Purpose, a carrot or a stick!? #51 #cong22

Synopsis:

Coming soon

Total Words

682

Reading Time in Minutes

3

Key Takeaways:

Coming soon

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About Paddy Delaney:

I am a reformed Financial Advisor! Now spend my time trying to make a difference to both the Financial Services industry and also to individuals’ financial wellbeing. Do this through coaching, training and the (award winning!) Informed Decisions Blog & Podcast.

Contacting Paddy Delaney:

You can follow Paddy on Twitter or sign up for his blog/podcast.

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By Paddy Delaney

Through my work, I get to know some professionally successful individuals. Many of them will admit that their sense of purpose is firmly aligned to their professional accomplishments. They get respect and social status from their profession.

When they are asked ‘What do you do?’, they might proudly state that they are a pharmacist, engineer, executive manager, or ‘business owner’. Their role and successes from it quite often gives them purpose, and understandably so.

However, when they retire, they leave those roles. When they are now asked ‘What do you do?’, for some of them, it is a big adjustment and admission to reply that they are ‘retired’. They admit to feeling their sense of self has evaporated somewhat.

For many humans, our sense of purpose is closely linked to our chosen profession. I am no different. If I retired today, I’m not sure I’d be delighted to confess that I ‘used to run a business helping people to make better financial decisions, but now I look after the kids!’. It’s a painful admission, but it’s the truth for me right now.

In the 190,000 years that us humans have graced this fine planet, it is said that approximately 110 billion people have lived and died. Did every single one of those individuals live a life of purpose and meaning?

Perhaps they did! But I guess, it depends on what you mean by purpose! Does purpose mean that we live, survive, perhaps have some relationships, and then died? Is that a life lived with purpose?

Or does purpose mean that throughout our lives, we not only survived, but we thrived, and bettered the lives of others and the planet we live on?

I guess, that is the thing about ‘purpose’ – many of us (including yours truly) have been conditioned about what living a life of purpose should mean. It seems that it is no longer OK to just ‘be’. It has become the expectation to strive for a greater purpose.

When we are on our death-bed, will have deep regret if we can’t say that our lives were purposeful, and that we had a meaningful and positive impact on the world?! That is a high standard to meet, if so!

But perhaps having such a high bar is beneficial to us as individuals, our communities and society in general. If we have a defined and clear purpose of improving something within our control, surely that will be helpful?

Personally speaking, I tap-into purpose when I want to make a change or take on a large project. Striving to achieve that purpose is a fantastic carrot to pursue. Focusing on our purpose or our ‘why’, as Simon Sinek has made famous in the past decade, can be a great motivator.

My only reservation is that we don’t get so wrapped-up in that purpose that it creates a stick for our own backs! Life would be pretty tiring if we had to be purposeful in everything that we do, and always thinking about whether we are striving for ‘better’ all of the time.

Some of the greatest characters we meet in life are those that seem not too distracted by purpose or living a life of challenge and achievement. They seem content in simply ‘being’. Are they ‘free’ of purpose. Or perhaps their dedicated purpose is to live a life of fun, and put a smile on the faces of others! That too can be a tough act to maintain. Ultimately, like all things in life, purpose can be great, but lets do so in moderation!

December 14, 2022 2022 Purpose No comments yet

What Do You Care About….!? #45 #cong19

Synopsis:

Communities are great, and I love them usually, but sometimes we need to leave them in order to do what needs to be done.

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. We all love a good community
  2. It’s not easy to leave
  3. Leaving one can be exhilarating
  4. Know what it cares about can drive a community

About Paddy Delaney:

I am a reformed Financial Advisor! Now spend my time trying to make a difference to both the Financial Services industry and also to individuals’ financial wellbeing. Do this through coaching, training and the (award winning!) Informed Decisions Blog & Podcast.

Contacting Paddy Delaney:

You can follow Paddy on Twitter or sign up for his blog/podcast.

By Paddy Delaney

“There is no power for change greater than a community discovering what it cares about”

– Margaret Wheatley

I have always loved a good community – I love the social aspect of being part of a community – I feel close, in a really warm and fuzzy way with the other humans in that group. Whether that was playing sports, working fruit & veg markets as a teenager, studying through college, in working life, or coming to Cong every November, I Iove nothing more than being part of a community! For many years I was occasionally told I was naïve, and I hope I am not gone too far the other way, but are communities always a good thing!?

If you asked 100 people what the word community means, fully 90 of them would say things like ‘belonging’, ‘togetherness’, ‘progression’ or some such positively-slanted description. But as sure as God made little apples, there are communities that are doing anything but having a positive influence, and they are equally if not even more resilient than the positive ones!

But what makes a community a community? Either they have a shared interest, or they have shared values. For example, my next door neighbour and I have zero shared values but we have shared interest in stopping the ‘little feckers’ from stealing our wheelie-bins and setting them alight!

Or I might be working in an industry where our shared values are one of hood-winking customers. As a community our value-system might be one of deceit, greed and selfishness. We can dress it up all we like – we can present shiny brochures of smiling couples hand in hand on a beach, but we are really only interested in lining our own purse as thickly as we can, and at the expense of those who trust us.

For a decade I worked in a community that had some of those values. It served a purpose as I learned the ropes for the first few years. I was happy being part of the community – strength in numbers etc. But over time as my confidence grew and I had more awareness of the chasm between my values and those of the broader community, it began to feel a bit off.

