Our purpose: every person deserves fulfilment

What’s your personal purpose, or that of your organisation? What sits at the core of everything you do and gives focus to your work? When we can identify this North Star and anchor our lives and our leadership around it, everything else falls into place. Work becomes not just more meaningful but also fun, our performance improves, and we find even greater success and happiness.

Here at iTS Leadership, our purpose is based on a belief that every person deserves fulfilment, and this stems from my own personal purpose too. Some people disagree with this (“What about criminals?”) but I reallybelieve it, and every day it drives me in my work with clients, charities and, in fact, in all my interactions with people.

As I reflect on this purpose statement, there are several aspects to it that are particularly interesting, not least the word ‘deserve’. Why? Because it’s a word – and concept – that I’ve often struggled with!

What do you deserve?

When my mentor asked me recently, “What do you deserve?” I found myself unable to answer the question. Feelings from my childhood flooded in, and all I could think was that it feels greedy and entitled to say that I deserve anything. From talking to other people, I know that this kind of guilt and discomfort is very common; we can feel unworthy or even ashamed about good things coming to us. When the thought of something positive happens, how often do we try to put it out of our mind as “it probably won’t happen to someone like me anyway”?

So why do I believe that every person deserves fulfilment, yet sometimes fail to count myself among those people? After some pushback from my mentor in our discussions, and by asking my own mentees about what they feel they deserve, I think I’m starting to understand.

Breaking down the barriers

As is frequently the case in life, we are prone to putting up barriers, and this is what stops us from feeling we deserve something. We trip ourselves up with our negative thinking about things we may have done in our past that we’re not proud of, or things that have happened to us. We can let small moments amplify their influence, or allow our emotions and intellect to overwhelm our intuition. These stories that we tell ourselves can become obstacles to fulfilment, stopping us from embracing what we deserve.

It’s interesting that the root of the word deserve comes from Latin and then French, and is linked to being entitled to or worthy of something because of good service. So, this sense of reciprocity requires us first to see the good in ourselves before we can allow ourselves to be rewarded.

By remaining in a neutral frame of mind we’re better able to see our positive qualities and acknowledge that we deserve good things simply as a fair trade. After all, it’s how we would treat others, isn’t it, so don’t we deserve to treat ourselves in the same even-handed way – a fair price for a fair service?

Self-fulfilling prophecy?

The more I think about it, the more I see that when we know, deep down, that we deserve something, we tend to get it. And conversely, if we don’t fully believe it, it won’t and doesn’t happen. So, the most powerful and important change we can make is to start acknowledging our worthiness.

I have the privilege of working with a huge range of people in my quest to help them find the fulfilment they deserve, and whether they are a leader of a multinational business, or a former prisoner or addict trying to get back on their feet, they all have this in common: when they start to allow themselves to SEE that they deserve fulfilment, they start to find it.

In a beautiful way, this is not the only self-fulfilling prophecy at play here, either. Because every time I deliver against my purpose, by helping someone else find the fulfilment they deserve, I simultaneously create the very same sense of fulfilment for myself.

After all, iTS Leadership, and that’s wonderful.