The practice of purpose

I want you to win. I want you to have a better outcome. I want you to love what you're creating and I want you to love the life that you live now. Next Level UX has purpose. The purpose of Next Level UX is to accelerate your growth, help you foster clarity, help you connect to your greater purpose. Right. Well, we're talking about purpose today through intentional design. So my thesis is around connecting you intentionally to all the things that you care about while teaching you about the practices of design maturity and what's going to help you be a better design leader, what's going to help you be a better practitioner, what's going to help you be more prepared and efficient in everything that you do, so that you can do these things on the right side, like, so you can lead the net new project, so you can build a remote team, so you can optimize your approaches when business comes at you with different challenges and things, so you can optimize for design impact. You know, all these things on the right are just the, like, you know, we're going through quarterly planning, we're going through our new initiatives, and these things are just things that we come back to every single quarter. And the more that you can practice, the more that you can elevate, like how these systems work and be aware of them and write about them and journal about them. Oh, my gosh, the more awareness and vibration and excitement that you're gonna have in your career because you're just gonna be aware of what's going on and the more awareness leads to just better outcomes because you're more in tune. What's happening. You can make better course corrections. You can make better moves. You know, if you're playing a game of chess, you want to be able to make good moves. If you're playing checkers, even, you know, you want to make good moves. Think about it. Moving through. All right, let's keep going. Purpose right now is really fueled by intention. Now, if I walk into the door and I walk into the studio and I'm thinking, like, what am I going to do today? And I'm thinking about, what am I going to do today? And I didn't already put the thought of before I even walked into the studio, well, what kind of a day am I going to have? How am I going to. I have, say, six or seven meetings today. How am I going to show up for those meetings? How am I going to help the people that are in those meetings have a better outcome in their day? What can I do to prepare for this, what can I do to set them up for success? What can I do to set the team up for success? What can I do to set up a project for success? All these things, that's intention. So when you have a sense of purpose, and that purpose is fueled when you can step in to a more intentional life. And that's what we call intentionality. So, you know, design intentionality, being aware of what you're doing when you come into the game, being aware of what you're doing when you're stepping, stepping in to your role. And from here, it just makes things incredibly, incredibly exciting. So let's continue this talk. So the next thing is tension is manifested from consistent reflection. So what do I mean by this? Consistent reflection is that ability to be able to journal on a daily basis. And journaling on a daily basis could be as simple as writing down on, like, a notepad or a little piece of paper and thinking about the four or five things that you accomplish for the day and thinking about, oh, well, how could I have done that better? How could I have done this better? That went really well. Okay, well, could I have done here and then just writing about it or could be like, today was a great day. I accomplished this. I met this person, I made this meal, I went on this run. You know, what was the life force of what you did in the day? And thinking about and really sitting into that moment and feeling it. And that consistent reflection is a way for you, again, to course correct and recalibrate and then reintegrate what you're doing. So I'll say that again. So consistent reflection allows you to quickly course, correct, recalibrate, and then reintegrate. Those sorts of, you know, when we talk about the growth loop, which I'll show you that picture a little bit later, if you haven't seen it, these abilities to quickly course, correct and reflect are so, so incredibly valuable, but so underutilized. And the more that you can reflect and do these things, the faster you'll be able to have that emotional awareness and emotional intelligence to be able to snap back and jump in and get after these things. It's like another level of awareness. And we want to create that for you. We want to generate that sort of awareness. So the third thing is connecting to your purpose frequently helps you acknowledge why you do what you do. So when you can connect to the purpose, like, oh, my purpose is to help foster clarity, elevate your practice, help you increase your design maturity, so that you can show up better for your team, for yourself, and for Your company, I'm going to acknowledge that's why I do what I do, because I want you to win. I want you to have a better outcome. I want you to love what you're creating, and I want you to love the life that you live. And we are designers. We are creators. We're makers. Like, it is a superpower to be able to create something out of nothing. And to be able to create an experience that uplifts somebody or that makes their life a little bit better. Just that moment when you can make their life a little bit better or solve that problem that they're at, it is so invigorating. And so just. It just lifts me up. And I think that's, like, essentially why people design and they want to create that emotion. And I think that when you can acknowledge why you do what you do and be appreciative of it and grateful for it, and I think it just unlocks a whole nother level of purpose. So let's keep this going. So develop the routines to connect to the purpose and create intentional actions each step of the way. So