05. Leadership: Finding Your Purpose

Hey, welcome back, my friend, to Leadership in a Nutshell where we are cracking the code of the driven mind. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman, and we're taking bite sized pieces and keep you rocking and rolling because I know how hard it is to create a ton of time to do the necessary steps. I'm super pumped today to be with you for episode five, Purpose and Impact. Basically in a nutshell where, you know, just think about a couple questions as we get rolling here. Why are you doing what you're doing? Just think about that. Huge question for our short time together, right? Why do you do what you do for a living? Big question. If you could choose again, would you, would you choose what you're doing? Would you choose something different? How would you show up? Perhaps in a different way. So today is really about how purpose is directly tied to your impact levels, your reach, the ability for you to really effectively lead others. And I think it's really important when we think about purpose, we kind of get into our industries for different reasons. Different. Whether you went to school for a certain thing or there was a family business that you grew up in and ended up taking over, or you were, you know, you learned to trade in the military or went to trade school, whatever it is. But suddenly we find ourselves and we're making a living and then all of a sudden it's like, wait a minute, why am I doing this? And around purpose and leadership, you know, there's so many areas we can go and we have a short time together. Today I'm going to assign you a big heavy piece of homework. So I just want to create some concept and context around what we're talking about. But you know, we wrestle with and kind of get challenged by this whole purpose concept. We definitely want to make an impact, but what does that mean, right? How does it really show up? And it can take, you know, our impact through our purpose can show up in different ways, different faces, different perspectives, the reason you do something or why something exists. But you know, here's one thing too, is what about when things change? What if why you got into what you're doing might have changed a little bit over the course of time? What if you're a little bit of a different person than you were? I know.

I consider that I'm on my third.

Or fourth, I guess, now that I think about it, maybe my fourth life of my 50 years ish on the planet, right? It's like, well, wait a minute, I've had these different kind of lives during this life. And how does that impact through my different purpose and what that looks like? Right. So, you know, I've done a lot of work and I do a lot of strategic work. I do a strategic growth intensive day where, you know, people come and spend an entire day with me working through different challenges, obstacles, breakthroughs. But today, I'm just going to kind of run through this with you of just a few questions that you can ask yourself. And first, we start out with what we call the quandary question. And that is, why am I here? Like, why do I exist? Why am I on this planet? And a lot of people have a really hard time there. And so we kind of go to the second step and ask some reframing questions. And, you know, you kind of go, well, what am I doing here? How do I go about things? Who am I spending my time with and enjoying? And then we go to the third step of uncovering purpose, and we do a little bit of a behavior inventory. If I'm really trying to get clarity around my purpose and what I'm doing, why I'm doing, what I'm doing, who I am as a person, this action behavior inventory, where do I get meaning, where do I get joy? Where do I get fulfillment? Is a very important step to take. Then we go to what we call the service to intersection, meaning where am I spending my time in service? A lot of us, you know, whether it's family, friends, community, churches, animal shelters, a lot of people like you and I, our service, too, shows up in the business. It shows up through our companies. It shows up through what we create, and that's perfectly okay.

There's nothing wrong with working a lot.

With creating a lot.

As long as you understand the why, the purpose, and you're making a positive impact through it, it can be your expression in life.

I don't have children.

I'm blessed with a great marriage to the lovely Christy.

That does take work.

It's not like we just, oh, we wave a magic wand. Everything's amazing. We're two different human beings, so we work at it. But a lot of my life is expressed through the businesses that I'm involved in and the programs and the projects that I create. Right. So then we go to step five, which is the energy ad and life sucker task list.

