In the book, Future Purpose: A Five Dimensional Framework for building your C-Suite career, Chris van Melle Kamp, founder and CEO of Future Purpose, has taken his years of leadership experience to help others take charge of their own careers. Read an extract below.

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‘The horse leads with the heart’

As we build our careers, the question of purpose is one of the greatest influences—conscious and sub-conscious—on our career decisions. It manifests in different forms and at different times in our lives, nudging us towards change or convincing us to stay where we are.

It is embedded in our identity, our need to make a difference, our desire to do meaningful work and, in many cases, a deep desire to leave some kind of legacy. It can be a wonderful catalyst for action.

We can find some kind of purpose wherever we work and in whatever we do, but clearly the degree to which this energizes us will be directly proportional to the degree of alignment with our origins and values, our level of development and experience, the contexts in which we thrive, and our stages of life. 

In other words, four of the five key aspects of the Five Dimensions of Influence become evident in various forms and at various levels of intensity as we seek to discover a personal purpose that resonates with us.

We search for purpose in organizations that we are about to join, or we search for it in our current work and when we don’t find it, we disengage. We ask ourselves questions such as Why should I be doing this? Why I am here? and What good is all this hard work really doing? Our personal rejection of a context in which we find no purpose is often accelerated by a toxic firm culture, poor or inauthentic leadership, or the lack of future growth opportunities.

In other cases, we may well find huge attraction in joining firms where we can enjoy driving the firm’s fundamental purpose and appreciate the the impact of this firm’s presence in society.

Whatever we decide, personal purpose is central to most of our career decisions.

Although we all strive to find some kind of purpose in our lives, some people are able to find this sense of purpose more easily than others. Many feelings come to mind when we talk about purpose. At its core lies a sense of doing something meaningful or close to one’s heart. It can also be aligned to a sense of transitioning away from doing something that is essentially uninteresting towards something that provides you with a sense of fulfilment. There are underlying themes that relate to happiness, or at least being content.

In my work with executives, this issue of purpose is a significant component of our interactions. It permeates our conversations at every level, and while each person describes it differently, they each feel the need for it very strongly. The reality is that a sense of purpose can also be linked to how you are treated or respected in the workplace. A large proportion of those who have left their jobs during the last few years in order to find a more meaningful life, have left because they felt that they were not recognized by their leaders and/or colleagues. This sense of not being seen will weaken or even destroy any sense of purpose, no matter how strong you believe in it.

Even if we see purpose through a eudaemonic lens by taking the view that the pursuit of purpose has an element of altruism or value beyond the self in it, we also know that to achieve ‘purpose’, there are a whole host of environmental and systemic issues that may have to be overcome before reaching that state of living a purposeful existence.

It is often the realization of these very real systemic and environmental obstacles in our lives and in our minds that create the noise that destroys our ability to drive for purpose. It is here where people start calibrating the levels of importance of what exists in their lives, and they become torn between dreams and obligations.

One of the most powerful ways of moving through these very difficult phases is to have a really good sense of what makes you truly stressed, unhappy, out of flow and lacking in purpose, and then working from there, taking a realistic pathway of building more purpose in your work or life. 

The Five Dimensions of Influence model touches on many of these findings in that the model expressly talks to the integrated nature of everything that we are and do. In other words, our sense of purpose is not derived in isolation but finds itself being nurtured all the time by who we are, what we do, why we do it and where we do it. At the most fundamental level, our purpose is completely intertwined with our identity and talks to ‘who we are’. We may never be able to verbalize it, but we experience this at a subconscious and even conscious level. It is a deep driver of behaviour, choices, focus, who we want to associate with and our values.

Our relationships and our impact on the world at large are all part of building a sense of purpose, and even more so when we are fortunate to be part of a broader group who all pursue a ‘common purpose’. 

Winning teams and winning cultures, breakthrough results in innovation, global care for nature, moon landings—all are driven by a culture of collaboration and common purpose, and these are the teams and projects we want to be a part of. It is for this reason that toxic work environments, where every person is out for themselves, are so debilitating; they strip us of our ability to enjoy our work and appreciate the people with whom we need to work and connect. So the context is critical, but so is the content. It is the content of our work that adds the extra dimension of meaningfulness and that may feed into some inner personal purpose at the same time.

The word ‘meaningfulness’ carries within it a sense of weight. It is something more than just an event or experience—it is deeper and emotion-laden. I use the word to describe the level of joy, wellness, happiness and fulfilment that we may experience in certain jobs or careers. Meaningfulness in our work is an essential ingredient of being content and loving what we do. It speaks to our hearts and our souls. In distinguishing meaningfulness from purpose, one may say that purpose carries strong elements of meaningfulness, but the word ‘purpose’ is also likely to conjure up thoughts of doing, being and aiming in the right direction… 

Different world views exist around ‘purpose’. They vary from the spiritual perspective that we are governed by a larger external force that determines our purpose and our destiny, to the more existential perspective that carries a message of individualism and the ability to freely choose what our future should look like.

People tend to gravitate towards organizations, institutions and sectors of the world where they feel that this question of purpose is being addressed. Many people achieve this, not entirely, but at a substantive level. At a subconscious level, people want to belong to something that provides them with more than just a task to complete, where the work that they do has some kind of impact beyond profit for the firm. In other words, they feel that their work should speak to something deeper inside them. I don’t mean this in a spiritual or religious sense, although that may be highly relevant to many people. I mean it in the sense of feeling worthy and valued, and being able to contribute and add value, especially in a way that feeds an inner need. We may refer to it in different ways, but we know it when we see and feel it…

Some people spend their entire careers climbing the corporate ladder and creating wealth for themselves and their families while enjoying it very little. They have followed in a parent’s footsteps or built wealth that their parents could only dream of. Despite being very successful, some of these people are left feeling unfulfilled in their later years. They stuck with the original plan and, as Peter Senge says, they “have got better and better at doing what they don’t want to do”.

Over the past few years, the issue of purpose has been hugely inflated into a catch-all phrase that is somehow supposed to solve all issues related to achievement. The reality is that purpose plays an important part in our lives, but it should be seen as an ongoing and powerful energizer that guides us along the way, rather than as a final destination. Our purpose can also change and take on different forms if we allow it to do so, lest we become enslaved by it or become a prisoner of a dream… DM