Hone your focus to what matters most!

A gift from PurposeFused

As we embark on the last 2 months of 2022, we wanted to offer you something practical you could take away, work through and apply towards being the happiest, most fulfilled version of you! It’s a cool little tool we’ve designed for you, based upon the “Sphere’s of Impact” model our partner Nell Derick Debevoise designed for her book Going First.

There’s no information capture, no strings – just a link for you to access and download from.

As you would have seen from some of our prior insights (game plan here) and (fulfillment here) for example – happiness and fulfillment, explored and understood, enable you to unearth and articulate your purpose; if then applied intentionally to how you spend your time and energy in life – you’re living on purpose. So, regardless of whether you have done the deep purpose discovery and exploration process; you can hack / short-circuit living on purpose by focusing on the things that make you feel happy and fulfilled.

Below we explain how starting with gratitude and being intentional about happiness and fulfillment, will get you on track by focusing on what matters most FOR YOU. The more you focus here, on the areas you can control, the better you are – whether measured by performance, productivity, impact or wellbeing.

The Spheres are 7 areas of your life you can be aware of and intentional about. They are practical ways to think about the interactions, actions, activities and experiences you have, across:

• FOUNDATIONAL AREAS because they are core to sustaining the best version of yourself, which include 1) Self (Mind, Body, Spirit); 2) Family and 3) Friends; and
• ABOVE THE LINE: being 4) Job (role), 5) Employer (workplace), 6) Community, 7) Money (buy, invest, donate).

Ref: Spheres of Impact Model (fig. 1) below.

The link to the tool is HERE.

The only instructions being (given it is a google spreadsheet) TO DOWNLOAD IT, in order to edit it! So go to “File” then “Download”, then open it from your desktop and save to your own folder.

Fig 1. Spheres of Impact, Nell Derick Debevoise, Going First.

Let’s unpack the tool a bit more:

Firstly – Gratitude: What are your grateful for?

Gratitude is a lens through which we can look at life; an abundance mindset. Appreciating what we do have in our lives, rather than looking for what’s missing, helps establish a positive mindset, which is the initial trigger for positive thoughts, perspectives, possibilities and actions. Whether you journal, take gratitude walks, share gratitude with others or meditate around gratitude, there are a number of practices to help you implement gratitude.
The activity in the tool encourages you to think about what you are grateful for across various spheres of your life. The sphere

Secondly – Happiness: Do you want to be happy?

The research on happiness is unsurprisingly, comprehensive. We’ve read our fair share and incorporate it into our work with individuals, teams and organizations. We might as well enjoy life, right?

Whatever you read, in our view, the components of happiness boil down to two common denominators: people and experiences. That is, more specifically meaningful relationships (as most extensively documented but he Harvard Grant study) and meaningful experiences (which we like to benchmark against Flow – Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s model around optimal experiences).

If we are all more intentional about the relationships we want to take deeper and the experiences we enjoy most, we would focus our time and energy in a way that would make us happier, period.

Thirdly – Fulfillment: Do you want to feel fulfilled?

Obviously there are some gray areas and areas of overlap between happiness and fulfillment. These can result in us feeling inspired. Further, when we recognize these areas and are intentional about putting them into practice, we’re living on purpose. In order to feel the sense of accomplishment, reward, pride and satisfaction we get from being fulfilled, we have to focus on actions, activities, interactions and experiences, that drive fulfillment.

To consider these in a holistic and impactful way, we suggest you think about things that make a meaningful impact (positive difference) across 3 dimensions:

• Me – that’s you. What actions, activities, interactions and experiences leave you in a better place?
• We – that’s those you surround yourself with the most. Likely friends, family, colleagues, for example.
• World – anything meaningful that sits beyond your ‘We’ – for example, a cause, movement, faith, or community-based initiative. It may also be the ripple effect your We have as a result of the difference you have made for them.

Forth – Focus: What means most to you?

By reviewing the three areas above, you can take a step back and then narrow back in one what matters most to you. Where can you make the most impact, where will you be happiest, who would this be with, why? The spheres will help you prioritize within each, to get the ultimate blend of focus across various areas of your life.

Of course, if one particular areas takes priority over another for this particular season of life – it should. We’re not suggesting an equal balance across all areas; that would likely imply compromise in some areas that deserve more attention. Rather, we’re looking to infuse our purpose across all areas but in a weighting that makes sense based upon what matters most, NOW, that is aligned to the impact you’d be proud to make long term. If you’d like to reflect this in the tool itself, you’re welcome to document more than one area of focus in any particular sphere you feel deserves it.

Lastly, we’ve added a couple of additional tabs for those who would like to visualize their inputs – so cut and paste the model and let your artist juices flow; and additionally a “review” tab, if you’d like to revisit this tool at the end of your timeline and re-use it for another season (which of course we strongly encourage you to do)!

Again, zero strings attached here. We’re super passionate inspiring and empowering people to be on purpose – that’s it. If you do download the tool, please let us know about your experience with it, if you have any questions and of course, if you’d like to learn more about the purpose work we support people and teams with, around this.