Conscious Leadership and the Quest for Meaning and Purpose

What does it feel like to achieve everything you set out to, and still sense that 

something is missing?

Your teams hit and even exceeded the target. Celebration time. 

And yet somewhere in the satisfaction, you catch yourself thinking, 

‘There is more to life than this. I am meant to do more. Be more.”

‍The Pattern Has a Name

In my coaching work with leaders, I hear a version of this often. Marshall Goldsmith calls it the Great Western Disease. "I'll be happy when." The goal arrives. The feeling does not. So we set the next goal.

Goldsmith makes a key distinction:

Aspiration is the overarching purpose, the reason all of this matters. 

Ambition is the specific goal with a finish line. 

Action is what you do today.

When these three are aligned, the daily work feels meaningful. When aspiration gets buried under ambition, and ambition loses touch with action, a dread sets in. You are busy. You are delivering. And something still feels off.

Perhaps you have felt this too. Decorated on the outside. Wondering on the inside.

‍A Different Kind of Evidence

Martin Seligman, whose work founded the field of Positive Psychology, distinguishes between three levels of a good life. A life of pleasure and comfort. A life of deep engagement and flow. And a life of meaning, connected to something larger than oneself.

Most leaders are deeply familiar with the first two. The pleasant life arrives through success. The engaged life arrives through the work itself, the problem-solving, the strategy, the craft of leadership.

It is the third level that tends to get deferred. Something to think about after this cycle, after the next milestone, when there is more time. Seligman's research points to something worth pausing on: among the 3 levels, meaning produces the most enduring sense of a life well lived.

Research from Okinawa arrives at the same place from a different direction. The Japanese call it ikigai, the reason you get up in the morning. 

Garcia and Miralles found that a strong ikigai is associated with significantly lower rates of cardiovascular disease, lower rates of dementia, and a longer life.

Purpose is biological.

What might change if the question you have been deferring became the one you paid most attention to?

‍The Compass You Already Have

Bill Burnett and Dave Evans, design professors at Stanford, invite their students to write two short documents before any career planning begins. 

A Workview: why do you work, and what makes work meaningful to you? 

And a Lifeview: why are you here, and what does a life well lived look like?

Most leaders have never written either. The pace of a leadership career rarely creates the space to sit with questions this close to the bone. And so ambition tends to move faster than aspiration. The targets are met. The meaning recedes. And the question surfaces again, in a still moment, often when least expected.

Burnett and Evans point to flow as a reliable signal of where meaning lives. The work that makes you forget to eat. The conversation that makes you look up, surprised that two hours have passed. Most leaders have learned, over years of performing and delivering, to move past these signals quickly. They are worth slowing down for.

What would it mean to follow those signals, even a little, in the week ahead?

‍An Invitation to Reflect

I invite you to reflect on these before you look at your calendar today.

When did you last do work that felt deeply yours? 

Work connected to something that matters to you, beyond this quarter's number?

Then look at your calendar for the past two weeks. How much of what you did served that?

You have come this far in your career and life. Your wins, your losses, your experiences, all of it carries wisdom. 

That wisdom, when you listen to it, will guide you toward coherence, meaning, and purpose.

Your calendar is a good place to start listening.

Points to Ponder

• When did your daily work last feel in service of something you deeply care about?
• If you wrote your purpose in one sentence today, what would it say?
• Where in your week do you experience flow? What does that tell you?
• What would it mean to align your aspiration and your daily action, one step at a time?
• What do you wish you had paid more attention to earlier in your leadership?

Reach out to explore how coaching can add meaning and purpose to your leadership.