Purpose makes Practice (more likely to be) Perfect

The old maxim"Practice makes perfect", doesn't amount to a flea's breakfast without a sense of purpose fuelling it. Perhaps it should be compulsorily married to another time-served phrase, "What's the point?" Because 'What's the point?' is basically asking us about our target. What's the point on the horizon you are steering your ship towards? Without a point, we are rudderless, aimless and moribund. In other words, stuck!

As a coach for over the last 30 years, first giving golf lessons as a fledgling Assistant Golf Professional, then as a Swimming Teacher, and latterly as a Career Guidance Practitioner and Executive Coach, I have come to respect that without a specific bearing point on the map to aim for there is no direction. No drive to fuel the practice, no vision to visualise and no decision making muscles exercised. And in many cases, the cause is lost before the journey even commenced. Golf's got an obvious target with a flag-stick on a green and neatly mown fairways to indicate your path to success, but in life, although equally relevant, the pathways are not so obvious.

So there can be no doubt that time spent practising your sport, your craft or your vocation is a worthwhile investment, but understand first what it is that you're investing your focus, effort and time in achieving. This is why, here at The Purpose Foundation, and our sister organisation, The Talent Engine, we respect the key ingredient to any coaching success is seeing 'the point' clearly and how sport correlates so perfectly. If you're still asking "what's the point?" - then there isn't one! You need to set your goal. Your purpose needs to shine on the horizon like a beacon which compels you to tune into your inner compass and align all of your positive attributes. Otherwise, it's pointless!

Since inception in the 1950s by billionaire insurance salesman William Clement Stone, 'Positive Visualisation Technique' has become the keystone to high performance and spawned millions of coaching businesses around the world. In Rhonda Byrne's smash-hit movie 'The Secret' she attributes 'clear sight of success' as The Secret to having anything we desire in life - if only we first see what it is that we want. It is only then that 'The Law of Attraction' will work for us. She has so many of the world's greatest proponents of 'positive thinking' lend their crystal clear metaphors to the film's subject - "...a glimpse of a great secret!"

My deep belief is that so many sufferers of stress-related illness can be cured in the moment they switch-on to a purposeful goal in their lives. Even better if they can envisage a goal that interconnects the 3 pillars of holistic wellbeing in their life: psychological / sociological / physiological. Here again, even for the amateur, sport is a wonderful channel for your investment of effort.  Not only is it great stress relief from the ardours of modern life, it is a great focal point, commitment, dojo and laboratory for practising positive visualisation techniques. Tellingly, is a Japanese term which literally means "place of The Way".

I have born witness to inspiring transformations across all departments in many people's lives just by setting a sporting goal on the calendar to aim at. Hence, my long distance swimming spills-over into my professional life so perfectly as I function so much better day-to-day when I'm committed to a date on the calendar horizon to which I aim to hone my skill, build my cardio-vascular fitness and test my stamina. My training sessions at the times when I don't possess a visual goal tend to be empty by comparison and this is a symptom I work hard to legislate against.

These sporting metaphors translate so well into the workplace too. It is no coincidence former Olympic gold medallist swimmer Adrian Moorhouse's consultancy business is called 'Lane4'  because this is the lane he swam in when he won his gold medal. And why British Gas, one of the largest energy companies in the world, sponsor British Swimming and use elite swimmers to deliver motivational training to their personnel.

So in modifying the maxim to 'Purposeful practice promotes perfection' we start to transmit a far more empowering message to the world in that we have thought our options through, made an informed decision, valued our goal-specific attributes, fuelled our motivation with drive and chosen to discipline our actions with purposefulness. The net result of this knowing state is that it connects-together all of the dots in our life. The more clearly we see our purpose the more joined-up we feel and the more attractive our performance is to others. After all, 'charisma' means both 'a compelling attractiveness or charm that can confer devotion in others' and 'a divinely conferred power or talent'.

This is The Key to success in our working lives too. This is why understanding our career attributes and the faculties we possess within is vital. In my new book 'Every Person's Path to Purpose - Everyone's Work Manifesto' I introduce a new kind of energy called 'Vojo' (Vocationally Generated Energy). 'Vojo' has almost supernatural powers that I believe only a very few people possess. So few are in possession of 'Vojo' because so few people are truly in possession of purpose; possibly as few  as 5 to 10% of the working population experience the joys given to them by 'Vojo'.

