Where my purpose started
Up until yr 11, I studied art at school. When I got into the higher grades, more theory came in and I had to write about an artist I admired, I chose Vincent van Gogh. I had a love of impressionism but it was his struggle with mental illness that really caught my attention. I learnt how he used art to express himself and it was through this that I looked into the power of psychology.
I went on to study psychology at Uni, and even a semester of art history, and I found my love of social and group psychology. It was the early 90s and industrial & organisational psychology weren’t career options, so I went on to postgraduate study in management and human resources.
How I refined my purpose in the workplace
Fast forward to 2000, when I moved from Adelaide to Canberra to join the Australian Public Service (APS) as a graduate. Graduates do 3 placements in their graduate year, I was lucky enough to start in the ebusiness team and end up in the team responsible for the outcomes of the Son’s and Daughter’s Study. This was where I learnt the importance of putting people at the centre of our online business and how important understanding psychology is to the services we deliver. (Note: I was one of the study participants too)
I spent the next 12 years with the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. I started my Masters in Public Sector Management and ended it after 1 subject because I decided I would leave the APS. You see, in those 12 years, I learnt how important people are to the success of the business, staff and clients. I know not everyone has a good experience with the agency but staff morale played a massive role. I learnt how to engage and motivate staff by focusing on their values and showing them how they fit into the larger picture. I aligned their values and parts of their own purpose (the legacy they wanted to leave) with the roles they had. What happened is that the staff were happier, more productive, and we had higher client satisfaction.
My purpose as a business owner
I spent some time running a handmade business. This coincided with the start of Facebook. As soon as Pages started, I started a page and grew my following. What I quickly learnt was that the content I had to produce needed to match what engaged and motivated my clients. My following grew and within the first 12 months of having a page, I was being asked to teach other business owners how I achieved this.
The deeper I looked into Facebook, the more I realised that not only did they use and leverage user psychology, but they employed psychologists.
Serendipity happened in the form of Cambridge Analytica and the dirty dealings of the platform and how they and others used it to manipulate and mobilise populations allowed me to further explore the psychology of social media and neuromarketing.
Purpose realisations as a business owner
At this point I knew:
– importance of putting people at the centre of business
– importance of putting the user first online
– the importance of community to our psychology online
– how social media uses psychology to engage and motivate people
I went on to speak interstate and to international audiences about psychology in social media. I continued to train business owners on the psychology used in social media and particularly how to understand and leverage audience psychology. Then I realised something. Business owner mindset played a bigger role in their success online than their actual skills online.
Embracing my purpose
It was clear that business owners feared showing up online and that was what was holding them back from promoting their business, not their understanding of social media. The more I looked into it, the more I discovered issues around fear of failure, fear of success, fear of other people’s opinion, and imposter syndrome were other root causes. Some business owners thought it was procrastination or comparison that was at the root but it was really their own mindset. I went through difficult periods in my life and I realised that my mental health impacted how well I showed up online.
Realisations when I went deeper on my purpose
At this point I realised:
– importance of putting business owner mindset at the centre of business success
– importance of understanding the online user
– how skills are great but mindset is where it starts and ends (and boundaries make it so)
Where Ikigai comes into finding my purpose
It was through my interest in Blue Zones, my grandmothers lived into their 90s, that I was introduced to the concept of Ikigai and how living your purpose impacts your emotional and physical health. I watched 2 separate documentaries about the contributing factors to living a healthy life past 100. One of the factors that lead Okinawans to live longer is there sense of purpose, Ikigai. It was a few months later, while listening to a podcast, I heard about the link between work, purpose, and happiness that I knew I needed to do something about this. (I’m not one for coincidences) So I went and bought, and devoured, Ikigai by Hector Garcia & Francesc Miralles to learn their take on the concept. Left with considerable questions on how to actually uncover your purpose with their concept of ikigai, I spent considerable time online taking online tests and reading other articles. This left me feeling underwhelmed and still wondering how to find my purpose with ikigai.
Recalling the podcast, I thought back on my own work on using psychology to engage and motivate business owners, I knew that my experience and studies in psychology would be the key to developing the right questions to use ikigai to find a business owner’s purpose.
Realisations since developing a method to finding purpose with Ikigai
I have since realised that I get the most satisfaction from helping business owners get out of their own way so they can get on with business. Marianne Williamson was right, “It is our light, not our darkness that most frightens us”, and this is true for business owners. I have also recently learnt that boundaries help us grow and that people show us what they really think of us in their behaviour and how they want us to treat them.
It is clear that I have a strong purpose about the importance of our psychology in our success and that people (and their psychology) need to be placed at the centre of businesses for us to be able to achieve what we desire.
I hope this blog has given you insight into why and how I have taken my understanding of all of this and developed a system to help other business owners to uncover their purpose. You see, I’ve not always followed my purpose. I have been caught by comparison and letting how others perceive me influence what I do – I ended up miserable and coming back to psychology. Researchers are now understanding what the Japanese have known for centuries, the power of purpose (ikigai) and how incorporating it into what we do can make us happier, more productive, and in the case of some, even live longer.
Want to discover your purpose so that you can be happier, unstuck, or just feel like you’re having a greater impact? Access my system here.
