The 2025 Purpose Odyssey

Part 1 in a 'How To' Guide for Elevating Lives, Leadership and Communities

Welcome to The Messy Middle in 2025, Wayfinders.

What a way to start a new year, huh? We’ve had intense weather activity across the globe. Thunderstorms on the east coast of Australia, blizzards throughout the UK, parts of Europe and the US, an earthquake in Tibet, and we’ve watched in horror as Los Angeles burns (an experience that hits close to home for many Australians).

While we despair at this bleak testament to our climatic reality, we’re also witnessing a psychological and sociological phenomenon that never fails to give me hope when disaster hits. As homes and businesses are obliterated and lives, livelihoods and wildlife are lost, we see humans galvanise. Individuals and communities gather to organise clean-up crews, provide evacuation updates and emergency resources, offer free medical care, set up relief funds, and support displaced families, children, and animals.

No one organises this. No one is put in charge of this type of immediate disaster response. It’s rarely a government measure and much of the activity pre-empts organisational efforts. These are the self-organising actions of individuals and communities uniting and rising to meet challenges and threats to their own.

Why?

What drives people to dedicate their time, energy and resources, often at personal cost or risk, to assist others in crisis? What motivates and catalyses communities in this way? (And what might organisations learn from it?)

There are a few drivers of disaster response behaviour:

1. Altruism: Many of us have an innate desire to help others, especially in times of need. This altruistic impulse can motivate us to offer assistance, even at personal cost or risk.

2. Compassion: Seeing others in distress can evoke strong feelings of compassion, compelling us to offer support to alleviate suffering.

3. Sense of community: Crises can bring communities closer together, fostering a sense of shared identity and purpose. Individuals often feel a strong connection to their community and a responsibility to contribute to its well-being.

4. Personal experience: Those of us who have experienced similar hardships or have been helped in the past may be more likely to offer support, as we understand firsthand the impact it can have.

5. The desire for meaning and purpose: Helping others in times of crisis can give us a sense of purpose, fulfilment, and a sense that our actions have a tangible, positive impact.

This last one is interesting.

Purpose is a word that is often used but not well understood. We discuss ‘finding our purpose,’ ‘our life’s purpose’, and ‘for purpose’ organisations. We seek ‘meaning and purpose’ and describe leaders and leadership as ‘ purpose-driven’. But how many of us can define what ‘purpose’ means?

There is no one agreed definition of purpose*

Purpose means different things depending on your scholarly bent.

1. In Psychology: Purpose = Individual meaning and motivation

2. In Sociology: Purpose = Fulfilling social roles and goals

3. In Anthropology: Purpose = Significance through cultural practices and beliefs

4. In Philosophy: Purpose = Meaning of Life

5. In Biology: Purpose = Function and Adaptation

If we extend this further…

6. In Business: Purpose = Raison d’etre beyond profit generation

7. In NFPs and Social Impact: Purpose = The social, environmental, or cultural change an organisation seeks to create.

8. For individuals, purpose often equates to happiness, fulfilment, and a sense of direction.

From where I sit, in the space between psychology, social impact, community leadership and systems thinking, I’m fascinated by purpose as a motivating force. Instead of something we seek, maybe find, and hope will bring us a sense of direction, how does purpose drive action in the service of others?

How does purpose facilitate positive change in our world?

Let’s dig into the ‘what’ and ‘how’ of purpose with a few fast facts…

1. As a psychologist, I’m going to use a psychological definition of purpose as my starting point. This one works well in the context of motivation:

Purpose is defined as a central, self-organising life aim. It’s core to our identity and motivates us to dedicate resources toward specific goals (Kashdan et al, 2023)

2. What is the difference between ‘meaning’ and ‘purpose’?

Meaning is a broader concept encompassing how people make sense of their lives, the world, and their place within it. It’s a sense of coherence, significance, and the feeling that one's life is worth living. You can have a sense of meaning (and I hope you do) without having a clear purpose.

Your purpose, on the other hand, is a long-term goal that combines meaningfulness with an intent to accomplish something of consequence to the world beyond the self. For example, my purpose is to help others live, learn and flourish. It’s the doing of this that makes my life meaningful.

You can think of purpose as a subset of meaningfulness.

3. Purpose is active.

Your purpose must be meaningful to you, but it’s a verb, not a noun. You don’t just have a purpose. You enact it and develop it by engaging in the world (Damon and Malin, 2020). It’s not a matter of finding your purpose. You find it through doing. More on that in a moment.

