Your Why

In one of my recent workshops on finding your purpose at work, there were a couple of IT guys who weren’t sure what they were doing in a workshop on such a “squishy topic.” They came on their own, no one signed them up, what were they expecting? So we chatted a bit. What do you do? How did you get started? What would you do if you couldn’t do that? What’s the underlying theme? Basically, they like figuring out how things work. They would take stuff apart and figure it out. Now they help people figure out how to fix stuff (computer stuff at the moment) that’s not working. If it wasn’t computers, it would probably be fixing other broken things or systems. They love doing stuff that makes a lot of us crazy. We need them. 

As we continued the workshop, people shared their fledgling purpose statements. No two were alike. It was marvelous. It was touching. We all work at a university, we have a common mission, yet we all contribute different things and for different personal reasons.  

Your “why” is your underlying purpose, or passion, in life that is the bottom line for what you do. It’s not about what you do, although it includes that. People can be doing similar things that stem from different motivations. It’s not about how you make a contribution, although it includes that as well. People can have similar purpose or motivation, that plays out in different ways. 

If you don’t already know your why, a common way to discover it is to think about various incidents in your life that had an impact on you. It could be something you did or something someone else did that stays with you to this day. What happened? How did you feel? Maybe you were excited or felt like you had a positive impact on someone. Or maybe you felt frustrated by an unjust situation. As you think about those incidents, is there a thread that runs through them? A common theme? You don’t have to nail it down right away. Just think about the theme(s). Let it percolate. After you have a feel for the theme, try to craft a short sentence that expresses it. What impact does it have on others (the world)? (It’s okay if you revise this sentence over time as you become clearer on the nuances.)  

If you lived in accordance with this statement, what would you embrace? What would you decline? How would that improve your life and others’?