You can spot people with 'Vojo' because they are the charismatic people who never work. They are the people who discovered a job that they truly loved. A job which sees every one of their career attributes in perfect alignment; dovetailed beautifully into The World of Work. As if it was always intended to be that way. I argue in my book that society desperately needs more people dovetailed into their perfect work and managing well-planned careers because they have so much to contribute to the wellbeing of society. No longer can we strip employment of its meaning in pursuit of profit and dividend paid to an ungenerous few.

'Every Person's Path to Purpose' is a blueprint for an interconnected, congruent and sustainable working world where all workers are encouraged to contribute to the betterment of their fellow humans. It talks about the nurturing powers of 'Work Aesthetics' where by honing skills over time workers construct meaning not only in their own lives, but those who pick-up on the resonance and purity of great work around them.

Progressives / Proutists such as myself see a future where not only is there enough resource in the world to go around equitably, but everyone extracts the benefit of living well and prospering with the egalitarianism borne out of personal effectiveness, merit, living well, being spiritually connected with our surroundings through the imperatives of ecology, cooperation and sustainable living.

Although too easy to forget in an increasingly greed-driven and engorged world, social cohesion relies on each individual wanting to give to their fellow citizen, unconditionally. For each of us to express our individuality through creativity, our quest for spiritual enlightenment - the answering of questions - and our perpetual pursuit of growth - yet contributing to - the greater good of the community we live in. Be that through maximising our potential, skills mastery and/or the fulfilment of our 'Hierarchy of Needs' (Maslow) in the culmination of self-actualisation. If we are not proceeding we risk being in decline, stagnating at at risk of falling foul of low self-esteem and entering into the minefields of mental illness and self-doubt.

As the aeroplane's wings need to be at just the right attitude in order to take-off, so purpose relates to the fulfilment of potential and growth in the individual. Drive - the fuel of maximising one's potential - must be intrinsic. It cannot be given to another. The push and pull of personal development and growth can be taught, mentored, guided, supervised and coached, but without a purpose, it is a pitiful waste of energy, resource and time. This is why when we wake each day we can measure our individual effectiveness simply by gauging the clarity with which we can visualise our purpose and our relationship to the goals we have set ourselves on the horizon. In this way all the time we devote to honing our craft as we pursue our individual potential will be guaranteed to pay the bearer a healthy return the investment! (Coincidentally, 'vojo'  is Esperanto for 'The Way'.)

What's the difference between success, happiness and achievement....

 ... and falling short of your dreams?

Before reading this item, please take a moment to visualise those people you have seen who are fulfilling their dreams, and those who aren't there yet.

What is the difference between them?

I’d hazard an educated guess that a lot of what you’re seeing in the successful person is in their physical posture.

What do I mean when I say ‘physical posture’?

Let’s face it successful people tend to give-off an aura. It is deeper than just looking confident; they carry themselves differently, they act differently, they think differently and this positive energy is often regarded as ‘attractive’ in much the same way as magnetic energy attracts.

You can always recognise the people who have ‘it’ because they tend to look above the horizon. They aren't looking curled-up in a ball or looking at their feet as if they worry that they’re going to fall down a crack in the pavement. They've no use of superstition because their 'glass is half full' and they’re consistently optimistic. They have faith in what the future holds and stride out towards it proactive, confident and eager.

The Hedgehog Effect: Just like the hedgehog’s instinct to roll-up into a ball, there are times when I have met clients for the first time when they are physiologically and psychologically rolled-up tightly in a ball of self-preservation; as if rolling with punches. Somehow they have lost their faith in the benevolence of the universe and seek to protect themselves from being harmed. I often see clients in this state following long periods of unemployment or experiencing the grief of redundancy. 

There are osteopaths, Bowen therapists, Hellerworkers, and body alignment experts that help release this pent-up anxiety from our bodies. I regularly encounter this physical manifestation of anxiety and stress as it prevails in people who have not experienced fulfilment and meaning in their work because they have yet to piece-together their career attributes to form a sustainable career plan; the people who are still wrestling with themselves to discover their own identities and define their mission in life.

