How To Reignite Your Purpose When Your Tank Is on E
Finding what fuels your fire to bring your best self to the table
We all hear about self-care, but do you know what works for you and why it matters?
I don’t think I fully understood what self-care meant for myself until recently. I had been on autopilot and in survival mode for a lot longer than I thought. In fact, I’d clock it at about two-and-a-half years.
In January 2017, I moved to Germany to take on a new development opportunity within my company. That experience quickly went from cultural adjustment to work adjustment with the additional responsibility for branding, which, in this case, meant changing everything on everything related to our products — all 300,000 products, 2.5 million SKUs, and millions of documents, with multiple enterprise resource planning (ERP) systems in the background. That was a major shift.
Then, in March 2019, I took on a new role to help out our Healthcare business when a colleague went on maternity leave. Looking back, I joke that my future Healthcare boss caught me at the right time: after recovering from surgery and on pain medication. This was slated to be a 16–18-month assignment and would be in addition to my other two responsibilities for our corporate responsibility practice and branding work in our Life Science business. As a people pleaser, and as someone who is always up for a challenge, it didn’t take long for me to succumb to the request and say “yes.”
Navigating life’s challenges
I was excited to learn about a different part of the business, especially since my entire career has been dedicated to the adjacent, but much different, life sciences. However, it didn’t take long for me to feel like I was drinking from the firehose on full blast. I joined at a momentous time. A drug that held significant promise to improve the quality of life for patients was expecting imminent FDA approval. Less than three weeks later, we were executing the approval — the first in over a decade — in my new third job as the head of internal communications.
I know that I show up best when there’s a clear need that I can help with and when there’s a lot going on — so the story tracks thus far. My goal is to try to bring calmness to the situation. I think people can perform in high-anxiety environments, but I’d argue that the outcomes aren’t as good. The emotional toll on people is too high and, more importantly, it’s not sustainable.
Part of my ability to bring calmness to situations and keep contributing in ways that catch people off guard and surprise them is by trying to keep myself calm. I have two strategies for this: 1) Take lots of “healthy walks” as I call them; never underestimate the glow-up of a “walk” with some good branding to give yourself some processing time and dopamine production and 2) On the other end of the spectrum, rigorous high-intensity spinning. As I’ve said before, spinning is the one thing I do that I literally cannot focus on anything else in an effort to try and survive, and there’s freedom in that.
Under that calm exterior, though, is what I would equate to a kid who is hopped up on sugar. Or, in my case, an iced white chocolate mocha paired with an incurable sweet tooth who is bouncing around with a level of energy that isn’t normal, trying to make an impact at every turn. That goal takes something though. Continually delivering creativity, intrigue and surprise requires fuel. I filled all of my time focusing on the “moment” which left the idea-generating engine dried up, or at least that’s what it felt like to me.
In February 2020, I was back in the U.S. on what would be the last business trip I took for a meeting with my Sustainability and Social Business Innovation team in Austin. Then, COVID-19 went full tilt and I didn’t return to Germany for six months.
In that time, everyone adjusted to a new way of life. I was up at 3 a.m. doing global broadcasts from the U.S., which was during the morning in Europe. I love sleep, so this wasn’t my favorite development, but I survived — and there were bigger things going on. We all flexed. I started working on external media in Life Science to share our work in COVID-19 research and how we were helping move forward solutions for the global scientific community.
As this was happening, so was the end of my third job with Healthcare, which was bittersweet. I could imagine the level of focus I could once again have, but I knew I would miss the people and the stretch learning. June came, and I handed over the reins in Healthcare to my colleague who was back from her maternity leave.
Homing in on what fills your cup
That’s when it hit. I had more time to think and process, but I didn’t have the deep well to explore. To be honest, I was exhausted and didn’t have it in me to fully figure out what came next. The slow change happened in the wake of the murder of George Floyd. This is when I began to dive deeper in understanding how we got to where we were and how I could be a better ally and advocate. I started reading, watching and having tough conversations.
Reading has always been a struggle for me. I feel like I read slowly, and I start thinking about how slowly I’m reading and how much more there is to read rather than focusing on the content. I set a goal at the beginning of the year to read four books — four. Oooooof.
I now realize that part of my idea factory, or how I contribute, is tied to reading. Reading stories inspires me to think about things in my world using a different lens, translating it to be relevant for the moment I’m in, planning for the future and then executing.
I returned to Germany at the end of August to start the process of moving back to the U.S. The life that I left in February was frozen in time, except the sweet potato on my counter in my apartment, which sprouted multiple times over. As I began the process of shutting down my life in Germany with the end of my international assignment, cleaning prompted me to start looking at stacks of things that I brought with me more than three-and-a-half years ago and didn’t really touch.
The aha moment: a stack of magazines from Fast Company, Fortune and Harvard Business Review. There were probably 30 magazines dating back to 2015 that I had intended to read when I brought them with me from the U.S.
You may think that’s an immediate recycling bin trip. Instead, I took the opposite approach and went through each and every one of them, literally looking at every page, reading articles and pulling stories and profiles of interest. And interestingly enough, it started: I had crazy dreams, fountains of ideas — and I could feel “it” coming back.
That was a long journey to say I need to read. But, if you don’t understand how you got there, how are you going to learn? For me, there are some critical ingredients to bring my best self to the table. I need to be doing something meaningful that I believe in; I need to bring some balance to the equation, which happens through walks and spinning; and I need to refuel, and that happens through reading.
For you, it may be relationships, a faith practice or meditation, or tidying and cleaning. Whatever it may be, knowing and carving out time for those practices is important. What each and every one of us brings to the table is important — that diversity of perspectives makes the outcome richer. There’s plenty of research to show this, but if we’re in the midst of starving ourselves of the things that fill us up, then SOS — we’ve got problems. And, in a time when it’s clear we need the collective input, impact and outcomes from people to get this thing we call life on a new track, we need the best that everyone’s got.
