The Knowledgebase

Inspiration

Shared understanding

Bringing purpose to life

Clarifying your motivation for change

A common reaction to hearing about Blueprint’s approach is to feel both inspired and overwhelmed.

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Being purpose-led is both an organisational and a personal challenge. 

Purpose only comes to life if it means something personally to you and connects in some way with your own desires and aspirations for the business, your team and yourself.

To deepen your conviction for change it can therefore be helpful to start by reflecting on your own experience and what has helped, guided and motivated you.  

Much of our work with people in business starts with exploring the assumptions and beliefs that inform how decisions are made and how people in the business behave, so, before starting to try and put it into practice, we encourage you to start with exploring your own assumptions and beliefs and, in the light of that, to explore how you personally convey what it means to be purpose-led and how to put it in your own words.

Exercise:

You can do this exercise alone or with a coach.

Reflect back on your own career: how have limiting beliefs about the role of business or what motivates people impacted you?

This exercise builds on the exercise in Challenging assumptions & beliefs which also explains what we mean by limiting beliefs.

Think of a time you were thriving at work and felt you were fulfilling your potential:

  • What was the deeper motivation driving you?
  • What was the balance between intrinsic or extrinsic motivation? [Intrinsic motivation is where behaviour is driven by internal rewards because it is naturally satisfying and extrinsic motivation involves engaging in a behaviour in order to earn external rewards or to avoid punishment.]
  • What mattered about what you were doing? And how you were doing it?
  • What was different about how you interacted with people?
  • How did this impact on others / on your business relationships?
  • What broader impact did this have?
  • Did your immediate colleagues feel the same? If so, why, if not why not? What was different for them?

How have your expectations of work and your own sense of what you want to achieve through work changed? What now for you is most important to making a role fulfilling, and the company somewhere you want to commit to?

How have your expectations of work and your own sense of what you want to achieve through work changed? What now for you is most important to making a role fulfilling, and the company somewhere you want to commit to?

Look ahead 10 years – your organisation is one in which employees, suppliers, communities all feel it is worth contributing to:

  • What are they contributing towards? What are you contributing towards?
  • What is guiding decision taking in the business? What is guiding you?
  • What does being purpose-led look like for you? For your team? For your organisation?

Whilst it’s important and helpful to be intrinsically motivated to drive change, hold it lightly and don’t try to force change, that’s not how true and lasting changes happens.

To be a catalyst is the ambition most appropriate for those who see the world as being in constant change, and who, without thinking that they can control it, wish to influence its direction.

Theodore Zeldin