“Our prime purpose in this life is to help others. And if you can’t help them, at least don’t hurt them.” Dalai Lama
“Service is the rent we pay for being. It is the very purpose of life, and not something you do in your spare time.” Marian Wright Edelman
In my work with organizations, I am often asked to facilitate strategic planning sessions. I always start the process with three questions:
- Why do you exist as an organization?: What is your primary purpose? What is your vision of possibilities? How do the answers to those questions inform your strategy?
- Who do you want to be?: What values provide anchors for your decisions and beacons for your behaviors?
- How do you want to relate to each other, your clients, and your community?: What norms do you want to inculcate in your culture?
Only after rich and deep dialogue on those questions, can the organization turn productively to what their goals and objectives should be. If organizations don’t live fully in the questions why, who and how, their “what’s” will not only be random, they will also be irrelevant. And employees will not be mobilized to work toward them. For a full overview of the strategic planning process, go to: https://rickbellingham.com/2023/01/15/the-art-of-strategic-planning/
The same three questions are important for us as individuals as well: Why are we here? Who are we? How do we want to relate?
Living in the “Why” question helps us define our purpose and what would make our lives meaningful. My purpose is to help others realize their dreams and aspirations – to support them in their quest to transform their possibilities into realities. While I continually fall short on my purpose, at least it gives me a sense of direction.
Living in the “Who” question helps us clarify our values and what’s most important to us. One way I have tried to answer that question for myself is to list my most important physical, emotional, intellectual and spiritual values. For example, my physical values are health, energy, and having enough money and material resources to live a comfortable life. My favorite intellectual values are curiosity, creativity, and cultural understanding. Some of my emotional values are respect, trust, freedom, and openness. My primary spiritual values are love, joy, wisdom and connection. I try to ground my decisions in these values and use them as guideposts for my actions. I frequently fall short, but I try to be honest with myself when I do.
Living in the “How” question helps us maintain equanimity and clarity in both calm and choppy seas. For me, this means loving myself, loving others, and loving Nature. In order to do that, I need to radically accept differences, forgive myself and others for not meeting neurotic expectations, and extend generous gratitude for all that is present. When I live in this question, I reach a higher degree of clarity about the norms I not only honor, but also help to create. I also experience more openness and transparency in all my relationships.
If I live fully in each of these questions, then answering the “What,” “Where,” “When,” and “How much” questions are much easier:
What career should I pursue?
What schools should I apply to?
What courses should I take in school?
Where do I want to live?
When will I get my next promotion?
How much money will I make?
How much money do I need?
And yet our kids are bombarded by “What” questions, and a long list of other “What are you going to do” questions their whole lives and, in most cases, spend very little time living in the three most important questions: Why am I here? Who do I want to be? How do I want to relate to the world?
As you might suspect, I just finished two poignant books that tell the stories of many different characters living in those questions. The first, Hello Beautiful, by Ann Napolitano, is a brilliantly crafted novel that begins with a tragic twist leaving one of the characters totally alone in his struggles to answer the three questions discussed above. His early childhood relationships are cold and distant, and he has to grow up on his own with remote parents who don’t listen. Through a stroke of luck, he comes in contact with another family that exudes warmth and close connections. In this book, Oprah’s 100th selection for her book club, Napolitano masterfully develops multiple characters in these two families and how they are intertwined. I came quickly to love each person in the book and was captured not only by their failures, but also by their resilience and the support of friends who helped sustain them through difficult moments. Each person is so different and so beautiful in unique ways. To me, the characters in the book constantly struggle with the three most important questions throughout their lives in very different ways. Their youthful exuberance ends up confronting the darkness of alienation, betrayal, divorce and death, and yet, each manages to find some light on the other side. Napolitano points out that there are no easy answers to these questions and no magic formulas for working through trauma of one sort or another. Each character’s perspective shows us the difficult truths of our own stories. Enough said. It’s a must read.
The second book, Signal Fires, by Dani Shapiro, also provides rich examples of how different people live in the three questions. In this book, a car wreck sets off a cascade of events sending shock waves of implications and lasting effects. The tragic accident impacts the way each person affected answers the three questions. The story revolves around one family’s secret and another family’s neuro-divergent child and how the two families become intertwined. The intersections of these two families reveal the effects of secrets, miscommunications, and how everything is connected. Shapiro’s characters are deeply and beautifully developed. The thoughts and feelings of each character at various ages of their lives are explored as they struggle with these questions. The mother in one family, Mimi, has Alzheimer disease; the son in the other family, Waldo, is obsessed with astronomy as a child and grows into a brilliant astrophysicist as an adult in spite of being misunderstood and friendless for most of his childhood. One father is a compassionate doctor and the other father is an angry and frustrated businessman who has no tolerance for his son’s differences. It turns out that the Dr. forms a stronger connection with Waldo than Waldo’s biological father. The main message in Signal Fires is that all lines converge and we are as interconnected as Waldo’s constellations. While I didn’t find this book as compelling as Hello Beautiful, it still represented many wonderful examples of what happens when you let the “What’s” of your life take precedence over the why, who, and how’s of life.
If you decide to read these two books, I urge you to experience them through the lens of the three most important questions. I think it will give you a new appreciation for the characters AND why these questions matter.
As the Dalai Lama and Marian Wright Edelman imply, it’s important to have a meaningful purpose in our lives as an organizing principle for everything we do. For the Dalai Lama, it’s helping; for Edelman it’s leading a life of service. Both require us to rise above our own needs, to know who we are, and to decide how we want to relate to the world.
I’m hoping we will encourage our kids and the people we love to live more fully in these questions. And, I’m hoping that, through our struggles, we are able to find meaningful answers that work for us. Most importantly, I wish world leaders would ask these questions before they decided What new war they choose to instigate. May it be so.
Also published on Medium.
May it be so indeed ! Thank you Ricky!