when I was talking about self, reflection leads to a little bit of course correction. That course correction leads to a little bit more of a recalibration. And then that recalibration is like you going in and re acknowledging what you need to do to create some more intentional actions. And it just allows you to connect. And when you're thinking about your routines, your routines are your patterns. The patterns that you create and the routines that you create are. Those are your habits. And when you can kind of recalibrate your habits in order to serve your purpose, it allows you to have a little bit more momentum, maybe a lot of momentum. I'm just being conservative here with a little bit, because when you're first starting this out and you're thinking about, like, whoa, shoot. How do my routines serve me on a daily basis? When am I going to sleep? When am I waking up? When am I working out? When am I cooking? When am I supporting my family? When am I supporting my work? When am I supporting myself? Just foundational living practices. How am I doing this? How am I coaching my kid? How am I being a dad? How am I being a friend? How am I being a husband? How am I being a creator? How am I being a maker and thinking about how my routines serve me and my purpose? So, you know, alignment. It's like you have all these things that you're doing. Like, that's why there's a lot of circles on the screen right now. But when you have all these intentions and you bring them together and you align them, boom, that's when the magic happens. That's when the magic happens. So let's continue doing that. So how do we do that? Well, I want you to go back to week one and week two and week three and think about what your doing right now to connect your purpose and your greater mission to your routines and what you're doing on a daily basis. For example, when we go back to clarity, we had already given you the homework to do. Purpose. Figure out what your kryptonite is, understand your priorities, understand how you identify as a person, as a creator, as a maker, how you want to show up, how do you want to interact with other people when you're in there and then what success looks like for you and for, you know, just your being. So you got to get clarity straight up. So go back and reevaluate your clarity. That's a big part of the homework assignment today. The second part is, like, thinking about your goals. So you have passion, project, career and personal goals. You have different things going on, right? Your passion goals are like, I'm going to build. Right now, one of my passion goals is I'm building a video game. Always wanted to build a video game. Jude inspired me. And it's like, there's an opportunity there and I just, I have to do it. I have to do it. It's a passion creating this studio on wheels, this rv and being able to travel and still be able to create, make and have this, like, beautiful space to just make things and create things. That was also a very big passion of mine. Now for project, I have about over a dozen things that grote that we're doing to just really crush this next quarter. Those are my big projects. Plus we're potentially moving and looking at some land that we might want to invest in. That's a big project that those are things that need to happen from a career perspective. I'm really happy at growth day. I'm really happy at next level ux. My career goals and ambitions. I feel like I've gotten to the point there where that's taking a little bit of a backseat. I'm not trying to go off and move to different career. So my career goal is on point. Like, I'm doing the things I need to do. So my passion and project goals are serving my career goals and then my personal goals, staying fit. So I'm stretching, walking, running, lifting every single, like, week. So I'm staying physically Fit, staying healthy, and nurturing my body. So I got my goals set right? So how do these goals connect to these things on the left, like, my clarity? I need to be very aware and intentional about how I integrate these things. And that, again, helps me connect to my greater purpose, helps me understand, like, okay, what I'm doing. Because when it comes down to it, then we have our plan. So, you know, how are you going through these goals and getting ready and getting and breaking them down and just staying super focused and laser focused on these elements because. Because these are the things that help you stay on track. Now, when you combine all these things, that's what we're talking about with purpose, and it helps bring that intentionality. So I want to encourage you to go back to week one and week two, reconnect to these things, because this is the month where we go really clear on the purpose that we're bringing into our life. And how do we do that? Again, like, when I was talking about routines, now, I know I talked about this in week four with practice. And then when you start to understand, like, well, when am I going to have my priorities going? When am I going to be setting my ritual, like, evaluating my rituals, my routines with my team and integrating these things? I want to encourage you to go and map out your week and see, still, if you haven't done this yet, like, how are you moving through the week? So today is Thursday. It's Thursday lineup day. And the lineup of Thursday is preparing all the things that need to get reviewed and finalized by Friday. So Friday is kind of like this upcoming week, Friday finishers getting things done. But I need to prepare and execute and finish things today, and that's what I'm going to do. After this talk, I'm going to go in and just really nail down these things. And I want you to also think about, like, well, how are you doing this? How are you reviewing or redesigning or getting more intentional with your schedule? And really mapping it out takes time, takes effort, and it takes a little bit of accountability for yourself to be able to go in and just really think this through. So I want you to encourage you to do that. Sam.