We talked about job cultures that make it easier to become purposeful at work. So let's talk about being purposeful at work. What does that take? Now, you might remember in Lesson 1 that I have this diagram of you or me in the center. This is me in this case because these are my "Be" goals, I call them. I'm here to be a visionary leader, to be a family man, to be a truth seeker, and they come from my core purposeful values. The things that matter most to me are my family, curiosity, my students, the arts, my company that I have, my friends, having fun, being globally engaged, the world, in other words. From those core values, the things that matter most to me, I am building what I call my "Be" goals. I'm here to be these things. From that, I create a purpose. Now, then once I have a purpose, I want to be purposeful. Then Lesson 1, I talked about how I can be purposeful by creating "Do" goals. I need to do certain things to be the person that I want to be in fulfilling my purpose. To be a family man, I need to be calm. To be a seeker of truth, I need to be abroad thinker. To be a good teacher, I need to have more energy. To be fun-loving, I need to be more connected. You see the point, these are "Do" goals. These are things that I need to do in order to be the person I need to be. These "Do" goals tend to be a little bit on the vague side. They're not quite as crisp or habitual or behaviorally focused as I would like. In fact, what we really need are what we might call action goals. These action goals are crispy habitual behaviors that I can engage in and learn more about what works and what doesn't work to becoming calm. For example, I engage in loving kindness meditation regularly to calm me down. Why do I need to be calm? Because I am a family man, and I want to be the best family man that I can be. I also want to be a visionary leader. How do I do that? I need to be positive. How do I do that? I read books and I look at studies on how to be more positive during stressful situations. You see the point. There are things at work, there are things in my family, there are things in my community, all of these things in my personal life as well. All these different domains of purpose relate to my "Be" goals of who I want to be while I'm on this planet for this brief period of time. In order to be that person, I need to do these things. In order to do these things, these "Do" goals, I need certain crispy actions that I need to engage in and form as habits over time. That's what we're talking about. So often people fall right in the middle. They may start with some "Do" goal like I want to become. What I want them to do is not think about the 20 different ways to meditate, I want them to think about why they want to be calm in the first place. If I understand that why, then I can handle almost any how, I can manage almost any action goal as soon as I know what their "Be" goals are. Let's use a couple of examples. These are real-world examples, real people. This is a woman who was a student of mine, graduated, amazing student, a very deeply religious student. Her purpose in her life is to be an empathetic healer and helper to the sick and dying, and to serve God. So she has two domains of her purpose. One is very work-focused, to be an empathetic healer and helper, and her other is very religious-focused, her more globally or spiritually based purpose. You see the two are probably very deeply connected as well. Her first "Be" goal, to serving God, requires a "Do" goal. What would be a good "Do" goal to serve God? Well, she decided that a "Do" goal would be to stay in touch with God. Now, that's a little vague, like how do you actually stay in touch with your God? Well, she had a good answer to that, prayer. For her, she prays, but why? She does that to stay in touch with God, and she does that to serve her God. That's why she prays. So there is a why to her how. Is this making sense? I hope it is. Her other domain is to be a healer and helper, a work domain. What is a "Do" goal that's relevant there? She needs energy because she's working in a difficult place, and she needs to be a healer and helper to a lot of people so she needs more energy. How did she get more energy? She tries to sleep well, and she tries to eat well. Those are fabulous ways to develop more energy. You can see, she wants more energy and she may turn to me or to other people saying, "How do I get more energy?" I could give her 20 ways to get more energy. But the first thing I want to know is, why do you want more energy? Now that I understand that why, I can better help her with the how to do this. Also, once she understands her why, she's more likely to maintain the habits of good sleeping and good eating. We know that. The other thing she needs maybe is more empathy. To be a really good healer and helper, she wants empathy. So she's going to learn to listen better. All of those things are part of her "Be" goals, her "Do" goals, and our action goals, which is really the overall conceptual model of her purposeful life. Here's another example. This is a young entrepreneur and this is a real story as well. This young entrepreneur wanted to learn how do I become an energetic, innovative, engaged, and inspiring leader. That's what I want my purpose to be. Working through the same model, okay, you want to be a leader. So in working with him, says, well, he wants to be a leader, great. To be a leader, as he said, he wants to be innovative. How does he want to be innovative? Well, that means creating things. Innovation means creating something from nothing. If you're going to innovate the wheel, you may start with a big block. In order to start with that block, somehow you have to visualize what you want in the future. That visioning exercise is something that is a skill. It is a "Do" goal to become innovative. What's an action goal that might lead you to become more innovative? Well, he decided he's going to try to become more artistic, so he took a drawing class. That's a great idea. Just taking drawing so that you can start drawing things just for fun. Again, you're starting with nothing. You're starting with a sheet of paper and a pencil or whatever, and you're turning it into something, a drawing that expresses you. That's innovation. Some type of action goal leading to the "Do" goal of being innovative, which he feels is part of being a good leader, is really important in his conceptual model of being purposeful. Another is to be engaged, engaged with his employees. So he connects with his employees. He hangs out during lunch, eats lunch with them. He doesn't leave all the time. He's part of his employee's social network. He hangs out and, for example, the lunch room is a wonderful time to learn more about what you're doing well, what people think the company is doing well, or struggling with. Great conversations at the lunch table. So that's what he wanted to do. He also wanted to be inspiring. In order to be inspiring, he wanted more energy. So he engages in yoga and he starts trying to sleep more because he needs