Join us for an enlightening webinar on “Purpose, Power, and Peace,” where we explore the profound impact of these three principles on personal and professional growth. Discover the origins of purpose, learn how power truly manifests through relationships, and find the key to inner peace amidst life’s challenges. Drawing from years of experience and real-life stories, this session aims to help you unlock your authentic leadership potential and align your actions with your core values. Embrace the journey towards a more purposeful, powerful, and peaceful life.
Transcript
Hey, everybody. Welcome to the webinar on Purpose, Power, and Peace. There’s a story behind these three words, actually. Many years ago, when the LDI, the Leadership Development Intensive, which is kind of our flagship program, was in full swing, we did some research with graduates who had been there 4, 5, 6, 8, you know, 9 or 10 years earlier. We asked them, “What have you gotten? What did you get out of that experience that is still with you?” We took notes and stuff from about 25 or 30 people over different time periods, countries, industries, genders, and everything. The three words that kept showing up over and over again were some version of a greater sense of purpose, a greater sense of power or influence, or being comfortable with my influence, my power, and a sense of peace. Purpose, power, and peace. Those words just resonated with me. I thought, okay, maybe that’s what our work is really about. We have programs and things that we do, but ultimately what people come away with is some form or other of a greater sense of purpose, power, and peace. So, this is a webinar about those three things, and I’ve done a lot of thinking about them, as you can imagine, over the years.
So, let’s get started. See if I can do the shared screen thing here and do it quickly so that, you know, this is always a kind of a hard transition for me. Ah, here we go. Here we go. Some of you have wondered what I’m doing lately, like what I’m up to. I’ve created, with a couple of colleagues, a thing called Wiser at Work. It’s going to be a platform for all my stuff, all my material, how to get my body of work out there. So here we go. This is how to unlock your true, real, authentic leadership potential. So here we go.
Purpose. You know how I love words. Because I think sometimes knowing where the word came from can tell us a lot about what the word means and where its power is. Purpose comes from the Latin “pro” and “ponere,” which means to place or to put, similar to Spanish, the Old French “proposé,” and Middle English “purpose.” That means to put forward. So when we have a purpose, the purpose is what we are putting forward. You can think of it as what we are intending to happen, something along those lines.
Here’s an important thing: you don’t need a purpose. It’s not like you don’t have a purpose. You already have one, maybe even at least one. I know sometimes we go into an organization, and they say, “We need a purpose.” No, you already have a purpose. It might not be very useful, but you definitely have a purpose. Maybe it’s some version of looking good, or staying safe, or comfortable, or familiar. Some version of that, you know. But what is your purpose right now? Seriously, that’s what I’m hoping this next few minutes will help you figure out. What is your purpose in this moment? What is your purpose on this webinar? And then, what is your purpose like in general right now in your life at this point in your life? What are you intending? What are you up to?
I had a chance to confront that question in 1982. In 1981, the company that a couple of colleagues and I had started, we had the first computer-scored organizational survey. Brilliant product. We had no clue how to make a business out of it. And so after 3 or 4 years of trying to make it work, it was just upside down. It was, you know. So one partner declared bankruptcy. The other partner left town. I was left holding a lot of debt. A lot of my best friends and colleagues had invested in this thing with me. And a huge sense of guilt and obligation. So, I called my friend Dixon Delaney, who is a consultant colleague in Seattle. I was in Spokane, Washington. I said, “Dixon, I need help, man. I’m lost. I’m confused. I feel like a failure. I don’t know what to do.” He said, “Let me come over.” So he came over to Spokane, spent a long day with me. Toward the end of the day, he said, “I’ve got a question for you, John. What’s driving you?” And, you know, I thought and said the truth. He said, “Well, yeah.” And I said, “Getting out of debt and surviving the next month financially.” I’m telling you, when I confessed that to him, it was like this weight just came off my shoulders, and a sense of peace just flooded my whole being. It was like, oh. And that’s when he said, “Thank you, John. Thank you.” And then he said, and this is the question that really changed my life, “Is that a purpose worthy of who you are?”
