How to harness the magic ingredient inside of you that affects your outcomes more than anything else.
"How can I spend more of my energy on the positive in service of my mission, when there’s so much to explain to people about what’s wrong?". I was asked this question the other day by a dear friend and ally of Organisational Alchemy. He’s up to some awe-inspiring stuff in the world, doing great things. He is passionate, smart, and uber talented. He wants to do more great things, reach more people, and have more impact (which will be a very good for the world, I should add). His question got me thinking...
I spent lots of my earlier career railing against leaders and cultures that I deemed inadequate or harmful, and a lot of my life trying to fight parts of myself that I considered unworthy. I hated ‘the system’, and I spent a great deal of energy and time feeling either furious or hopeless about what was happening around me. Both emotional states are pretty exhausting I can tell you. So it’s no surprise that I collided head on with my own spectacular burnout three years ago.
That burnout was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Why? Because amongst other things, it revealed to me the magic ingredient that significantly impacted everything in my life. And it taught me that if I stayed conscious of this ingredient, and chose to honour it, I would be able to reach my highest potential, and bring into the world that which I was designed to bring.
That ingredient is my Motivating Force.
Any action we take, any choice we make, and anything we create in the world has a motivating force behind it that brings it into being. It’s the ‘Why’. And the Why is everything.
Many of us are trying to usher new ways of being, leading, and showing up in the world. And boy does the world need it. What we must stay present to is that our motivating force impacts our outcomes over and above anything else we put in. Yes it’s true, in trying to bring in new ways of being, we can’t help but see the old paradigms, and get frustrated with what’s wrong with them (hence my dear friend’s question) - this is normal, and it’s normal to get triggered by them.
What I’m urging us (and my dear friend) not to do is fight them. When we try to combat something we are by default sticking ourselves to it. So if we’re trying to beat something, it still has us. My Dad is 81 and has a full head of hair. Despite this, he uses fancy shampoos and diligently ensures he’s not going bald most days. Rather than enjoying being an 81 year old man with excellent hair, he’s busy not being bald. Do you see the difference? Baldness still has him trapped.
If you’re purpose-led, it means you have life force inside of you that wants to be born, it wants to be brought into the world. This force is relentlessly trying to express itself through you. And it doesn’t want to express itself as frustration, judgment or blame, it wants to express itself as creativity and possibility. The things you see in the world, your organisation, or even yourself, that you deem as ‘wrong’, are in fact perfectly crafted springboards for you to push off against to propel you to your calling, to your highest potential.
Moreover, these things about yourself, your organisation, or the world that you perceive as wrong, were also once life forces trying to be born to achieve something great. Yes, many of those life forces have taken wrong turns, fallen off track, or they may have given all they are capable of giving, but it’s unlikely that at their inception they were inherently bad. If we look at these things from this perspective rather than one of judgment, we can harness the good that’s still left in them and take it with us on our journeys.
These four things below are things I know to be true. And they are Organisational Alchemy’s motivating forces for bringing change into the world:
Without fallen paradigms, mis-stepping leaders, and past versions of ourselves, we’d have no springboards to push off against.
We can only bring our unique talents into the world if there are problems for us to solve.
We can only create and innovate if there are opportunities to be better.
The things we want to change are not our enemies, they are our sources of inspiration.
So to my dear friend (who I hope is reading this), and anyone else who is still reading, I leave you with this...
I don’t think our missions are about making sure good triumphs over evil, or about being right or wrong. I think they are about leaning into our highest potential and the highest potential of our organisations. And letting that life force, that motivating force, express itself.