Leading From Empathy: What is your purpose?
Today, my personal mission statement is: “I am in my power when I use my freedom and empathy to spread well-being and happiness.”
This morning, while preparing to share with the world our latest creation, the prototype of valuesexercise.com, I decided to take a look back through my journals.
A little less than a year ago, on April 16th, I wrote these words in my journal.
“Feeling sadness. Feeling flooded. Feeling out of control and out of my environment. I am running out of money. My plans for Actually Curious are getting more precarious. I probably need to find a job. My parents mean well, but I am having a hard time co-existing with them. How do I make them feel seen while protecting my space and boundaries? What do I need to do to thrive?”
Around the same time, I began a 21-day abundance manifestation challenge, which helped me to form into habit, work that I’d been attempting around personal well-being, mindfulness and growth. I also was beginning to form a deeper bond of trust with my Men’s group, as we all navigated the ever-volatile challenges of life at the beginning of COVID-19, together.
This following a 2019 in which I ended a long-term relationship and suffered the loss of two older brothers within three consecutive three-month periods. At this point, individual and collective trauma had taught me important lessons about acceptance.
During the weeks following, as I flipped through the journal I realized, I would be ghosted by two potential marketing services clients.
I was broke, unemployed, two months into the pandemic, and worst of all, my parents thought I had become a loser.
I needed to find a way to derive my happiness and self-worth, not from the world around me, but from an internal source that I could call home.
I took a moment to revisit my values and mission.
This time, I didn’t just go through the motions. I found privacy, slowed down, and really listened for a somatic connection to the words I was exploring. Trying to connect with language from an intuitive, abstract, and empathetic place. Trying to listen to the wisdom of my inner child.
Today, I don’t recall the values that I had identified. What I remember is that, for the next few months, whenever things got uncertain or my confidence wavered, being able to return to my values gave me an anchor to my purpose. It gave me a framework for making decisions that honored my self-worth and boundaries.
Today, I know that whenever my world feels uncertain, I return to my inner voice and values to guide me. I revisit my values to see if anything has changed.
Today, my personal mission statement is: “I am in my power when I use my freedom and empathy to spread well-being and happiness.”
I always believed that having a clear and accurate sense of individual and organizational values and being adaptive as they change, is central to sound and empathetic decision making.
But today, I return to the truth that is within me in more ways than one. I can read it in my journal. I went from fear, scarcity, and toxicity, to acceptance, abundance, and grace as the norm rather than the exception.
It’s led me to a place where I’m able to spread the tools that have helped me, to communities that can be helped by them too.
It’s led me to alignment between my purpose, how I spend my time, and how I spread compassion to the community around me.
We at Curiosity Lab are blessed to be able to share this free digital values exercise, with you.
We hope it brings you clarity to unlock the gifts you mean to share with the world too. To help you on your way, here are 3 easy steps to getting started.
Develop a Mindfulness Routine:
- Perhaps that is starting the day without your phone for :30 mins, or journaling or meditating once a day, your mindfulness routine is a gift to yourself that allows you the time to just feel, without outside influences. Starting a mindfulness routine is an important part to developing tools of slowing down and checking in with your emotional state and the choices that influence your life.
Get Clarity on Your Values and Purpose:
- As we grow and change, so do the things that matter to us. Having ways of auditing and checking in with your values and purpose helps give a safe place to return to when the situations, people, and world around us are constantly changing.
Express Gratitude for the Good and the Bad
- Positivity is like a muscle. It supports you instinctively the more you use it, especially when you aren’t expecting to need to use it. The more time we spend expressing gratitude, even for the more difficult moments of life, the more positive energy we have for healing, creativity, and collaboration.
I’d love to read your values and mission statement and hear what it means to you. Email me with the subject “Leading from empathy” to hello@curiositylab.io.
To learn more about how Curiosity Lab helps individuals, brands and nonprofits explore, articulate, and build a community around their values; or to schedule a virtual workshop to spread tools of empathy in your community visit www.curiositylab.io.
