The Power of Purpose and Why It Matters Today with Ariel Naftali

Finding a sense of purpose is important to our well-being. As you grow and live your life, your purpose also grows. Following it can lead you to fulfillment. It’s like your roadmap. Think about this: When you have a sense of purpose, you tend to experience joy, happiness, and satisfaction more often. It gives you the ability to become resilient, hopeful, and optimistic about the future. When it comes to purposes, our guest Ariel Naftali is an expert on that matter. She is an executive coach for purpose-driven leaders. Ariel loves helping people find their purpose and perform at a high level. Let’s hear more about them today. --- Listen to the podcast here: The Power of Purpose and Why It Matters Today with Ariel Naftali Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. I’ve been thinking a lot about some of the problems that we’re experiencing in the world today, and, in my humble opinion, just from my observations, talking with people, reading things, it seems like what a lot of people are missing are three of the building blocks for a good life: purpose, confidence, and resilience. And what I mean by that is that the purpose to understand, get some grounding behind why you’re doing what you’re doing, making it meaningful; the confidence, of course, is the ability to really execute on it, believe in yourself; and resilience is how we respond to bad things that happen. And I see so many of the less fortunate, less happy things going on in the world today, I see a crisis where a lot of people are lacking one or all three of these particular things. My guest today, Ariel Naftali, is an executive coach for purpose-driven leaders. She helps people find their purpose and perform up to that purpose. --- Ariel, welcome to the program. Hi, Stephen. Thanks so much for having me. Ariel, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes. First of all, what is the name of your business? My business is Perform with Purpose and, I know, a very cliché title there as a purpose coach, but Perform with Purpose and we are located in Denver, Colorado. And your website brings up both performance and purpose. How do you see these things intersecting with one another and which one comes first and which one’s more important? Great question. I started my work mostly in the performance realm working with athletes and I didn’t realize this emphasis on purpose was important in the beginning of that work. A lot of the work that I was doing was helping athletes with their mindset to perform at a higher level, but what I realized for myself and for them as well is if they’re not clear on why they’re doing what they’re doing, if they haven’t really attached a meaningful reason behind the effort, the work, the energy, their time that they’re putting into something, when they actually reach that goal that they’re setting, that performance metric, it doesn’t end up feeling as satisfying or fulfilling as they thought it was because they didn’t attach it to something meaningful to them. That had me rethink my whole process and my whole focus and wanting to center more on this purpose lens first to figure out what’s actually important to you, what’s actually meaningful to you, and once we identify that, then let’s set goals in line with it and help you perform at the height of your potential in the pursuit of that to ensure that you’re actually setting yourself up for a career, a life that’s going to be more fulfilling and more satisfying on the other side. Well, it’s interesting that this came from the world of athletics because I think a lot of us have in our minds what professions feel like they have a lot of purpose and which professions feel like they don’t, and do you see this as varying a lot? Do you see a lot of athletes that understand, say, you’re running for track, for example, understand like, “Why did I pick this sport? Why does this sport interest me and why do I wanna reach my peak performance at this particular activity?” I don’t think that I’ve seen that there’s a deeper connection to purpose to certain lines of work from a topic perspective or role perspective. I think any role can feel purposeful. Where I think that the differentiating factor is, one, on the individual level is what you’re doing in service of something that you personally care about. That’s a really important distinction because you might be able to identify some cause that you know is important generally, like I might say that working towards helping climate change issues is an important cause and matter that’s happening in our world today but that doesn’t mean necessarily that me working in an organization that’s helping to fight climate change is what’s going to be most meaningful to me. And so we really want to get clear on an individual level what is it that really moves the needle for us? What is it that makes us tick on a macro level, putting ourselves in organizations, if you’re at the employee level, that align in the values that you have and are working towards a mission that you genuinely care about? That makes sense, and I’m wondering how many people fall into this trap, because I think a lot of people have these causes that maybe you’re supposed to care about. Do you observe a lot of people who picked the cause maybe because so many people around them decided that that’s an important cause but wasn’t their specific purpose? Yeah, I do have a number of clients who come in who are doing work on a volunteer basis or on the board of some organization, are part of an organization that has a really altruistic mission, because that person has identified that they want to help people, they want to help the world, they want to make a positive impact in some way, which is step one in the process. You got to get there to make effective progress towards that purpose alignment. I would say there is certainly a disconnect sometimes for some of those people if the thing that they are immersing themselves in doesn’t have a personal connection to who they are in the life experiences that they have had. Often, what it is, like the missions that we feel passionate about, we feel so passionate about them because they relate to a life experience that we’ve had, they relate to some painful experience that maybe we’ve had, like if you’re someone who spends all day in your house playing video games and never goes outside in nature, you may never realize or care that climate change is a problem that’s happening in our world. You might read about it but if you’re not viscerally experiencing that shift and really seeing it happen in front of you, there might not be that deeper connection to the mission so, yeah, I do see that play out. One time, I met someone who had moved from Italy to Iceland and this person acknowledged, saying, “When I first heard about climate change, and I was living in Italy, I said, okay, the world’s gonna go up 2 degrees Celsius, it’s 25,” because they do Celsius everywhere else, “it’s 25 degrees Celsius,” which is 77 here in Fahrenheit, “and I’m wearing a t shirt. So what? It’ll be 27 and I’ll just be wearing a t shirt and that’s about it,” but then, when he moved to Iceland and saw that those 2 degrees made the difference between rain and snow and made the difference between the glacier staying where it is and the glacier starting to melt, he saw it more and is like, “This is when I decided to care about this issue.” So I think that whole makes sense that you have to have some sort of a personal relationship to it. And do you think it’s always the experience someone has or can it be sometimes a little bit more complicated, because people sometimes will think about a specific experience, the whole idea of the inner child wanting to always get what you were denied when you were younger or can sometimes involve maybe you need to dive deeper and to go into little known memories or weird connections between events? I think it always relates to some experience that we’ve had, whether it’s on a conscious or subconscious level, tends to drive what it is that we feel we gravitate towards. I can say for myself in the work I’m doing is not as necessarily tangible as working to fight climate change or homelessness but it is driven from a past experience of not feeling a sense of belonging in my childhood and wanting to now help people feel like, one, they belong, and, two, they can be exactly who they are and accepted for who they are, and, three, my experience in the corporate world doing work that just didn’t let me up and didn’t fulfill me and didn’t feel like it really aligned with who I authentically was, that didn’t allow me to actually perform at the height of my potential, because of that, all those experiences coupled together have led me to become passionate about helping people and serving people in the way that I am. And so, it can be multiple experiences, different times in life that form what it is that you value, what it is you care to serve. And also that purpose, that thing that you could have served can evolve over the course of your lifetime as well. Yeah, I actually have tried to tell people more and more this is what my life’s mission is, this is what my mission right now is or this is what I’m tackling at this point, because, I mean, even what this podcast is about, for example, there’s a possibility that 10, 15 years from now, for some reason based on cultural changes, society trends, might not be necessary, because maybe we’ve abandoned the 40-hour work week due to automation and people are okay that it’s 25 hours a week but it’s a terrible job but it’s only 25 hours a week and, therefore, we can deal with the fact that it’s just grunt work that doesn’t really matter. One thing I’m wondering, if you’re willing to indulge or share,...