I can still picture where I was sitting in the living room on Sumner Avenue in Spokane, Washington, and I said, “Yeah, right. Yeah. I was put on the planet with the mission, the purpose of getting out of debt and making it through the next month. I don’t think so. I don’t think that’s a purpose worthy of who I am.” And he said, “Well, okay, what would be?” And I said, “God, right now, Dixon, I don’t know. That is so in front of me, getting out of debt and surviving. I don’t know.” He said, “I really can’t help you until you figure out what that is.” So he went back to Seattle. Oh, and he said to me, “What about your tagline ‘transforming the world at work’?” And I said, “Yeah, it’s a really clever marketing thing I made up in the shower one day.” And he said, “Okay.” So he goes back to Seattle. About a month later, I called him and said, “Okay, Dixon, I’m ready.” He said, “Great, great, great. You figured it out. What is the purpose worthy of who you are?” And I said, “Transforming the world at work.” It turns out that’s not a clever marketing statement. That lives right here and has for many, many years in my life. And he said, “Okay, let’s get to work.” And that released naming it. Telling the truth, first of all, naming what the truth is rather than trying to pretend or to others or to ourselves, naming what your purpose is, even if it’s embarrassing, releases, creates space for what the real purpose is to show up.
So I have to say that I highly recommend telling the truth to yourself and then seeing what flows into that space. Everything that happened after that, my business doubled and doubled and doubled until, you know, fairly soon our little consulting firm was making, you know, like $1 million a year, which was just really extraordinary. Here’s a way to discern what your purpose is. Look at your calendar. What do you spend your time doing? And then look at your checkbook. Where do you spend your time and attention and your resources? If a Martian or a stranger showed up and just invisibly followed you around for 2 or 3 months, and then you asked them, “What is my purpose?” What would they tell you? Well, based on what I’ve seen, based on where you spend your time and attention and your resources, I would say your purpose is this. What would they say? When you step back and look at your life and your time and attention, where is it going? And is that a purpose worthy of who you are?
Another way to get at this, which we use in our EDI and our LDI, is this concept of what’s pulling on you. There are always three pulls working on us. These can be very useful to figure out where we’re leaning in terms of what we’re up to, what our intention is. The first pull is from ourselves. What do we need in that moment? The other is from others. What do they need in this moment? And the third one is from whatever the system is—the team, the marriage, the relationship, the company, the country. There’s me, you, and us. Which one of those three pulls on you right now? Off and on during the day, I call it our micro purpose. The micro purpose will move around. I’m on this phone call. I’m in this meeting. I’m doing this thing. I’m writing this thing. I’m doing this. Whatever. Which one of those three is the strongest for me right now, and that’s influencing my purpose. You can think of it at the micro level, which is this particular situation that I’m in right now, all the way up to what I call the meta level. But I want to tell you another experience that I had that really opened a huge door for me. I was doing a workshop with Tim Gallwey, who wrote the book “The Inner Game of Tennis.” I was doing a workshop on Saturday. He was doing a workshop on Friday, and so it was like maybe 100 executives. This is back in the 1980s, all men. He stands up in front of them, and he’s doing his work. He was a national American tennis champion almost at this point. And he says to them, “So how many of you play tennis?” Almost every hand goes up in the room. He says, “Why do you play tennis?” Some guy says, “To win.” He says, “How many of you play tennis to win?” Every hand goes up. These are CEOs, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Play to win. He says, “Really?” He said, “Wow. What a shame.” Some guy said, “What do you mean? Don’t you play to win?” He said, “Well, let me see if I understand. So you play tennis for two hours, let’s say. And at the end of that time, depending on what the numbers are, you decide whether you’ve enjoyed it or not. Whether it was worth it or not?” Yeah. And he said, “Isn’t that a shame? You missed two hours of great tennis. That’s beautiful. It’s like you missed two hours.”
And this takes me to this really, really wonderful presentation. I hope the video works. From Alan Watts, who is kind of a spiritual teacher from New York City, kind of an amazing guy. I’ve learned so much from him over the years. He’s been gone now for some time, but let’s see if we can, let’s see if this video will work here. Hang on a second. Here we go. What do you think? That took me to this place. I don’t know how they got this photograph of me swimming last week at the pool over here in West Seattle. Oh, I wish. I don’t think my back ever looked that good. I swam the 200 butterfly in college and the 200 individual medley, but when I was swimming the other day, I was thinking about our webinar and I was thinking about purpose and intention and so on. And I realized that when I’m swimming, my purpose, what am I? It’s like dancing, you know, I’m not trying to get somewhere. Maybe my coach wished I tried harder, but I’m feeling the water. I feel emotional just thinking of this. I love the feeling of gliding through the water and my catch, you know, how’s my catch and my pull. I’m totally into, okay, then there’s the pull, then there’s the press, then there’s the high elbow. Okay. How am I doing? I’m totally into each stroke, each stroke, each stroke. Get my breath on the left side, then on the right side. I’m totally into the experience. It’s absolutely magical, absolutely magical. People, when they see me swim, they don’t believe I’m 83 years old, you know? So there’s something about being in the moment that is really, really, really, it’s where purpose and power come together, you know? And that’s my purpose in this webinar. Right now, it’s to be absolutely fully present with this slide on the screen, with this moment. I wish I could see your faces. We talked about whether we should just have a regular Zoom call. That 70+ people registered, and I think we can only have 50 or something like that. We decided to do a webinar. It’s hard for me because my purpose for this webinar is to be with you. The content gives us something to talk about while I’m being with you. So this is my purpose here, just to be with you in this moment. And then, okay, let’s go to the next one. In general, it’s passionate non-attachment. I’m passionate in the water, but I’m not efforting like this. I’m putting a lot of effort, a lot of muscle. A lot of muscles are being used, believe me, during the butterfly. And let me tell you, I can only do about 4 or 5 strokes, and then it’s time for the heart-lung machine. So I’m passionate but not attached. All out leaving, leaving, what happens, open.