4. You can have more than one purpose (purpii?)

A person can have multiple purposes in different independent life domains. You might have a family-oriented purpose that differs from your occupational purpose. The risk of too many purposes is that they lead to inefficient allocation of your precious time and energy - or more challenging still, they conflict with each other.

3. What if I can’t articulate my purpose?

The ability to articulate your purpose is not a strict requirement for its presence or the positive effects you gain from having purpose. Your purpose can reside in full conscious awareness or outside of your conscious awareness.

Like most human experience, our purpose is not binary. It’s not a case of ‘you have one or you don’t’ or ‘you can articulate it or you can’t’. Purpose exists on a spectrum from weak to strong (the degree to which it drives your behaviour), narrow to broad, and from outside conscious awareness to full awareness (Damon & Malin, 2020). Good news. You can live a life with purpose without being able to explain what it is 🎉

4. What are the paths to developing purpose?

I firmly believe that we all have a purpose, but articulating purpose is difficult. Clarifying your purpose is a long-term, lifelong commitment. It’s hard to accomplish quickly precisely because it requires us to engage in the world and reflect and learn from those experiences, evolving our understanding and articulation of our purpose over time.

The process of engaging in action, reflecting and learning to clarify your purpose can look a little like this.

Here are some ways in which you can develop your purpose over time:

Proactive Purpose involves reflecting on who you are and what matters most to you. It requires you to try out different activities to find what gives you satisfaction and drive. Your purpose most likely involves a contribution or intention to accomplish something of consequence to the world beyond yourself, but it may not exclusively be in the service of others. Your purpose might rest in discovery, aesthetics, occupational, or physical pursuits. 

In essence, discovering your purpose means making mindful decisions based on your core values, and actively pursuing them. It's about taking control of your life's direction instead of letting external factors decide it for you.

Reactive Purpose involves clarifying, reinforcing, or modifying your purpose after experiencing adversity. Events that disrupt our sense of safety or alter our worldview may prompt us to recalibrate our life aims and redirect our energy toward a new or refined purpose.

Social Learning: Role models and supportive relationships can influence what we value and pursue as purpose. We might observe others, particularly those of a similar background, who have accomplished something that we find meaningful and motivating and we incorporate this into our purpose. Access to media stories can work in the same way. This is core to the axiom, ‘You can’t be it if you can’t see it.’

Knowing that purpose motivates humans, what can leaders do to harness this drive (for good, not evil)?

This will be the topic for Part 2 in this series, but here are a few tasters:

• Be clear on your purpose as it relates to the work you are doing or the project or cause you are leading. That thing about social learning 👆, you are the role model and supportive relationship here.

• Encourage others to cultivate their personal purpose and help them connect it with the overall objectives of your organisation or pursuit. Coaching, conversations, storytelling and creating opportunities for learning and exploration all foster a purpose-curious culture.

• Make the impact of your collective work visible. This will help everyone connect their actions with tangible outcomes and feel that their contributions are meaningful and purposeful.

• Use your organisation's or pursuit's collective purpose as a decision filter. This may include making tough choices and being willing to forgo opportunities that do not support this purpose, but emphasising its significance helps engage aligned hearts and minds.

Extreme weather and the havoc it wreaks will remain our destiny for a while yet, and the human drive to help in disaster will also endure. But what if we don’t have to wait for catastrophe to reveal our purpose? Perhaps our opportunity right now is to buffer and bolster our resilience, to create antifragility, in our communities, our organisations and in ourselves in the moments between crises. Perhaps a more considered, more connected and more pervasive engagement with purpose, individually, organisationally and institutionally, will help.

I believe it might. It sure won’t hurt.

What do you think?

Onwards and upwards,

*There are so many other ways to conceptualise this, including the cultural context that drives our understanding of purpose. In Finland, purpose is linked to a ‘hopeful future,’ connected to moral and ethical development and is emphasised in the Finnish education system. In Brazil, purpose is seen as a “life project” with an emphasis on family and work as the most important domains. In Korea, purpose has different forms, with social purpose a key goal motivated by a deep sense of social values that contribute to society. #nerdalert - want to know more? Have a read of The Development of Purpose: An International Perspective

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P.S. With 2025 here it's time to launch the NEW incarnation of Potential Psychology and my work as a Community Catalyst and Change Strategist. I've spent the past eight months redefining my career and professional identity. It's been challenging, confusing, expensive and uncomfortable - but also meaningful, revitalising and absolutely worthwhile.

I've integrated my newer learning and experience (social impact, community leadership and systems thinking) with the stuff I've done for over 20 years (social and positive psychology, workplace development, coaching and media). If you want to know more, head over to the website 😊