So, meaning, what are the things that really add energy to your life and your situation? And then what are the things that you just go, oh, my gosh, that just sucks the life out of me when, you know, for me, it's spreadsheets. I love spreadsheets. I love all the data that they can process. I love getting amazing reporting. But it'll suck the life right out of me to try to build one from scratch. And that's okay, because when I understand my purpose is not to build spreadsheets, there are other people on my team that have much more purpose in that capacity than I do. And that's okay for all of us. Okay, then we go from that task list and we go, what about honoring my purpose versus being in purpose? What's that? Clarity process. So we have this challenge of like, oh, I've got to do these certain things, you know, how I live my life, how I engage others, how I speak, how I support my growth and positivity. Sometimes it's like, you hang your hat on, I've got to do these things. And to honor, quote, unquote, my purpose, how about you just be it? It just shows up in your daily life, in your daily leadership, in your company, how you create different ways that you market, different ways you create your sales process, who you hire, how you add to your team, how you train your team, who you invest in, and how you invest in their growth and education and those different types of things. So very powerful things. I know we're cruising along here because there's a lot that I just really want to get on the table. And then I am going to assign this entire exercise for you at the end of our time together. So stay with me here. The seventh step is to create what we call the death exercise. I first did this exercise when I went to the E Myth Academy. E. Myth, Michael Gerber, many of you know the book. I actually became a certified E Myth consultant in December of 2,020. And one of the things that Gerber had me do in that process was to write my own eulogy. And so, you know, I've created a three step process around this where you kind of imagine your death and you visualize what your funeral would look. And I know it sounds kind of grim and dark, but incredibly powerful when you realize at some point, I mean, a reality to life is we're all going to die one day, right? And so it goes back to some of the cliches of, you know, the tragedy isn't dying, the tragedy is to go through life and never really lived and all those different things.

And so once I get clarity about.

What'S my death situation going to be.

What'S my funeral going to look like.

And then you actually craft a eulogy that would be read and see what that looks Like, I get chills just thinking about it and talking about it here today because it's so powerful.

Then we go to step eight and.

We actually go back and look through those first seven steps and we circle keywords and we get some clarity around specific things and we take the first.

Run through, if you will, of crafting your own primary purpose. And what are you doing here? And now I know we're talking about leadership. I'll talk about purpose and company and.

Vision in our next episode.

But this is really about you.

If you're in leadership, you have to.

Come from a place of authenticity, honoring and guided through your own purpose as you be. As I mentioned in Purpose on Purpose.

The game really, really begins to change.

So you create a quick draft, then you leave it alone for 24 hours, get completely away from it, go do some other things. Then you schedule some time where you can have some personal time with yourself and read what you wrote. Like, does this reflect who I am?

Does this reflect how I want to be in my life and what this looks like? And then ultimately you craft your final draft of what your primary purpose kind of looks like and how that goes. And today, if you're not down to invest the time to go through this exercise, that's okay. You've got to find the time for yourself. You've got to make your own decisions. But what I do want you to have take away here is how powerful purpose is. You are hard pressed, my friend, to find a really effective leader that doesn't understand why they're on the planet. Like I said, for me, having children wasn't in the cards, but I'm very blessed that I get to impact a lot of children through their parents. I've had people come to me and say, man, I remember five years ago when you said this about parenting. I'm not sure where you got your guidance to teach parents how to parent better. And that's probably why I can do it, because I don't have kids, right? But the reality is that wasn't in my purpose on this planet to bring children into this world. However, my purpose is tied to impacting those that do have children, impacting those that do have huge teams. You know, I don't have. I don't own a company with a really large team at the moment, but we do have clients that have hundreds and hundreds of team members, and I'm able to influence them through their top leadership. So it doesn't matter whether you're by yourself and figuring out your next level. If you've got 100 team members or 1,000 team members. But regardless, it is all about you getting super clear with who you are as a person, why you're here and why you do what you do on a daily basis. So if you want this entire it's 10 pages, it's basically an eight step process, multiple steps in each step. If you want me to send you this, just go to kennychapman.com it's my name, kennychapman.com and just go to the Contact Us form and fill out in there and put primary purpose exercises. Just let me know you listen to this episode of the podcast here together. Episode five put that purpose and you'd like to have the worksheets and the work to do and then take the time and I'm happy to help in any way that I can as you do this incredibly important work. It's not the easiest work, but it is absolutely worth doing the work. So go to kennychapman.com fill it out in the Contact Us form if I can help you. If you want to go a deeper dive, but really take a step back today and ask some questions. Why am I doing what I'm doing? What am I here for? There's some tremendous clarity that really changes the game for you there. So do me a favor, make sure you subscribe here, rate, review this podcast.

I'm super honored you're spending some time.

With us until we talk. I'll see you on the next episode. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. This has been leadership in a nutshell where we're cracking the code of the driven mind. See you next.