The Path to Purpose: A Roadmap for Transformation

I was at a peak in my career and many of my long held dreams had come true. I was a leader, I had the opportunity to manage people and design systems, I was responsible for strategy and solving complex problems in both operations and creative work. As my corporate career hit full stride, I could begin to see the last rung of the ladder to executive coming into sight.

At a late dinner with my husband, we struck up the conversation that had become a running thread. “Is this the life we really want?”

We were both ambitious and we married later in life, our graduate degrees were complete and our careers were demanding. We discovered in our marriage that we were a great team, complimenting each other’s skills and styles to make a well-balanced whole. We were both proud of our careers and worked with great dedication and yet still felt a disconnect between our passions and beliefs and what we were doing. Even good companies often lack a true mission. We began to imagine starting something together and the first thing we started was the process to identify our purpose.

Setting Intention

Once we acknowledged together that we wanted to make a change and to do it together, the next question was what do we do? In my life I have repeatedly set big, long term intentions and then committed to working toward those goals over time. I have achieved some unlikely accomplishments and transformations, sometimes working on goals over several years to reach the finish line. So, I was familiar with starting with intention. Our intention was to create something together that focused on purpose and embodied our skills and desires and contributed to changing the world for the better.

The trick to intention is taking small actions to move the project forward each day. Intention is a practice that takes organization and discipline. That makes it sound restrictive, but sometimes the action can be as light and joyful as daydreaming, reading a novel, or writing down random ideas. Putting action behind intention is not about controlling the path or the outcomes, it’s about a lived experience of exploration and often the best results come from intuitive insights that emerge from letting go as opposed to trying to control outcomes.

Organization and control are separate energies. Using a Gannt chart to organize your evening or weekend free time may not be typical. But for us, sitting down at our favorite local brewery on Sunday to review our plan and talk over what we’d accomplished that week on our project was great fun.

1st Path of Inquiry: Internal

We planned to work together, but first had to work separately. The first path of inquiry was to look inside. Seeking to better understand and evolve myself has been an ongoing activity for me. But even with an interest and dedication to working on myself, life moves quickly and there is always something new to learn by taking time to reflect on your own needs and desires.

There are many useful tools available to put some structure around this idea. It can be useful to simply make a list of your desires and skills and set a period of time, like a week to take note of dreams or ideas that bubble up. Another useful approach can be to take notice of how inputs in life make you feel each day (like watching a movie about traveling in India, or a reading a book about the findings of a lab scientist).

Another approach is to use a more prescriptive tool based on science and research, such as the Gallup CliftonStrengths Assessment. I had used this tool myself and also used it with my teams at work. Categorizing and understanding your strengths can be an enlightening and energizing way to look inward. I purchased the assessment for my husband so that he could also identify his top five and then we had the opportunity to compare and discuss.

2nd Path of Inquiry: External

When it comes to looking outward to connect to purpose, it can be overwhelming to consider the whole wide world and its myriad, insurmountable problems. Some people know they want to work with animals or children or have a passion for forest conservation or the theater. We both shared the values of environmental sustainability, racial and gender equity, eliminating poverty and many more of the shared values that many of us have, but there were too many aspects of the world that we wanted to see change so connecting with causes that need intervention didn’t help us to clarify our direction.

Our internal ways of thinking and feeling about the world provided a key theme, we were both drawn to the big picture and enjoyed problem solving with a systems approach. With our separate skillsets one thing that we were united in was a similar approach and in fact, we had both experienced being described professionally as thoughtful. To organize a thoughtful approach to the problems of the world we focused on global trends that we saw as major forces shaping the future of the world and were areas we were already engaged in and could bring some expertise. His area was urbanization and the built environment, mine was entrepreneurship and the future of work.

We created a shared Pinterest where we could post articles that were relevant to our inquiry. We read books out loud together exploring urbanism, entrepreneurship, and community. Our pursuit of these topics was both separate and shared. In a life that we thought was so full we could barely find time for anything, we suddenly found pockets of time to learn on the bus or waiting in line at Veggie Grill, listening to a podcast while exercising or choosing a different kind of movie on the weekend. We built momentum in this process by setting our paths of inquiry, sharing them with each other, and capturing notes and ideas with the goal of creating a project.

