Purposeful leadership starts with the purposefulness of the individual holding the leadership role. How can a purposeless individual help people and organisations to be purposeful? I am not claiming that all leaders are purposeful self-leaders. Many are not, and as a result, the people and businesses are not purposeful. In this article, we explore the notion of purposeful self-leadership. Given the need to keep these articles short, we will explore how to develop purposeful self-leadership and the complexities of such an aspiration in subsequent articles. In the first two articles of this series, we explored the two keywords of the concept of purposeful leadership: purposefulness and leadership and the three branches of purposeful leadership: self, people and organisations.

A useful question to ask at the outset is what is purposefulness and how do we know we are purposeful?

Answering the first part of the question; being purposeful is conducting ourselves with decent human values for the flourishing of life (De Silva, 2024). Flourishing means healthy growth. Life relates to all forms of life, starting with the self. The self contains many selves such as the spiritual self, emotional self, social self, intellectual self, physical self, financial self and temporal self.  Decent human values refer to values accepted by a civilised society such as benevolence, generosity, authenticity, humility etc. The choice of our values is guided by our childhood influences such as religion, family and society. Some of these are compromised when we try to get aligned with social, organisational and economic expectations and realities. Given the meanings different people ascribe to notions such as flourishing, life, self, and the values they select to live by, the notion of purposefulness is very subjective and depends on individual contexts. Click here to read more about the notion of purposefulness.

Answering the second part of the question is, how do we know we are purposeful is difficult as it is complex. However, I like to start simple, and my simple answer is; that you know you are purposeful when you are peaceful. Each person knows they are peaceful in their unique way. I know that I am peaceful when I have a good night of uninterrupted sleep with pleasant or no mental activity (dreams), when I am stress-free, when I am physically well and when my relationships are cordial. When we think, decide and act contrary to our higher purpose, the contradiction creates an inner conflict between our purposeful self and the self which acts in a contrary manner. When I am not generous or helpful in my relationships, it disturbs the cordiality. The tension that is created leads to stress, sickness, insomnia etc. I consider these inner signals that inform me when I am not purposeful.

I invite you to reflect on your purposefulness to determine the improvements required. In looking for how to improve you may examine literature from my blog www.ranjandesilva.com, website www.ranjandesilva.com and other sources and speak with your trusted advisor. We will further explore the notion of purposeful Leadership and methods of transformation in the upcoming blog posts.

References De Silva, R. L. G. (2024). Living Purposefully: An Inquiry into the life of a leadership development practitioner. (Doctoral dissertation, Hult Ashridge).