Determination – probability, nature or nurture:

Looking back now, with the luxury of 20/20 hindsight, I survived that difficult transition between childhood, adolescence and adulthood because the activities I was good at fed me an inner strength. In the main, if it wasn't for sport and my love for The Arts, I would have struggled much more.

Deep down inside I knew I possessed positive potential and that it was surely a case of just keeping going and one day I would end-up discovering success, achievement and happiness. It was just a matter of time.

I have no clue where this deep instinct stems from, nurture or nature, but I suppose I am lucky that I sensed it was innate within. A long time ago I came to realise that everyone has an innate talent within; it is just a case of circumstance, perseverance and positivity whether they ever experience the warmth of its glow.

I made a breakthrough in my life when I realised how other people had struggled with the same hurdles I had experienced and when a very kind tutor explained to me how insanely unkind the perfectionist character trait can be because we constantly use it to ensure happiness is always just that inch or two out of reach. He helped me understand that my “good enough, might be equivalent to somebody else’s best”. It was like a weight had been lifted from my shoulders and I never looked back.

It wasn't the past that was going to determine my future…

...it was my decisions in the ‘here and now’

Even though our future course is borne-out of extrapolating the trajectory and themes of our past accomplishments (and failures), potential will always outweigh previous experience; this is how we fuel forward momentum.

How we act upon this potential right now, today governs our future course, our potential for success, happiness and achievement. No great oak ever grew from an acorn that was not 'anchored’. It is a challenging life-lesson to absorb, but our environment is a mirror to our actions. We can influence ‘Darwinian probability’ in the way we represent ourselves to our surroundings as image determines our horizons in life. ‘The expressions we meet on other people’s faces tend to reflect the look we transmit to them’. Hence a sincere smile - reinforced by a self-assured character - is such a disarming weapon in life.

Positivity building-blocks:

As we know from ‘The Secret’, ‘What the Bleep’, and the infinite pool of knowledge on ‘self-help’ and ‘positive thinking’ espoused by visionary thinkers like Dr Norman Vincent Peale, William Clement Stone, and founder of sports psychology Coleman Griffith, there are some essential ingredients to performing well:

• Do what it takes to germinate the magic in desire – get hungry, want to be successful, fill the void with it and use it to launch yourself.
• Strive for Inspiration – find a field you are passionate about otherwise you will never find the motivation necessary to persevere over the long haul.
• Identify where your skills lie. Develop your technique – practice, practice, practice. Hone the attributes you have been ‘given’ until your mastery infects you with conviction and purpose.
•  Disarm your past mistakes out of the same kindness you would bestow on any other young person who was beating themselves up with negativity born from past errors. Move forward and grow from experience. Look forward and outwards not inwards.
• Nurture calm and rejuvenation in your bedroom and turn it in an oasis of calm as it is proven that disrupted sleep exacerbates troubled spirits. Master your thoughts through calmed breathing with inspiring books and tranquil meditation in order to cleanse your mind of the days’ strains.
• Above all enter each day pointing all your faculties at your ‘beacon of purpose’. What is it that you wish to marshal your career attributes towards? Progress is continuous personal development, self-encouragement and confidence-growing; whereas, the stuck, entrenched and stagnant en route to inevitable decline.

Encourage-meant:

Sometimes by providing for others what we actually seek ourselves we are recognising human need. Heartfelt encouragement given to others is an empowering lever in building cohesion, connectedness and cultivating the essential benefits of team-spiritedness and community; especially when we share our successes and goals.

This helpful realisation often comes as a great surprise to my clients, who may have experienced long periods of feeling lonely, isolated and withdrawn, that through their altruism they inject within themselves far more optimism at a time when the natural instinct is to be alone and withdraw. Remember: Respect is very much a 2-way street.

Connecting-with and communing-with others:

The reality is that few champions taste success from the confines of solitude. Achievement, in the main, is built upon united effort, linked with unconditional equality, connected via our ability to depend on others, as it bonds communities invested toward a common good. This is why ‘employee-owned’ organisations like The John Lewis Partnership in the UK do so well – because they share the incentive and the trust.

Very few inward-looking, isolated egocentrics sustain success over the long haul without cultivating more open partnerships with others buying into similar value systems and shared motivations for succeeding. Hence good communications, clear boundaries and respect form the glue that binds every worthwhile success.