3rd Path of Inquiry: Internet Research

Internet research is its own category in this process because even though we use the world wide web every day, it’s easy to overlook the power of this tool. Pursuing this inquiry opened up the wealth of the internet to me in a new way. We can all google absolutely anything at any time and come up with rich information sources that are freely and openly published by trustworthy organizations around the world. I’m not talking about social media scrolling; I’m talking about research.

If I type in boots on google, social media responds immediately with boot ads. It turns out that if you type in global entrepreneurship, housing innovations, or technology in education, your data driven advertising feed doesn’t change, but the resources that can be discovered are nearly endless. The United Nations, World Bank, and other NGOs and educational bodies publish research and reports on every subject studied on earth and make their findings available for all. If you seek to understand global trends or pursue big picture inquiries you may be surprised by what you can learn in the same amount of time that it takes to check your feed on any of the social platforms.

The magic of this process was that as I learned I began to identify better questions to ask. I discovered the Sustainable Development Goals created by the United Nations General Assembly and the growing field of Impact Investing. In short, I discovered that there was an entire world of thinking and action supported by organizations, frameworks, and even budding new industries that were committed to changing the world for the better. So many times I was bursting with excitement to share a new insight with my husband at the end of the day, and some of those insights became integral to the vision we were shaping.

Defining the Project

During this process we tried on various resulting ideas. We talked for weeks about a community marketplace with micro businesses that would lower the barrier to entry for mission driven entrepreneurs. That idea went to the wayside, but it was an important step along with many other formations we tried on. There is no arriving at the destination on the path to purpose, so don’t hesitate  to draw conclusions along the way. We would come up with a thesis or idea and talk about it for a weekend or even weeks playing out scenarios and picturing possibilities, only to realize that it wasn’t the one.

Each of these hypotheses helped us move toward refining our goals. We spent time on topics and approaches that we later abandoned, but all of this time helped us to build the muscle of refining concepts together. I began to write out project statements every few weeks where I would tinker with wordsmithing an articulation of our thesis as we continued to evolve how we might contribute to changing the world.

At one point we determined that part of our plan needed to include a field study of travel to some of the fastest growing urban centers around the world. Originally this idea was connected to an entirely different thesis than the one we landed on, but the field study concept itself lived on. We knew we wanted to create a global business, we were researching development in other parts of the world and were particularly interested in Asia one of the fastest growing and changing parts of the world today. Over time the idea of the field study evolved into an around the world trip to do a landscape study on the entrepreneurship ecosystem and business development tour to build our impact investing organization, Global Urban Village.

Commitment

The same way that the trick to intention is having the discipline to continuously take small steps, the trick to purpose is commitment. Once we had explored internally and externally, gone down the rabbit hole of available research on global trends, tried out many ideas and project statements, we reached the tipping point. Creating an intention and a purpose driven project doesn’t have a clear endpoint where planning stops and living it begins. The tipping point was self-identified as the project held a specific shape for a longer period of time, and we began to acknowledge the kind of major steps we would need to take to realize our dreams.

The process I’ve described here took about 6 months before we reached this point. We knew our plans would require drastic changes including quitting our corporate careers and packing up our home and we arrived at the moment where we were ready to commit to these steps. We happened to be on vacation in South Beach Miami, soaking up the sun at the edge of the ocean, looking out over its beautiful vastness. We sat on our lounge chairs under a yellow striped umbrella and we said, “I do” to our next big commitment in life…transformation.

If you undertake the process of finding your purpose, or creating a purpose driven project, it doesn’t have to require transformation on this scale. It is just as important to make a commitment to the decision to volunteer for a few months, to complete a creative endeavor, or to make a career shift. Whatever the project may be, marking the commitment can be a great way to celebrate and acknowledge reaching the tipping point in this process. Write it down, shout it out, announce it to your friends or family and make the shift from planning to living your purpose.