15. Defining Your Why

Hey everyone, I’m Saralyn Hodgkin. And this is the podcast to practice your leadership.

What’s the foundation of your purpose? The very foundation of why you exist? What a crazy question, hey? Something that I did in 2019 as I took what I thought would just be a lovely course called the foundations of purpose. It was at the Banff Centre for anybody who knows the Banff Centre. And the facilitators who have turned into friends, Julia Norris and Laura Blakeman, such wonderful human beings, and a wwhole crew of of others supporting a week long intensive of a crew of us coming in to exploring somatically, viscerally paradigm shifting-ly, what are the foundations of my purpose? It was heavy, it was heavy.

There was dancing. There was meditating. There was talking to myself. There was artwork. There was a whole bunch of great stuff. But man, it really shook me into me, that’s what it did. And I did it because I needed some clarity around who am I, and why do I exist? Why do I bring my agency out into the world in different ways? In my career, in my in my leadership and, and just who I am. And I had had a whole bunch of stuff, you know that stuff that was still clinging on from experiences and situations. And it was, it was clouding my judgment about the very foundation of my purpose. And through that work, plus a sabbatical, where I hosted myself in unlearning, learning and exploring. I came into a place of exploring what Simon Sinek talks about of my why right?

Many of us have seen the concentric circles of what do you do? How do you do it? And why do you do it? And a lot of us can talk about, you know, at a party, so what do you do? Oh, well, you know, I’m the program manager for blah blah blah. You have some answer to that. Well, I’m the executive director of da da da. I’m the VP of blabbity, blah. Oh. Then you started talking about what how do you do it. Right? Oh, well, we design and deliver transformative processes. So we’ll you know, well, what I do is I really help curate the venues and whatever it is, right? How you do it.

But why? Why do you do it? Why do you do what you do? And so I was holding my business Holon Leadership and holding it to the fire on why? Why would I build Holon Leadership? What does it offer to the world? And what does that mean? And how is it part of the very foundation of my purpose, and in that exploration, there’s a sensing there’s a sensing, there’s a plane, there’s a revealing, there’s blind spots, revealing triggers.

But all that to say that in defining my why or my just cause I, I started to play with a lot of the attributes that go into self leadership work around asking, you know, what’s needed and relevant, and you can use a business model canvas for some of this and so on, which was all very useful. But this is more about coming into why what is my why? So what’s needed and relevant out there in the world and in my soul’s calling? What does the ecosystem need in order to, to elevate? And how can I be in service of that?

How can I look beyond my usual horizon lines and find different places of intelligence and learning and sources of insight and perspective gaining? How can I humbly stand in the shoes of others to try and look at my why, and what do I need to let go or put aside in order for me to explore my why?

And I think one of the most important things was how do I own the responsibility of my power and my privilege? To figure out my why and what I’m going to do with it. I had to stand in a place to receive listening. I had to stand in a place of soul calling. And I did, right? I did. And I put myself into a place where I now, from a business sense anyways, look at my own sort of theory of change, right? My bet is that if I can hold spaces for people and teams to do their own inner work, then they can rise and generate the impact, foster the impact that they are there to serve, right? So I do that through my coaching and advising, whatever words you want to use for that.

But my why is to help people rise. To help teams rise. And so business canvases and theories of change, and even the eco cycle and the adaptive cycle to see what I want to creatively distract and what I want to grow, are all really important things. But defining my why has, and continues to be, a place of curiosity. Continues to be a place that acts as a touchstone for me, and that I continue to orient my learning around.

I’m here to help individuals and teams rise. And when I say that, it may gloss over for you. Right? I don’t have the cool marketing campaign to put the words around it and so on. But when I say it, I rise in myself. When I say it, I get into a deeply grounded place. When I say it, I pivot around exactly what I viscerally mean, deep in my soul. What’s your why?

Thanks all. I’m Saralyn. You can find me at holonleadership.org. I walk alongside you as you practice your leadership.