Leading in Your Life On-Purpose

Personal leadership is defined as “The proactive process of meaningfully aligning and integrating your life around what matters most.” There’s more here than meets the eye. You hold the key to the ignition to start the engine of your life. Be thoughtful and intentional about exploring possibilities to think about how best to align and integrate your decisions to produce the authentic life you seek.

Your personal 2-word purpose statement pays dividends. When you know your purpose, you have a personal, universally applicable point of reference for alignment and integration. Life becomes simpler because you’re aware of who you are, and you have a growing appreciation for what’s right for you. As you develop this internal guidance control for yourself, then events and circumstances will slow down and you’ll more clearly see your way through what might otherwise be chaotic or confusing. You’re capable of process matters and thoughts more rapidly and accurately because you have your purpose (vision, missions, and values) as a benchmark as well as a touchstone.

Leadership is a broad term that, like beauty, can be described as “being in the eye of the beholder.” Ask ten people to define leadership and you’ll likely get ten facets of this brilliant diamond. Most can agree that leadership involves other people but that’s an incomplete understanding.

Whereas leadership involves working with others, personal leadership is about working on and with yourself. You can’t delegate this responsibility nor should you miss this opportunity to better your body, mind, and spirit or circumstances. Here is the only place in the world where you possess a significant measure of control through choice. Your power of choosing can be exercised and strengthened or unused and diminished.  

Self-care is not selfish or weak. Actually, it is essential and strong. The more you develop as a person, the more others are willing to follow your lead. The better you know yourself, the stronger your leadership potential of others will increase. In other words, as you win in your inner life, then your outer life is likely to thrive.

Ask yourself the following personal leadership questions:

• What am I feeding my mind, my body, my heart, and my spirit to be a better person?
• Am I reading books, articles, blog posts, and other content that inspire me?
• Who in my life uplifts and calls upon me to rise above my problems?
• Am I investing my time in healthy exercise, eating, and behaviors?
• Do I have a plan to learn something new in the next 30 days … or the next year?
• What is one thing I can start doing today to make my life better?
• Do I have a scarcity or an abundance view of the world?
• How am I serving and giving?

The sooner you decide to be the leader of your life, the better off we all are. That, by the way, is true prosperity—everyone profits.

Personal Leadership involves the person you see in the mirror. Most of us will readily admit we have different “voices” within us competing for our “best” interest. No one escapes temptation. The following expressions offer insightful evidence of our inner demons of discontent and the desire for a more integrated life:

• “I have my own demons to battle.” – a la Flip Wilson‘s famous line, “The Devil made me do it.”
• “I must not be in my right mind.”
• “I’m torn. My head says one thing, my heart another.”
• “I need some time to get my head together.”
• “I can’t seem to get my act together.”
• “Why am I so easily distracted?”

Get started leading your life right now! Not tomorrow. Not next week. Right now! That’s leading your life on-purpose.

Who’s your mentor? If you have a mentor, thank them today. If you are a mentor, thank your protege today. Mentor-protege relationships are ultimately work because there’s a mutual benefit to both parties, albeit the benefits are different from one another.

Mentor-protege relationship are needed more than ever for the mutual benefit of the mentor and protege alike. The sharing of experiences and the mix of perspectives provides mutual benefit to both parties. This relationship is ultimately one of mutual giving and taking so each party prospers, albeit differently.

We live in a world of social networks, yet we’re too often curled up with our smart phones tapping away instead of talking it up face to face. Your favorite search engine may be efficiently rich in information and stories, but it doesn’t offer the benefit of caring inquiry, guidance unique to you, or such a perspective so fresh even your search results didn’t offer a clue.

Finding A Mentor-Protege Relationship

If you don’t have a mentor, then ask a person you respect and trust to have a cup of coffee. If you want to be a mentor, then invite a person you deem worthy (however you set that standard) to have a cup of coffee. If the person is remote from you consider using a video conferencing system such as Zoom, Facetime, or Skype to make a more personal connection.

Finding a mentor can feel a bit like dating. There’s that fear of rejection–what if they say no? There’s the fear of reaching beyond one’s “standing” and risking any current relationship or future possibilities. There doubt such as, “Why would {name} give me the time of day? They must be so busy.” Yep, you wish you had an app for finding a mentor.

While the above concerns are real, let’s consider it from the point of view of the mentor. Being asked to be a mentor is a compliment, period. Yes, mentors are typically very busy people so their time is limited, but that doesn’t mean it is available. They may draw the mentor time from a different bucket of time, typically there giving bucket. In many cases, you might actually find they want to mentor someone, have mentally allocated time for it, but they are just as uncomfortable inviting someone to enter into a protege relationship. It’s that dating syndrome working in reverse.

Someone has to break the awkwardness. That’s your job regardless of which side of the equation you’re on!

