something missing . And then I got asked to do a bit of teacher training and discovered a whole world of working with adults . That was just new and really exciting . I really enjoyed it . It was after the school day . I was running classes , so it was the end of a tiring day , and yet I noticed I had energy for it and the people who came seemed to enjoy it . They were also at the end of a tiring , long teaching day and they came and they kept coming every week and they brought people with them and the group size kept growing and I was like I think there might be something here for me . And so I left teaching and moved into learning and development roles and then leadership roles in organizations and found my way to an ex-co role in a large healthcare organization and then , through a series of moves , realized I was again too far away from something . I was too far away from teaching and helping people grow , and so I moved back into consultancy nearly 25 years ago to run leadership programs and to coach .

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When I was having this crisis back in 2020 , I realized again that actually I'm still a teacher and that if I began to filter all of what I'm doing through the teaching filter , the coaching filter . There might be some things in my job that I would stop doing so . For example , I run a small business . I would look for ways for other people to work in the business , to run that business , because that might be part of what was draining me , and I would look for more ways to teach , which I guess is what I'm doing right now . So I made some changes back then . Things got better and then last year again , I still felt that I wasn't quite right . And in the past 12 months I've done another refresh and check in on my purpose still the same , still teacher and coach , that's clear . But I made some different decisions , as I've talked about in the podcast , to get closer to my core , really closer to coaching , closer to working with people in groups , and I actually said to my partner last night I think I'm back in my lane and I feel great . So what I want to do here is to share some insights about how you can do that , what it means , and then exercises to help you get on that journey .

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But before we

Understanding Purpose and Alignment

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do that , there's a few things to explore . So let's start with . What are we meaning by purpose and fulfillment , and how does this land with us ? I think for me , purpose is really about knowing the reason we do something . I think it's as simple as that . It's understanding a little bit about our why , and it might be about doing things that fit our strengths and fit our values , as Simon Sinek , of course , wrote in his book Start With why . Looking at organizations , he saw that having a clear sense of purpose in an organization actually impacted the bottom line . They were more profitable , and I think there's an alignment for us with our working lives as well . If we can find ways to get our work more aligned with our purpose , then I believe that we can be more fulfilled , more energized , have a lot more fun and , ultimately , be more successful . We're also more motivated about our work when we have purpose .

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I love Daniel Pink's work about motivation , and he identified three things as being fundamentally key to motivation at work . One was autonomy , that was the ability to direct our work ourselves . The second is mastery , which is about growth , and the third was purpose , and for him , in this case , purpose was about how the things that I do , that I'm doing every day , align with the team . I'm in how the team connects with the organization and how we understand our overall why , but I believe that that's true for us as individuals as well , that if we have our own sense of why , we have our own sense of our value and our purpose and our role , then that can help us to bring about greater fulfillment . And so , for me , that , then , is really about alignment . How does my role , how does the work I'm doing , align with who I am , what I enjoy and what I sense my values and strengths are and , ultimately , my purpose ? And I kind of think about this as being in my lane .

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So if you think about yourself in a running race not that I would do much running , I'm a swimmer but anyway , if you think about yourself in a running race , you want to be in your lane . It's easy to run if you're in a lane because nobody's in your way . I know , if I'm running , where my destination is and I can run with ease . But if I move out of my lane , if I'm in somebody else's lane , I'm bumping into people and I'm having to concentrate really hard on where I'm going and where I am now in order to stay on track , and there's a lot of energy exerted there , of me not being in my lane , whereas if I'm in my lane , I can be in flow and I can be in that place of doing what it is I'm meant to be doing . I can run the race without worrying about others . I can run the race the way I want to . So it's really a way of getting into the zone of work or the way of life that we want to be in . That helps us to be fulfilled , and this really matters , because when we do things that fulfill us , they're aligned with our purpose , we are fed , we have more energy and we're generally happier human beings .

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There's a very beautiful book written by Stephen Cope called the Great Work of your Life , in which he explores the concept of Dharma . Of course , the term Dharma comes out of spiritual teachings , the idea of vocation , and in this book he talks about how we can find our purpose , our Dharma , but that it's not necessarily a step-by-step thing or a leap . He suggests we get there through an iterative journey , that with each role , with each part of our life , we can explore what fits with our sense of fulfillment and purpose and what's out of alignment , and that we can keep adjusting , we can keep seeing ah okay , so if I do this , maybe I'll be more in my lane . If I do that , maybe I'm out of my lane and that over time it becomes clearer and clearer . And that's because it's a series of action and reflection , trying things out and then reflecting , seeing how they go . So we might have to try things out and move forward into those things , see if this is our lane , see how it's working , and then maybe we need to try something else , and it's the expression of this that will help us to work it out and that , of course

Finding Your Lane in Leadership

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, might change over time . So what is my lane ? My version of teaching and coaching now is actually different to what I was doing 20 years ago . The core is still there , but the expression of it is different , and that might be true for us in our leadership .

