How ironic is it that our most consequential life journey is to find our way back to the essence of who we were at birth?
(The remarkable Richard Rohr has written an important book, ‘Falling Upward’, on (roughly) this topic. I encourage all CEOs and Executive Leaders over 40 to read it).
Essentially, we spend our lives trying to be who we already are. It sounds nuts, but this is humanity’s fundamental way: our unrelenting search for our True Self.
Why is being our True Self so hard?
It’s because we are inundated with experiences over the course of our lives that lead us away from our True Self: pressure, expectations, trauma, ambition, etc. All are necessary and good in some form, but all function as little ‘leashes’ that lead us toward our False Self and away from our True Self, making us smaller, less effective, less dynamic, less assured, less congruent, and less creative.
Less awesome – which is a loss for everyone.
As you will know by now, I am looking for life wisdom and figuring out how it applies to business. Why? Because life and business are not dissimilar – in fact, they are tightly woven together. Hence, I feel confident proclaiming truths like ‘A good leader lives a good life’, knowing that all the lessons good leaders learn on their journey directly apply to their border lives and automatically enhance all aspects of their broader lives.
What would businesses be like if that shaped people into their True Business Selves?
The journey to a True Business Self, in my view, would ask the following questions:
- What is your gift?
- What ideal is your work serving?
- What impact would you like to make in your career?
- What cause would you fight for that you could place at the core of your work?
- What sort of environment most suits your natural way?
- Have you evolved yourself to entitle you to lead other people?
- What is required of you to keep your True Business Self healthy, alive and vital?
- What is a bottom-line ‘no’ for you?
In my view, an aggregation of this amount of collective consciousness, wisdom, intelligence, surety, honesty, and truth would be nothing short of transformational for businesses — and not just fractionally transformational — revolutionarily transformational, including performance at the bottom line level.
Most businesses don’t even come close to this – in fact, a tiny slice of businesses has actually taken up the opportunity to transform themselves into a form that can truly thrive and achieve extraordinary results.
While this is a crying shame, it’s also just the way the world works, and eventually, they (or at least more of them) will come around. This snowball is already growing in size, and most businesses will come along at some point.
But the provocation as you read this missive today is about how close you are to your True Self and how magnificent your True Business Self might be if you decided to commit to that professional journey.
These are both questions for the ages. I’m not sure there are two more powerful and consequential questions to answer. And I hope – for you and all the people who know you – that you will.