Forgiving Mavericks: It’s worth remembering that it can be difficult to find one’s way back into the team dynamic if time has been spent on the periphery. At the same time we should be mindful that the most innovative of minds belong to the most unconventional characters and for them to conform risks amputating their innate brilliance.

Remember real value is borne from invention and invention is disruptive by definition. Sharing achievement is likely to involve adaptability, lateral-thinking, and the occasional ability to forgive a once-adversary who may well be more like you than you’d care to admit! Any such magnanimity requires great maturity. 

Learn to recognise the tiny margins between success and failure:

As is so often the case in this life love/hate, friends/enemies, success/failure are the same coin seen from differing perspectives with the tiniest of fractions differentiating the various viewpoints. Similarly, beware of perfectionism; as it can be a very unrealistic, self-defeating and an overly-rigid trait. [Beware ultimatums as they execute When is our striving for the highest of standards good for us and when is it eroding us away? When is a task finished and when is a task being unnecessarily finessed?

The keystone to happiness is knowing when to stop digging and start constructing; alongside the acceptance that building a life's mission starts with recognising, liking and understanding what talents you possess and appreciating what you’re going to do with them - everyday. Acceptance of what can and can't be changed is elemental.

It might take decades to put the roof on the house of your dreams, but you’re better-off knowing that it is built on firm foundations and that every day you step back to see that the incremental steps, not matter how small, see the walls growing upwards and taking you nearer to your ultimate goal.

A ‘patient summary’:

Perhaps this is why many of our most famous celebrities point-out that it took them a lifetime of error-laden perseverance to become an overnight success! I believe we can only truly measure our success when we can clearly state our values. Only then can we credibly interpret whether our achievements equate to actual success because it is only then that our work is meaningful. 

Concentrated endurance seeds worthy achievement; passion-led talent fuels it.

Duncan Bolam © 2012

The Career Dovetail Formula & Talent Triangles: 

Strengthening wellbeing by dovetailing more people into sustainable careers.

When to career and when not to 'career'

Career is designing your work beacon, 'seeing' how it is meant to be, and aiming for it daily. The gains of your 'return on investment' of time, effort and application come in many forms, some perceptible, some not so. For example, a positive outlook, progress, strength of character, fortitude, recognition, love, continued growth and independence.
To career along, out-of-control, does not come into it. In fact, careening would be very unhelpful!
Understanding the reasons why form distinctive parts of the journey.
Assimilate and grow.
Sustain.

the POWER of words in the discovery of MEANING

'Life' Navigation Using Words - an extrapolation:

Humans are often to be found deliberating and cogitating over the meaning of life. It's a query as old as our species. ~Discovery of the answer will propel a life through time with purpose. A million million thinkers have pondered this. Here are some of my thoughts out loud.

Life is a quest. Even 'the right' find answers every day. Yet there are many more people in search of answers than there are those who know. I see success coming to the purposeful, positive and persevering. 

What it is to know why you are here? The reality is, it probably means you have asked and answered far more questions than the people who don't know. The really successful people, if truth were known, have  braved many mistakes and enriched their navigation technique accordingly. Error forges, steels and galvanises character by ultimately providing answers. Achievement is awarded to the persistently brave. Mistakes are just answers with more growing to do. 

What is the meaning of life? I believe it is to have meaning IN your life. We extract meaning from making sense of the many ingredients that comprise an individual. Once we understand ourselves, perhaps not totally, but better, we then have foundations to build upon. Re-interpreting 'feedback' gives rise to understanding - another word for 'understanding' is 'harmony'. A self-image that we are happier believing in. A personality that we are happy with that we can project to the world, confidently. Wisdom is an understanding of this. 

In the Lexicon of Life there are words that exist that can guide us when we interpret their true meaning: 

'Living' - living is not just about breathing our way through life's journey. It is about how we will live. What will we do to live? How will we feed ourselves and our families? How we get paid for what we do. Payment is not always about money. Our contribution can be recognised in many ways.

'Contribution' - As a citizen how will we contribute? What  will we contribute to better society. It is the opposite of selfishness and involves our whole being.

'To Be' - I am therefore I am. Well it's not necessarily that simple is it. What is it that you are going to do To Be? It forms a big chunk of the answer to 'Why am I here?'.

