Young Professionals' Corner

 

Meaning and Purpose at Work

 

Struggling to maintain a healthy work-life balance?

Finding it difficult to rediscover your Meaning and Purpose at Work?

These familiar slogans have become part and parcel of every young professional’s life. On Facebook and Skype, which have become the water-cooler gossip center of today’s business world, we twitter and chat about it. The search for ‘Meaning and Purpose at Work’ is a recurring theme running through these conversations and seminars, both virtual and otherwise.

We define meaning as a sense of connection to the value of what we do. The absence of meaning or purpose manifests itself in many ways: clock watching, boredom, lack of energy and direction, staying invisible, and preoccupation with evaluation, rewards and incentives. Most of us will have encountered some – if not all – of these at various stages in our career. They are easy to recognize, but how do we change them? Why bother?

Connecting to Our Value

When we find a new meaning and purpose, or indeed rediscover the old motivation that got us started in the beginning, we become connected to the value of what we do. We become more resilient and confident - we become visible and willing to take risks in conversations. Perhaps more importantly, we become connected to others through the merit of what we do.

By connecting to our ‘hidden value’, we make the worth of what we do more visible. For those of us in professional life, this in turn means we can price our services according to the value we are providing. Our renewed sense of confidence helps us enter into “value centered” conversation and avoid the common pitfalls in negotiation.

Resilience allows us to recover from successive disappointments and not be afraid of rejection. It empowers us to take risks ask the difficult questions. Piecing together the meaning and purpose jigsaw means we can achieve measurable improvements in productivity and develop an outstanding reputation.

The result: More Revenue in Less Time.