What Is a Personal Purpose Statement?

What Is a Personal Purpose Statement?

Purpose is the way we personally motivate ourselves to create meaning in our everyday lives. Your personal purpose is activated and gains strength through a purpose statement.

 

Who do you want to impact? When we discover and bring our personal purpose to life, we are able to impact everything around us. We can create impact at a social and organizational level, as well as on individuals. This translates into a sense of personal fulfillment.

 

A personal purpose statement largely captures what defines you as an individual. It is a statement that describes what drives you every day and can be applied to every area of your life (family, work, friends, hobbies). To build a personal purpose statement, in the workshop we will work through several key exercises that will help us discover it, and you will be able to write a personal purpose statement that is authentic and meaningful to you. This is what will give you greater awareness of your purpose and help you activate it in your daily life.

 

Two Stories of Purpose and Their Impact

 

Story #1 by Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter

 

Adapted from: Medium

 

Biz Stone, co-founder of Twitter, returned to the company in 2017 tasked with boosting morale, revamping policies, and establishing a clear purpose. He worked on creating a purpose statement, “Serve the public conversation,” which was successfully adopted, aligning the company globally and guiding policies toward responsibility for the health of public conversation. The statement also attracted purpose-driven employees, contributing to a positive work environment. In his story, Stone highlights the importance of purpose statements in companies, citing examples such as Airbnb and Patagonia, and notes that a clear purpose strengthens the team, highlights what matters and what doesn’t, and improves productivity.

 

At the end of his story, Stone leaves us with a meaningful reflection:

 

“Purpose statements aren’t just for companies. A personal purpose statement can help you in a similar way. I’ve found that in my own life, when I think about what I’m doing through the lens of purpose, everything becomes clearer. I know what to do, what not to do, and where I should be heading. A personal purpose statement is like having a map in my head. Why am I here? Oh, that’s it! Then I should follow this path.”

 

Story #2: From the Organizational to the Personal: The Difficulty of Defining My Personal Purpose

 

Andrea Garderes, Partner and Director of Planning and Management at Almabrands.

 

When you have spent almost 15 years helping companies and organizations discover their purpose and become a better version of themselves, asking yourself about your own personal purpose should be a simple task. In fact, it really shouldn’t even be a question, because one would assume that someone who deals with these kinds of reflections and content every day has surely sat down more than once to think about and confirm their own source of meaning for everything they do inside and outside the workplace. Otherwise, how could they drive others toward that change and transformation?

 

However, reality is far from this idealization, and just as in the world of organizational purpose, this territory is full of myths and mistakenly assumed truths.

 

Perhaps the first thing is to acknowledge that, until I began this process, personal and organizational purpose had no essential connection for me. Of course, when choosing a place to grow professionally, you bring your values and dreams to the table, but not necessarily the idea of a transcendent purpose that gives direction to your life. “That runs on a parallel track,” I kept telling myself. And that was probably the first barrier to break down: connecting both worlds did not take value or uniqueness away from either; quite the opposite. Doing so opened up an opportunity to make every part of my day-to-day life more relevant, meaningful, and coherent.

 

Having somewhat overcome that initial barrier, I moved forward in the process, still anxious. High expectations, self-imposed pressure, and my habit of being very good at uncovering and putting into words the purpose of others acted as a kind of creative block. With every exercise I was given, my vision grew cloudier. “I can’t see it, it’s not coming. I have no purpose.” All those areas of impact that revealed themselves so clearly for the companies I worked with as a consultant disappeared when I looked at myself, when I tried to go layer by layer to find something meaningful and unique. I managed to identify strengths, yes, areas where I contributed, too, “things I was good at or stood out in,” but all very far from the standard of what a personal purpose “worthy of the name” should be.

 

I stayed in that loop until, with the help of those who accompanied and guided me, faced with a hopelessly blank page, I started changing the questions, going beyond performance and connecting with what inspired and energized me. Things that came through in any setting or place, no matter who I was with, and that turned out to be a constant and distinctive driving force. And the ideas began to flow, the words to become clearer, and the concepts to take shape. And then I saw it. It wasn’t the perfect sentence; I wrote and rewrote it more than once, at times it felt too long and even the focus wasn’t right, but it grew stronger and left me with that sense of meaning, of guidance, that everyone else talked so much about.

 

Today, I keep challenging and revisiting it, but with the peace of mind that, beyond the words, the reflection and the statement brought me closer to what matters to me, to what I want to leave the world as my own mark and contribution.