Great analogy. Before we leave purpose, I have a friend named Dave Wonder. He’s a really fascinating guy, and he is a trumpet player. His trumpet teacher is Bobby Shew, who is one of the greatest American jazz trumpet players. One day, Dave told me that he was playing this piece for his teacher, Bobby, and Bobby Shew said, “Dave, why are you playing this piece? You’ve got to decide why you’re playing it. What’s your purpose? What’s your intention? What’s your agenda here? Are you playing to impress people? Are you playing to impress me or to move me?” Isn’t that beautiful? Both are okay, but people can tell the difference, starting with yourself. I just think that is fabulous. So on a phone call, in a meeting, every interaction, what’s your purpose there? Are you trying to impress people or are you trying to move them? What do you really want? Tell the truth to yourself. That was the thing that set me free. And that’s the link, I think, to power.
Power. The word comes from “port,” which means able, to be able, and in Latin, the verb “posse” means “I am able.” So “posse” is to be able, from French “pouvoir,” and then Middle English “power.” This is from a guy in the 1980s. I heard about it from my friend Marc Yoel. All power to accomplish flows through relationship. If you have a role in life, you’re an executive, or you’re a parent, or you’re a partner in a relationship, there’s a certain kind of power that may be attributed to that role or influence. But congratulations, you’re the CEO and you’re sitting in your office. Congratulations. You have authority, but you don’t have leadership. You don’t have power because power only happens in relationship. No power happens until you start to interact with the world, maybe even with yourself. But when you start to interact, when you have a relationship with an idea, a relationship with some people, that’s when power actually occurs. In fact, you don’t have power. Like right now I’m sitting here, I’m talking about it, I don’t have any power. I’m not sitting here with power. Power happens in relationship with you. You’re either giving me power, so to speak, so I can use it. You’re letting me in, so to speak, allowing me to influence you or you’re not. And therefore I don’t have power with you. You’re allowing me to influence you wherever you think there’s a good reason for me to let this person in.
Well, what are some of the reasons people have for letting people in? What are some of the sources of power? This goes back to a classic article from the 1950s, I think, from French and Raven. These are reasons that people give you power because you have position, rank in the military. I spent four years. I knew exactly where I was in the power ranking by. We literally wore our rank on our sleeves. Literally. Okay. There’s coercive power. We give power to people because we think they have the ability to hurt us, hurt our career, hurt our reputation, hurt us physically. Then there’s reward power. They have the power to help us, which is the flip side of coercive power, by the way. It’s not a lovely thing. Mentors or sponsors in organizations have a lot of power, but they have both the power to help you and also the power to hurt you. Then there’s connection power. Sometimes people give you power because of who you know. You’re connected to somebody. I always made it a point to get to know the executive assistant to the CEO because he or she had tremendous power. They knew where all the bodies were buried. They were a fabulous source of influence. Information power. Sometimes people give you power because of what they think you know, what you know about. Expert power is another one, which is not just what you know but what you can do. If I have to have open-heart surgery, I might not want the doctor who wrote the book about heart surgery. I’d rather have the person who’s doing open-heart surgery every day. You know what I mean? Somebody who has expertise. And then finally, there’s personal power, which comes out of, flows from who you are. I don’t care who you are. I don’t care whether you’re an introvert or extrovert, Myers-Briggs type, Enneagram type, it doesn’t matter. No matter who you are or what kind of person you are, when you come home to yourself, that is a fabulous source of power.
Now there’s a line here and a line here. Above that line, you have power over people. Here, you have power with people. And down here, you have power through people, interaction with each other. Use this page, come back to this slide and take a look at where you think you have power. Why are people giving you power? Very, very important. And then, what are you currently putting your gifts in the service of? You have fabulous gifts. Everybody on this call, you’re gifted. Everyone’s gifted. Charism, gift, you’re gifted. But what are you putting those gifts in the service of? That links power and purpose. What do you get up every day and do with those gifts when you operationalize it?
