“From an energy drain to an energy source”
Starting position
After 25 successful years of projects in automation I took over a senior leadership position in information management. It started like many other challenges or projects before with ambiguity and some new tasks; like setting up a global organisation. But somehow this time it felt different. Most of the interventions didn’t land as powerfully as usual, and while the time passed on more doubts came up for me. The foreground performance was still ok, but I was not really happy with the progress I was making and I felt like an empty battery without a recharging opportunity. This continued to happen until the point became crystal clear: the question of ‘who am I and why am I here?’ had become much more important than the question ‘what shall I do?’
The approach
Jo offered the support I needed to go on the journey to answer my key questions. After a couple of coaching sessions I started with a process called purpose quest. The intention of the purpose quest was to find out who I am and why I’m here. It felt challenging to go with the process as I was not sure if I really wanted to know all the answers in full clarity, which was exactly the objective of the exercise!
However, the thought of creating the opportunity to align everything I’m doing with my purpose and therefore decline everything else was exciting. So finally I started the process, which was a series of briefings and exercises to sharpen all my senses and to get full insights from where I was coming from and ended with the purpose quest itself.
The insight
From my purpose quest I had roughly 20 pages of clues, symbols, feelings, impressions and question marks and an experience of how it feels when you are fully grounded and stilled. Jo’s coaching capability and her broad knowledge in reading and decoding symbols from various cultures helped tremendously to turn the clues into enough deep insights to fully answer my purpose questions.
The result
The insights were so powerful that my batteries felt fully charged immediately and I could make quite substantial decisions about my life. The most surprising thing was the sustainability of the energising insights. Whenever I visited them I found even more energising insights and more clues from the journey to add further detail to my purpose. These further developments helped me to state short term and long term ambitions with a level of clarity and confidence I never experienced before. I would not write this down without 360 degree feedback confirming this; many of my colleagues tell me that I’m looking different, which I can understand with a gentle smile in my face looking forward to future full of opportunities.
Head of Global Supply Chain IS