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I think there's a couple of caveats about purpose that I think it's important to share . The first is that purpose can seem to be something very grand . However , for many people , it will actually be something quiet . It could be that my purpose is actually to be a servant leader , to create conditions for others to thrive , or to be a talented problem solver within an organization . I once heard Elizabeth Gilbert share a story about how she saw a man up a ladder and she became concerned that he would fall . And she went and stood and held the ladder without him even noticing until he came down , and she suggested that we may have become so fixated on purpose that we've made it too big and that maybe her purpose in life was to hold that ladder that day . I love this . Maybe our purpose is something quietly expressed .

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The second is that we might become very clear about our purpose and know there's no way that we can align our working life with this . For very practical reasons , we may not be able to move jobs , for family reasons , for geographical reasons . It may be that the only way we can earn a living is to do the jobs that are available to us and that we need to do those jobs , and that there can be a real level of discomfort , especially if we're in a job that doesn't align with our purpose . We can see our purpose over there and we think how do I deal with this disconnect ? And actually I think this happens to most of us at some stage in our working lives . We end up in a job that's not quite right , that's not aligned with our values or our strengths and we still have to stay in it for a bit and work out what to do , and I think this is where we can frame it as looking for fulfillment at work . For me , fulfillment is about alignment and inner satisfaction that comes when our work reflects our values or our strengths and it's contributing to something greater .

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So if we're in this moment where we feel this is really out of alignment , we can look for tiny ways to express our purpose , and if work is not meeting our needs , we can look for ways in the weekends or the evenings maybe , or if you've got time , do a bit of voluntary work or put some creativity into finding things , and we can look for ways to do it even within our job , in small ways . As a leader , this might be seeking out moments where you can express your values , even if they feel misaligned with the organisation , or you can use your strengths . You can find small ways to do it , because knowing that you've got at least small places of work that feeds you in every day will help . I mean , a simple example of this might be that you're under so much pressure that you're finding it very hard to lead as a relational leader , so make time every day to have a conversation with a team member , even if you've both got too much to do . So I think if we're not aligned with our purpose in our role , we can look for little ways to be in our lane whilst we're there . They may be for a long time , so we might have to be very creative about how we do that and , at the same time , think about how do we bring about change if that's going to be possible .

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The other thing is that knowing our purpose doesn't mean that life will suddenly become easy and straightforward . I heard an interview on a podcast with Leanne Mariotti , who wrote Big Little Lies and many , many other novels . So she's a writer , she knows her purpose and she loves it , and yet she still has to make herself sit down at her laptop by using methods that make her do it , like setting a timer , having little rewards at the end of the session , and so here she is doing a job she absolutely loves , is incredibly good at , and she still has to make herself do it . So knowing our purpose doesn't mean that there won't be areas that we need to have discipline in and that we need to make sure things are done . It doesn't make life all easy . It just means that when I'm in my lane , even if I'm running hard , I know I'm in my lane .

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What can we do about becoming clear about it ? As I've said , I think it's an iterative process and that involves action and reflection , and I'm going to share with you a few of the things that I've done

Practical Exercises to Discover Purpose

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that have really helped and that have helped the clients I've worked with . The first is an energy audit , noticing our energy , and you can do this over a few days or over a couple of weeks . At the end of each day , look back and notice when your energy was low and when you felt drained , and when your energy was high and you were being fed , and these can be good indicators about what we're drawn to and you were being fed , and these can be good indicators about what we're drawn to . You can ask questions like when did I feel most energetic , creative , alive ? Now , be careful about the 2 to 4 pm slot , because most of us have a bit of an energy dip during that period . But notice other times of the day . So think about your best time of the day , when you have the most energy , and think about are there times when you are increasing your energy during that period or times when you're being drained , and what is it that you're doing ?

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So , for example , I know that preparing for the podcast and doing this is something that I can get completely lost in , because I really enjoy it and I get into the content , thinking about what I want to say . It's a high energy thing for me . I feel good about doing it . It's teaching , so I guess it's in my lane . But if I spent a day doing my accounts , you can be rest assured that I would be tired and drained and not feeling great , because I don't believe that working in financial planning and accounting is my lane . I know and love many people for whom it is their lane and that is where they get their energy and focus and are really happy . So it's about for each of us finding what's giving us energy . Where is it helping us to feel alive ?