More and more I find myself in the role of mentor. My Life On-Purpose, this website and the constellation of On-Purpose websites are my attempt to share acquired understanding but it isn’t mentoring. Mentoring is ultimately a relationship. The relationship can be light, brief, and even superficial but still meaningful.

Great mentoring is ultimately intimacy found in bearing our souls to another human being in a humble admission of “I need guidance.” That risky kind of vulnerability and trust is rare, but such confession offered by putting voice to and perspective so worth it.

Avoid confusing mentoring with mental health therapy or counseling where the focus is typically on recovery or dysfunction found in the past and present. Mentoring is about moving forward from today from your functionality and strengths toward greater revelation and expression of your purpose.

What Is A Mentor, Really?

In the Merriam-Webster online dictionary, the following root story of the word mentor is offered. “We acquired ‘mentor’ from the literature of ancient Greece. In Homer’s epic The Odyssey, Odysseus was away from home fighting and journeying for 20 years. During that time, Telemachus, the son he left as a babe in arms, grew up under the supervision of Mentor, an old and trusted friend. When the goddess Athena decided it was time to complete the education of young Telemachus, she visited him disguised as Mentor and they set out together to learn about his father. Today, we use the word mentor for anyone who is a positive, guiding influence in another (usually younger) person’s life.”

A mentor is a person with a somewhat impersonal interest in your personal leadership development and growth. You may be thinking, “‘… a somewhat impersonal interest,’ why not a personal interest?”

Actually, those of us who mentor need to maintain a middle space of closeness and distance from our proteges.  Otherwise, we run the risk of being too close to the person to where we empathize too much and become too emotionally connected. Closeness must also exist in order to be properly informed and for a relationship to informed and applicable.

We ask, we listen, we share our experience and insights. We guide, advise, and keep it real as best we understand it.

Mentorship is not worship. Your mentor will eventually fail you so avoid the false idol trap of projecting perfection upon them. Instead, embrace the healthy act of forgiveness and character acceptance within reason. All mentors are flawed human beings. For the wellbeing of both of you, as a protege don’t set unrealistic or idealistic expectations upon your mentor. We have blind spots, weaknesses, and perspective, as well as different background, capabilities, resources, and experiences.

These “imperfections” are often more qualifying than disqualifying for their humanizing factor. Much as your purpose is a 2-side sword tempered in the heat and cold of strength and weakness, respectively, into one weapon, you have the benefit to use it for good or destruction of the relationship. By definition, purpose is for good.

While there’s often a fine line between crazy and genius Avoid, when possible, the abusive authoritarian. Admittedly, a good mentor may be a temperamental, eccentric, or cantankerous grump who exhibits impatience, demands, and intolerance as part of their gift of genius. You get to decide how much color in the character you want to accept, but abuse is never acceptable.

On-Purpose Pointers:

• Break the awkwardness to initiate a mentor-protege relationship
• Set realistic boundaries and expectations for the relationship
• Recognize that the mentor-protege relationship is one of mutual give and take

Bonus Story

When I was in my mid-thirties, John, a colleague, attempted to organize a mentor program. Reaching out to select men in their 50s and older he anticipated they would be honored to be mentors. To his surprise, all of the men John approached felt inadequate to the task or were too busy to “take on the responsibility.” You see, they had never really been mentored so they perceived themselves as not being up to the role. They threw out the “busy” excuse. I once heard the acronym for BUSY is “Burdened Under Satan’s Yoke.” Now, that’s off-purpose.

Sadly, the program never got off the ground.

Now that I’m in that 50+ category, I reflect on that experience differently. I’ve been blessed by many informal mentors in my life. In the preamble to the I Grow section I share the story of tennis legend Don Budget,  In my tennis, educational, business, and life I’ve had many casual mentors. People whom I admired and made themselves available to me for occasional advice, insight, or input.

Perhaps the most difficult challenge for me is that of being a pioneer of On-Purpose. In the late 1980s I began hacking a pathway into the then wilderness of purpose. There were a few people whom I found as colleagues. I’m not sure if I was guarded or they were guarded, but we never really seemed to connect and collaborate. Part of that was that we saw purpose differently and so we were, perhaps, too close and committed to our respective points of view. So I never really had a purpose-expert mentor so to speak. Then again, on-purpose, not purpose, was my expertise–the moment-by-moment being, thinking, doing, and choosing in one’s life, work, relationships, building, and expanding once you know your purpose in just two words. In this regard it has indeed been a very lonely journey accompanied only by a patience and trusting wife. Fortunately, I did have business and leadership mentors to complement my emerging field of expertise.

Mentors aren’t just for career and professional pursuits. While your vocational interests may be what draws many a relationship together, it is the character development that will bind you together.