Troubled, something missing (part 2)

In part 1, I talked about how we all have an innate nature and I was experiencing dissonance, disatisfaction, frustration which (in hindsight) was telling me that I was not able to follow my own nature.

I found that when I realised I was talking about finding work exciting and inspiring for the first time in a long time this leapt out as important.

Different words you might use would be joy or thriving.

I had moved away from following the business analyst career as a purpose but needed a new purpose to give me motivation. Everything in nature has a purpose — something for which it has been designed through many millions, in some cases, billions of years.

I found the idea of helping provide the conditions (preparing the soil) for a work environment that allows people to thrive a motivating purpose. This will do for now I thought. [Something that seems on the edge of impossible, certainly with no clear path, is a good purpose that will motivate.]

I continued to explore purpose and experimented with Simon Sinek’s method for finding your purpose — Find Your Why.

I went through this process with my friend Kav to help her discover her purpose. In essence it involves exploring (with a friend) a few stories from childhood or adolescence that seemed to resonate.

I decided to flip this and interviewed my family about their impressions of me as a child to uncover my Why.

I still remember that within a few minutes, my mum said:

You were always adventurous

It was only afterwards that this sank in and I realised that this was the most natural way of describing my outlook on life and my strengths.

I won’t inflict the full story on you but I do talk about this in I am an adventurer, what’s your story?

This was an exciting moment and I was happy to update my LinkedIn profile to reflect this 18 months ago. My purpose has continued to evolve since then. It is not a point in time where your future plans are laid out for you. This is not how nature works!

However, fighting against your nature and accepting a role that is imposed upon you is unhealthy and will have undesirable side effects if you ignore it for too long! This is what I had been discovering.

I was starting to get some real resonance now as my inner nature was becoming clearer to me.

I had also realised that the practices and methods we were adopting hinted at this truth. The cliche of ‘bringing your whole self to work’ which was reflected by some fluidity in roles that could now be adopted. In the agile community there is a concept of T shaped skills. In essence this says that it is desirable to adopt the skills of more than one role — in the world of software development this could be developer and tester. I felt the irony in this — being given permission to be more than the role that you had adopted in the work place (i.e. almost yourself). Hinting that perhaps individuals were, could be and should be more than a specific cog to fit into a perfectly designed machine.

What does this mean?

The sacrifice of our individuality that takes place when you walk through the company door was no longer desirable?! Not only was it not desirable, changes needed to be made in the name of business effectiveness. So what was the purpose of this mechanistic structure? Was it in the name of business success or was it in the name of control of individuals?

This knowledge did come at a cost. I had believed a story that was now proven to be false. I had spent my career believing that this mechanistic approach was a necessary individual sacrifice for business success. I didn’t even realise that this story existed and certainly not that other alternatives were possible. It felt like I had suddenly woken up.

At various points this has made me angry, mostly when I encounter it and feel it impinging on my freedom. I am still working on this but it is difficult to be angry with a system. It makes it difficult to take action to lessen the anger.

There are more aspects to this story which I won’t explore such as my appreciation of Design Thinking and Systems Thinking as two methods that bring in emotion into the workplace and an eco-systemic view of the world, from complex individual behaviour to organisations and beyond.

Where has this journey taken me?

It is only in the last year that I have realised some simple truths that guide me now.

Systems may control us but it is only individual agency driven by awareness of the systems we occupy that change those systems. And we can only grow and adapt from our current state of awareness of the systems that we occupy.
(of course, humanity is not the only actor that changes those systems with covid providing a global example of how systems can be changed dramatically)

Nature is the master teacher for systems and the hidden natural laws that drive the world which includes us. Humanity is subject to the same natural laws, we have not somehow transcended nature. (as an example, these are the principles of Biomimicry 3.8. Other principles are available such as Permaculture)

This is why I help individuals grow using nature as a guide and inspiration and with coaching as a tool to help individuals transform their awareness in alignment with natural law.