There were of course individuals like myself in that community whose own values were at odds with that of the industry. So, it seemed to me that, instead of the community having shared values it had a shared interest in keeping the status-quo, of ensuring that it remained fully self-serving. Don’t get me wrong – the service it does for people can still be significant, but just not nearly as significant as it could be if it were more customer-centric and less self-centric.

The industry that I refer to, unfortunately, is Financial Advice. I still serve clients in that area, but in order to do so in a way that is in line with my values and the interests of my clients I have had to leave that community and create a new way of working which delivers better outcomes for clients.

I have gone from working in a community of several thousand people, to a community of just me, and my growing number of clients. I have had to create a unique proposition in order to work in line with my values. I have to agree with Margaret Wheatley, that there is no power for change greater than a community discovery what it cares about! I am far from the complete article, and I don’t claim to be a vanguard here – I am merely standing on the shoulders of giants.

I can say too that even though I am a tiny community right now I can see that I won’t be alone for long – that others are changing too – and that will be awesome to witness and see the impact it has on consumers. In order to evolve, to improve and to survive we must thing longer-term than ‘the next sale’. I am an unapologetic capitalist of sorts but firmly believe, as business communities we must get back to basics of what and who are we trying to serve or impact in a positive way, apart from our balance sheet!? I’ll leave the final words to Margaret Wheatley, she says it a whole pile better than I can;

“Whether we’re in a small village or a major global corporation, in any country and in any type of work, we are being asked to work faster, more competitively, more selfishly, and to focus only on the short-term. These values cannot lead to anything healthy and sustainable, and they are alarmingly destructive. I believe we must learn quickly now how to work and live together in ways that bring us back to life.”

 

November 4, 2019 2019 Community 1 comment

‘Beware Your Lizard-Brain’ #3 #cong18

Synopsis:

Idea #1 is that ideas are utterly worthless, we all have them, hundreds per day, majority lead to nothing. An idea only carries some value when coupled with action! Problem however is that so so many of us are terrified of action……!

4 Key Takeaways:

  1. Ideas are worthless
  2. For ideas to become actual IDEAS requires some form of action
  3. For ideas to become reality requires lots of action
  4. Many of us are terrified of action!

About Paddy Delaney:

Paddy, (last year a father of 2, this year a father of 3!) has recently left a perfectly well-paid and enjoyable job of 13 years working for ‘the person’, in order to follow a passion; to change how financial planning and service is done in Ireland.
Through his new company he has built the tools to serve people who seek help in making properly informed decisions with regards their finances, to avoid mistakes, which in turn will help them live the life that they want.
He works with a small number of clients, and develops life-long, multi-generational relationships based on mutual respect and loyalty. And he loves it! Like may of us he has lots of ideas, and is keen to dispell the myth that ideas alone are a worthwhile thing!

Contacting Paddy Delaney:

You can follow Paddy on Twitter or sign up for his blog/podcast.

By Paddy Delaney:

You have launched that business, ran that 5k, achieved that promotion, earned that income, lost that weight, painted that wall, made that speech, bought that house, found that soul-mate, or achieved or made progress on whatever your big outcome was. The fact that we apparently each have in the region of 30,000 thoughts per day and that for many of us approximately 70% of these are negative, makes it a minor miracle that we manage to do anything productive at all!

Ideas are frequent and regular, and more often than not we subconsciously try to sabotage ourselves with negative thought and internal dialogue that crushes these little sparkling ideas before they even get a chance to fly. Think about it, how many ideas have you had in the past week that, due to your own internal dialogue, never got to fly!?

Our lizard-brain (limbic cortex), that tiny part of our brains at the top of the spinal cord controls fight, flight, fear, freezing-up and fornication. It is said to be the most primitive part of our brains and the part that drives our most basic of instincts. It was designed to keep us alive when we were in danger of getting eaten 2million years ago as we pottered about in caves. Our environments have changed however we still carry the same thought-processes.

But you don’t live in a cave, you have achieved your goal or made progress on your outcome, so how did that happen? Well you may have been washing the dishes, driving your car, reading a book, on the verge of sleep, talking to someone, watching ‘Better Call Saul’ or doing any of a thousand other things when you were struck with a thought about something (we have 30,000 of them a day remember!). Your thought would have led to an idea about a desirable future state. Immediately and nigh-on uncontrollably your idea would then have been set-upon with great ferocity by your own negative and/or limiting internal dialogue. We all have that dialogue to one degree or another. That is our lizard-brain trying to strangle our idea, to convince us that the worst will happen, that it’ll be too hard, that we’re not good enough, that someone else will do it better, that we won’t have enough time, that now is not the right time!

However you managed to ignore that lizard-brain thinking, and you kept the idea alive, you let it fly. That’s the first hurdle to jump. You would then have had to keep chewing on that idea, again overcoming fear, laziness and doubt, and remained focused on the great outcome you are aiming to achieve! But an idea alone will not make the outcome happen. For an idea to really be of value it gives rise to action. Those actions don’t have to be huge or public, action which turns that idea into something bigger is simple as putting pen to paper, taking those first steps, talking to someone, practicing those first words, beginning your research, save that €100 or say no to that extra donut.

The lizard-brain will love you not to take those first steps. Your lizard-brain loves when you don’t pursue that idea. Ideas need action to become something tangible, don’t let the lizard-brain strangle them.

September 7, 2018 2018 Ideas No comments yet