'Meaning' - It is a tough life lesson to learn, but the practical reality is that most lives require meaning in order that they thrive. It is about listening for and being open to the feedback that living gives back; akin to a bow on a violin generating sound. 

'Purpose'  - along with 'meaning' 'purpose' is a key ingredient in the mix that fuels a life and drives it forward. Purpose instils forward momentum. It provides a reason for being like your internal propulsion system.

'Attitude' - In much the same way that an aircraft's wing must be at just the right attitude to lift a plane in the air, travelling at just the right velocity, so must a life. Attitude is the angle at which we approach life, both physical and mental. The ground, in the case of this metaphor, is the rest of society. 

'Identity' - Who is it looking back at you in the mirror? How will you like that individual? How will you project that image to the rest of society? Everyone I have ever met has a truly great person inside. The problems only arise when we don't give flight to the potential within. When we haven't taken the time necessary to uncover and truly understand the person within. This is where faith in the good comes in. Are you looking at your feet or in the person's eye?

'Love' - It can be an agonizing life lesson to learn, but self-acceptance and learning to love one's self is prerequisite in discovering the part of you that someone else will love. Love is the weave in tapestry of life because it interconnects and perpetuates the whole fabric of society. Love comes in many forms and degrees, success is built on believing in yourself. Only then will others buy into you.

'Conviction' - a word possessing many sides, curiously. The one we're after here is to do with acting with conviction; carrying oneself with certainty. Actions carried-out with conviction tend to be attractive because they are positive and pure. Actions that resonate.

'Attractiveness' - Believe it or not, attractiveness has less to do with physical looks than you might think. It is a powerful word. In certain respects it combines each and everyone of the words above. It is about 'believe-ability'. Attractive people possess the truth of meaning and reason. They have done the workings-out. This is recognised in the way events, actions and materials are attracted to them.

'Vocation' - "A strong feeling of fitness for a particular career" is the definition that my dictionary gives me. A person's working identity. The exercising and bringing-together of all the career attributes bestowed upon the individual by nature. It is my heartfelt belief that everyone I have ever met possesses a vocation. My fear is, so few tap into the life-blood contained within. It's about 'fit'.

'Work' - "the application of human effort to a mental or physical purpose". Perhaps this is why, as a result of increasing automation, so many Humans feel purposeless. The truth is that with an ever-growing population and the rapid, vapid mechanisation of the 'workplace', it is no wonder that more people feel redundant and are redundant. Purposelessness is a dangerously unsustainable 'state' to create in the world; a population without meaning will boil. What will all those workless people do? There will always be work needing to be done. It is simply a case of asking yourself is it work that you want to do and for what purpose and how will your effort be recognised? Effort / Reward, you reap what you sow. Life is brutally Darwinian like it or not.

'Capability' - Is a complex balance between actual ability and potential power. Capability is about the potential prowess a person has to combine their skills and their experience of having practised them. Measuring capability implies an ability to forecast 'ability', coupled with effort invested in improving performance that is applied in the present. Get an objective view. Ask an impartial expert.

'Vitality' - is the quickening of the experience of life relative to the amount of energy invested. A vital person is full of energy resulting from their expending energy enthusiastically aimed at a specific cause. Vitality only arises from the imperative of living life positively. 

'Confidence' - is the net result of liking what you be. It results from positive energy reflected back from your environment for good done.

This short article is aimed at prodding your use of language in the context of working and being. The idea is that we extrapolate our own meaning from considering the meaning of the words we might use to describe our own actions. 

Unless we can recognise, evaluate, describe and visualise our output it will continue to be difficult to extract meaning from what we do. If we cannot see value, how will we feel valued. And there is no greater conundrum in life than being able understand that lives do better when contributing to the greater good. Selfish lives, self-contained, inward-looking rarely produce for the greater good.

Happiness is balance. Success is sustainability. 

Job Search SB 6

The Path of Least Resistance:

When you are looking for a job make sure you understand exactly what your career passions are. It is no good moaning about rejection when you haven't taken the time to do the detective work necessary to identify your working talents and career attributes, such as - skills, strengths, interests and values.

The shortest journey to you getting a job that you truly love, where you outshine your competitors on the interview shortlist, is to decide what you do best - and do it.