Passion or Purpose

Hey, everybody. Happy Monday. Jean here. How are you? That's the first question. How are you? I am this Monday. I feel like I'm running behind. Hair's still wet, but it showered today, so that's a good sign. Today, our conversation, passion and purpose. I kind of equate this to chicken or egg. Now, I'll explain why. I'm gonna drop this down here. I'll explain why. So, when you think about the conversation, the age-old conversation of chicken or the egg, which came first, I often think about passion and purpose.

Which comes first when you're looking at doing your job, doing your work, really leaning into your opportunities? Do you lean into your passion first? Do you lean into finding your purpose first? Which one feels most natural? Hey Anna, how you doing today? Coming in hot, fresh wet hair and everything. So for me, I get asked this question a lot, passion or purpose, because I do a lot of work with leaders. I do a lot with teams and individuals. And some of my initial questions when I start working with them is, what are you passionate about?

What brings you joy in your job? What brings you joy in your day? And I get a lot of resistance to the question, not all the time. Sometimes people will launch in and they'll start to tell me all of their stories. And other times people will pause and they'll say, well, I'm not passionate about my work. And that is a very valid question. And then they ask me, why do I feel like you should be passionate about your work? Are you? And I try to answer them very directly and honestly, but also in a way that feels conversational.

And I share that I am passionate about my work. I'm passionate about multiple aspects of what I get to do. I get to be a coach, I get to be a consultant, I get to teach spin classes. I get to lead sound baths. So each one of those is something that is near and dear to my heart and fulfills a different passion for me. Leading a sound bath feels very different than leading a consulting project or leading a workshop. But what's at the heart of it, the same part of it is my purpose, my why. So I am My purpose is to bring out the best in people to help them move forward and create positive change.

So if I think about that as my purpose, my single statement of why I do what I do, then it gives each one of those individual things a little bit more meaning. So when I say that I'm passionate about my work, I can say yes. Now, that answer hasn't always been yes for me. I can honestly say that there are consulting projects that I take that I don't feel like are aligned with my passion or maybe they are aligned with my purpose, but in those instances, sometimes I just need to have work. And so I might choose to take something for right now because there's another thing that I need to do in life, which is have work.

Right? Now I'm going to share a story with you guys. I go to coffee on as many mornings as I can. Now I don't drink coffee, I drink tea, and most of the time I just show up with Major, my golden retriever, and we walk in and say hello to everybody. Now, these people that we meet for coffee, there's a lawyer, there's a painter, there's an artist. Most of them are retired. where they have like a little side hustle that they do. And all of them are over 80 years old. And I love them. They're fantastic.

But I was talking to the artist the other day. He had just had a showing where he opened up his studio and his gallery to sell some of his pieces. And he's been an artist for 50 years, maybe longer. And he is pretty well known. I didn't know this when I stumbled upon them at the coffee shop, but he has had his art in museums across the country. He's been published in the New York Times and he's just this really cool guy. Wears a fedora almost every day. He has multiple hats. And we talked to him after the gallery opening, which was on Thursday night and we met for coffee on Friday morning.

And we all talked about how it was and it was fantastic and so cool to see some of his work. And it's fascinating because he has shelves with drawers in them of work from 20 years ago. I picked out a piece from a sketch pad and I asked him to put in a frame and try to sell it because I think people would love to see some of his earlier work and just his random doodles in a sketchbook. And he did. And people talked about it and they loved it. And then they told him it was already sold because I bought the piece because I love it so much and I love his work.

But what's crazy about it is on Friday when we got together, he was like, Yep, I gotta go into the studio today. And we were like, What? You should take today off. Last night was a long night and it was really a success. And he looked at us with intent and he said, My best days. If I could live every day for the rest of my life where I go to my studio and I have it really quiet and I just get a paint, that will be the best days of the rest of my life. And he said, Painting is my purpose. It gives me life.

I can't imagine not going to my studio to paint. Now keep in mind he has a brace that he wears on his hand. He has worn it ever since I've known him, which is only been a year, but it's been there longer. He gets injections in his hand because it hurts when he paints, but he won't quit. He won't stop painting because that painting gives him purpose. When I think about the research that has been done on centurions, people that have lived to be the age of 100 or older, many of them are interviewed and a lot of the reason why, they've found purpose in their days.

So whether it's passion or purpose, chicken or egg, it doesn't matter. There's something inside the formula of finding what your purpose is and bringing that to life. And maybe you don't know yet. I know because I've spent a lot of time trying to figure that out. It was really important to me when I started going out on my own many years ago as a consultant that I really understood what I was doing and why I was doing it. So for me, it's the foundation of which I've grown my business on. But even before that, I think I've always been naturally moving in that space of passion and purpose and really trying to understand how does that play in my life and how does that play in other people's lives.

I have a book here that I'm reading. re-engaged reading more. I have a goal this year to read a certain number of books because I love reading. But this book that I'm reading right now is called Design Love In: How to Unleash the Most Powerful Forces in Business. Now part of the reason I am infatuated by this book is because of the author, Marcus Buckingham. He has been my single inspiration, at least a public figure inspiration, to help me really get grounded in understanding what are my strengths.

Not am I a good communicator or not a good communicator, can I do an Excel spreadsheet or not, but really foundationally, what am I naturally really talented at? What is my approach? How do I look at the world? And really getting crisp and clear on what are those activities in my day that I really get excited about doing. And then from there, how do I want to lead? Because no matter what your job title is, you're always inspiring people to do something, whether it's your kids to get the garbage outside or your church in a volunteer activity or a nonprofit that you work with or for.

There's always something that we are leading in our lives. We just may not think of ourselves as that leader every day. But when we design something, design work, design teams design projects from a place of love, a place of heart, heart centered. We have the possibility of really tapping into a potential that may go unnoticed. So whether you call it love or you call it passion, you call it purpose, sometimes those words can be interchangeable. But what is really super important is that we find what gives us meaning every single day.

And maybe every day it's not gonna show up, but if we invest some time and really take a look at what am I doing today? What is the job that I have? And what does it fulfill for me? There's always the me part of it because you're the one showing up to do the activities. You're the one having the conversations, bringing the ideas to life. tactically executing on whatever it is in your job that day or your life right now. So when we get really crystal clear on what that is, what really drives us, what really motivates us, that helps us to identify our purpose.

Our passion might be something that we're passionate about in our life that maybe it's not how we get paid. But at the end of the day, we do need to make money to live. But what if? What if we could do a couple of things that give us purpose and feed our passion? What if we took a leap of faith and we tried something different because we knew that there was something there, we just might not know the formula. Now I'll tell you what, if you're on LinkedIn, go out and check out Our fearless founders, Luke, his profile.

He won an award. He put in a post on his LinkedIn profile last week. And when I think about CADRE and I think about somebody diving into their purpose, finding the one thing that they're passionate about and using every experience up until this point in time to lean in to create something new. When you do that, you bring beautiful people along the way with you, such as Anna and Shannon and Dr. Cherise and every other Cadre contributor, but also every person that dials in. So just remember that discovering your purpose in life is one step you can take to unlocking your passion and really leaning into something beautiful that comes next.

I'll talk about this more as we go but I just wanted to drop that little bitty seed here on this beautiful Monday. I hope you have a great day and if today isn't great that's okay too. I hope that you find that you get to move through this day in a way that supports you. Sending you all the love. We'll see you again pretty soon.