that energy to be an inspiring person. He also is biking. So being an inspiring, energetic, innovative, engaged person required certain action goals. He bikes to work. He connects with his employees. He's taking a drawing class. He's trying to sleep well, and he's engaging in yoga. All of those things are really good ideas if you want to be a good leader, at least for him. This is his conceptual model of being purposeful at work. Here's another one, the final example here. This woman I've worked with in the past, and she wants to be a strong woman and a great scientist. She also wants to be a loving partner. She's a wonderful scientist, runs a lab. Excellent. So let's take a look at her "Be" goal. What "Be" goal? I am a woman. This is who I am, and I want to be a strong woman. That's a do part of her purpose. Now to be a strong woman, she's doing two things. She drinks six glasses of water a day, so she wants to make sure she drinks six big glasses of water a day, and that keeps her hydrated. We know that hydration is really good for being a stronger person. She's also taking kickboxing lessons. I love that. Isn't that awesome? She's a strong, powerful woman. She also wants to be a great scientist. At least, in my opinion, there are two parts of being a great scientist she identifies with this as well. You need to be disciplined. It's really hard work and you have to be a disciplined person. But also, oddly enough, almost working counter to that is you have to have this really open mind. Do you have to be curious about things all the time. So while keeping this open mind, you also have to maintain some kind of discipline. So she's done two things. One is start managing her time better. Now, usually, I don't like time management programming because I think it's more about energy managing. You're really managing your energy, but still she has a limited amount of time while she's at work. So she wants to structure her time more carefully. That's great. She also meditates, and there's certain kinds of meditation that actually help you open your mind to make you more creative. One of them just for example, I'm just going to give you a little example, is walking outside and while you're walking outside, you are smelling. You are looking at things visually. So you're hearing things, you're doing things that start opening your senses to new awareness. You might even notice the steps that you're taking. That kind of meditation, a walking meditation, which you may think that's not like any meditation I've heard. Well, I walk to work every day, it takes me 30 minutes, and I'm meditating while I'm walking because I'm trying to observe the sounds. I'm observing the smells. I'm observing my own body as I'm walking. All of these things, I'm keeping an open mind to it and I'm observing, and that helps me maintain an open mindset. Also, though, I need to be disciplined. I try to get to work at a certain time and I try to work for a certain amount of time, try to take a certain amount of time for breaks and hydrate and do other things. Just like this woman, I need to be a good scientist by doing those things. That's what she does, that's why she's very successful. She also wants to be a loving partner. So to do that, she is taking tango lessons with her partner. Imagine this very big life that this woman is living by being a loving partner, a great scientist, and a strong woman. This is her conceptual model for a purposeful big life, very important. Now, as I said before, when we think about these "Be" goals, these "Do" goals, and action goals, so often we begin, and this is okay, we begin with "Do" goals. Things like, I want to be more physically active, or I want to be more mindful, Vic, or I want to have a better diet, or I want more willpower. Those are all fine and we can go in two directions with these "Do" goals. We can either say, "Oh, here's a whole bunch of behaviors you can engage in and you can look these up on Google or you can take our application called Purposeful, if you're an employee, and use that." There are lots of ways to find the right action goals. But I know what we do in our Purposeful app and what you might want to do through this course is start by asking yourself, why do I want to be more mindful? Why do I want more willpower? What do I need activity for in my life? What are those things? Once I have those "Be" goals set, I can manage almost any how. I can handle almost or develop any type of action goal. If I understand my "Be" goals more, I'm going to be more likely to continually engage every day in these action goals or continue to maintain them. Let's work with an exercise here. You've now seen this model that I've presented. Starting with "Do" goals, can you name a "Do" goal that you have? Is there something that you want to do in your life that we've talked about? Maybe being less stressed, maybe being more physically active, maybe having more friends, being a better listener. All of those things. You could pick out a "Do" goal in your life. If you could pick out that "Do" goal, then what kind of "Be" goal would fit with that "Do" goal? What is the why, in other words, of your "Do" goal? Once you have that why, then what kind of action goal or action goals might you take for your "Do" goal? That's how I think about this. Very often we might start with "Do" goals, work backwards to your "Be" goal, work upstream, and then work forward toward your action goal. If you start with your "Be" goals, wonderful. Then from your "Be" goals, you move to your "Do" goals, and then your action goals. Now, you may think, "Oh, Vic is just making all this stuff up." Is he really? Well, it turns out this is actually a really carefully studied conceptual model for thinking about our lives and how to regulate our lives. Elliot Berkman, who is a wonderful psychologist and researcher and neuroscientist. He studies the neuroscience of self-regulation, but he wrote this beautiful article called the Finding The Self In Self-Regulation. I'll just show you the model that he presents. First of all, let's go to the left where our brains are. Remember I talked about this ventromedial prefrontal cortex in Lesson 1 and a bit earlier in this second lesson. Well, that VMPFC, that ventromedial prefrontal cortex, when we think of two things, we think about our self, who are we basically, and we think about what we value that coalesces right here in activity in this ventromedial prefrontal cortex. On the right, you see this top, you see our "Be" goals. That's our ideal self. Who do we want to be ideally? From that, our core values map to that, our identity maps to this, our longer-term goals map to that, and to get there, to those "Be" goals, we think about "Do" goals. From the "Do" goals, we think about action goals. So I'm not making it up. There's some really good research on this. I'd highly recommend Elliot Berkman's article on Finding The Self In Self-Regulation because that's what we're doing. We're regulating ourselves to improve ourselves to live bigger, more meaningful, more purposeful lives.