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The next is an exercise that I learned from Martha Beck , who's a life coach and author , and she talks about taking the idea of 10,000 hours . Many of you will have read Malcolm Gladwell's work about the idea that if we do something for 10,000 hours that we become really skilled at it , but she talks about doing this in retrospect . So looking back at things that you've done in your life for 10,000 hours which for me , because I'm older , is easy , but if you're younger you might want to take 5,000 hours or 2,000 hours and because often they're things that we're choosing to do , the things that we're drawn to do , they can hold some clues about our purpose . So I did this exercise and three things emerged , one of which surprised me actually . The first was teaching . That was obvious . I spent so much of my life teaching that it seems pretty clear to me that that one was there . The second that came up was personal growth and development . I've spent a lot of time reading self-help books . I've had masses of psychotherapy coaching for myself . I've done a lot of personal development programs and when I look back at that over time it easily adds up to 10,000 hours and probably more like 20,000 hours and a lot of money . And of course I do other things like journaling and all of that . So clearly , personal development for myself , and therefore helping others with that , is key . The one that surprised me a bit was cooking , because I don't see myself as a grand cook . I'm not a grand cook , but I do like to cook for family and friends , and I realized that I've done a lot of that actually not so much at the moment and I probably need to align more with that in my life now .

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So you can do that . You can look back and say say , what are the activities that I'm drawn to ? Where do I go ? Naturally , maybe you've done a lot of voluntary work or in your leadership role . There's bits of the work that you more naturally gravitate to , bits that you move away from , maybe the things you do in your weekends that do this , that signal this . Maybe , for example , you're a competitive runner and that signals that winning in business is important to you . It can be anything that gives you a clue about your purpose .

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You can also look back over your career and look at when you were happiest or most fulfilled and what you were doing and what it was , particularly in the high moments , when you had that sense of fulfillment . This is a career line exercise . We call it looking at highs and lows , and when you do that , you can also look at how your values were expressed , where there might be a misalignment with your values , where your strengths are . You can write a list of those out , write a list of the most important values and strengths for you and see if you can narrow that down to five , the five words that represent what you're doing when you're at your happiest , when you're feeling most energized , when you're feeling aligned with your purpose .

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You can also look at when you're in flow . Flow is the concept that we get into a piece of work and we don't notice the time . We don't even pick up our phone when we're in flow , we don't look at our emails . And you can look at bits of your day when you're in flow maybe at work , maybe in the weekends and see what's happening , maybe when you're curious and engrossed in something . What is it ? What clues does that give you about your purpose ? You can ask close friends . They will often have clues about what your purpose is .

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And one simple and slightly courageous exercise you can do is to email people you trust , both in work and outside of work , and ask them where they see you at your best and happiest . What are you doing ? We can take the idea of hot and cold . So I like to be hot , I like to be warm . So if I feel something's warm , I'm going to be drawn towards it , and if it's cold , I'm going to be pushed away from it . So if you're somebody who likes to notice things through your body , you could notice work that you're drawn towards

Final Thoughts on Finding Fulfillment

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and work that you're kind of repelled from .

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Some people talk about this as being a whole body . Yes , feeling yourself being yeah , I'm up for this . As being a whole body yes , feeling yourself being yep , I'm up for that . Or a whole body no , I'm not going to do that . You can write a letter from your 85-year-old self asking what you're proud of . You can say dear Jean , the things I'm most proud of are . You can ask questions in that letter about what do you want to be remembered for , and maybe the five words that you might describe yourself as looking back at your working life . You can create a series of questions that you can , as I say , create your own list of questions and go back to them time and again over a few days and see what emerges , whether the same things emerge , whether different things emerge . So these are a few exercises to get you started .

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I have a few final thoughts about purpose . Our sense of purpose and what our purpose is can be really heavily impacted by our upbringing and as we go through this process , we may have to dig deep , asking ourselves but what do I really want ? And a book that's really helpful with this is Martha Beck's book the Way of Integrity . It's a journey to finding your true self and it's packed full of exercises . I've read it four times and each time I gain new insights about how to get closer and closer to my core . She focuses a lot on us learning to tune out the messages we receive from society and from our family and tune in to what's true for us .

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This isn't a linear journey . It might be a lifelong journey for some of us , and I do believe it's a journey worth going on . If you go on this journey and discover that you're not really aligned or fulfilled in your leadership at the moment , be gentle with yourself in your leadership at the moment . Be gentle with yourself . Look for ways for small ways to gain alignment a little bit in each day , whilst you explore if there are any bigger changes you can make towards greater fulfilment . To create fulfilment in our working lives , I do think we need a balance of work that is aligned with our purpose , because if we're misaligned , then we can head towards burnout with great speed .

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I want to finish by saying don't be afraid to dream . We hold ourselves back when we could be encouraging ourselves , and I want to encourage you to go on a journey of becoming much clearer about your purpose and finding greater fulfillment at work . About your purpose and finding greater fulfillment at work . Thanks for listening to the Fulfilled Leader . If this episode resonated , share it with another leader or friend and don't forget to follow the podcast so you never miss an episode . You can even rate and review . You can find more support and resources at jeanbalfourcom , or come and say hello on LinkedIn . Take care and keep leading with heart .