Now let’s go to peace, which is where we all want to be off and on during the day, even in the midst of tremendous difficulty. It comes from the Latin “pax,” which means a pact. We get the word pact or truce, armistice, treaty, from Old French “paix” and then Middle English “peace.” It’s the absence of war. Peace is not something. Peace is an agreement in the face of a conflict. Peace is like an armistice, a truce, the absence of war, interestingly enough, internally or externally.
Let’s go back to these things. When what you’re up to, where you’re aiming your power, is nurturing towho you are and when it’s contributing to other people, and when it’s in alignment with what life or the system needs, now you’re in what we call the sweet spot. This is where peace lives. Ultimately, this is where you want to spend as much time as you possibly can. When what you’re doing is expressing the best of who you are, that’s a beautiful thing for you. When it’s contributing to other people, when it’s what they need, and when it’s what the system is calling for, then you’re in that sweet spot. How many times have you come back from work, having worked really, really hard all day, but you come home feeling good? I think that’s because off and on during the day, you were in your sweet spot. And how many times have you gone to work, sat around, not done anything, and felt exhausted? That’s because you haven’t been in that sweet spot. This is where peace comes from—when you’re in that sweet spot. Peace is the eye of the hurricane, the natural, calm center.
This is a key point, and then we’re going to wrap this up and have a kind of a Q&A. This is the awareness wheel. We’re walking around experiencing life. Something’s happening. We notice it. We hear, smell, taste, feel, whatever. Then we have a thought about it—what it means; we have an interpretation. Based on that, we have some affect; we have some feelings. What moves in me about that? Then we sometimes have a hope: If that’s happening, I need this, or I would like to see this happen. Then we take action—what we do. Fortunately, we have what in the yoga world is called the witness. We can watch ourselves have this process. We can think about our thinking. We can notice that we’re noticing something. This is where the action is. This is where peace begins. If we’re not at peace, it means we’re having an interpretation about what’s happening that creates something in us other than peace—a war of some kind, a struggle internally. Peace comes when we have a different meaning, when we attribute a different meaning to something that has been troubling us.
In a relationship, maybe your partner does something that drives you crazy. You complain about it all the time. What if you found a way to embrace it? I know I worked with the Navy Seals from time to time. We trained with them back in the day when they were called UDT, just before Seals came, but they were the same guys. They had a saying: When things suck, embrace the suck. Embrace the suck. In yoga, it’s hold the burn. When things begin to burn, just hold the burn. Don’t push, don’t press. Just breathe and be with the burn. Just be with the burn. As soon as you reframe something in a relationship, you can develop empathy, compassion for your partner for this thing that they’ve been doing. That brings peace.
When we change our interpretation of what things mean, peace can often flow from that. There are three worlds. Those of you that have done the LDI, you know about this. Somebody over here has an intention. They encode an action, which we can see. We’re over here watching it. We decode it; we have an interpretation. There’s their world, my world, and what happens out in the world. Those are the three worlds. What we’re making up is happening not out there, but in here. This is where we need to start. As soon as we begin to work on our interpretation, peace can flow.
I’m going to wrap it up this way. An acorn has no identity crisis. It’s not trying to be a pine tree. It doesn’t lie on the ground every day thinking, “God, I wish I was a mulberry bush,” or, “I wish I was a palm tree or a banana tree.” It’s an acorn. If you were an acorn, what would your purpose be? Actually, it wouldn’t even be to be a tree. It would be to be an acorn in its current state of development. It’s not trying to be somewhere else. It’s not trying to be the tree. The tree is inherent in it, but it’s a process. I remember years ago I had this insight that life is not a photograph, it’s a movie. It’s a series of scenes, and it can change on a dime. Where are you now in your process? Where is the acorn’s source of power and peace? I think the peace comes from being willing to be just an acorn lying on the ground in whatever state it’s in. What a fabulous way to be—to just embrace the suck, hold the burn, be with things the way they are, and expect what you get. Enjoy what you have.
I want to close with this saying that’s on my wall just around the corner: “I am not I. I am this one walking beside me whom I do not see. Whom at times I manage to visit. And whom at other times I forget. Who remains calm and silent when I talk. And forgives gently when I hate. Who walks where I am not. And who will remain standing when I die.”
You know, at this point in my life, I don’t know how many more trips around the sun I have left. None of us know. But let me tell you, when you get older, it starts to mean something. So, I’m going to stop now.
