One more look at Tal Ben-Shahar and Angus Ridgway’s SHARP model of leadership and Performance Multiplier 5: PURPOSE
MYTH: Achievement and success lead to happiness and fulfillment.
A. Meaning and commitment are the key ingredients of purpose and lead to joyful leadership. Purpose has to be:
1) A stable and long term commitment
2) Meaningful to you as well as valuable to others.
“Purpose endows a person with joy in good times and resilience in hard times and this holds true all throughout life,”William Damon in ‘The Path to Purpose'(2008). Damon studied purpose in young people and categorized them into 4 groups.
1) Disengaged: disinterested in anything beyond themselves (25%)
2) Dreamers: have ideas but make no real effort toward acting on them (25%)
3) Dabblers: have participated in meaningful activities but lack commitment and determination to follow-through long-term (30%)
4) Purposeful: have identified something that matters to them and the reason why, and are currently working on that cause with a long-term plan for future action. (20%)
Purpose is when meaning and commitment meet.
B. Change the way you look at goals. We tend to see a goal as the end which will make us happy, once we reach it. Instead, if we see the same goal as the means to the end, we will be happy while pursuing it. It is the pursuit of the goal that brings us ultimate joy. Enjoy your work-out in the present, not just wait for weight loss in the future, to make you happy. “A goal is a means and the experience is the end.”
As Ralph Waldo Emerson said “Life is a journey, not a destination.” Reaching the destination is undoubtedly gratifying, but the greater joy comes from being fully present and savoring the journey. Short and long term goals are only a means to a higher end; they are not the end in themselves. “Happiness is the experience of climbing toward the peak of the mountain,” Tal Ben-Shahar, in ‘Happier’.
C. Story Telling is another tool the authors offer us. They encourage us to write the story of how we have achieved and will achieve personal and professional goals. Story telling is the most powerful way of making sense of our culture, our community and of connecting to the world. Our brain links random episodes into a chain that becomes our narrative of who we are and our purpose on Earth.
Adam Grant Management Professor at Wharton concluded there are both financial and psychological benefits to meaningful stories that assign value to the work we do. Corporations started using stories to do strategic planning. “At 3M, we tell stories. Everyone knows that.” 3M managers wrote an article Strategic Stories in Harvard Business Review (1998) about changing bullet points into stories. “Writing is thinking…. bullets skip the thinking step.” Story connects the short term goals to the larger vision.
Create a story from where you are today to where you wish to be. Envision the challenges you foresee and form strategies to navigate them. You probably grew up listening to stories as a child. Now write your own.
“Live your working life as an adventure.”