The post-COVID guide to self fulfillment

There is a good deal to unpack about the concept of self fulfillment (you can refer to it with or without the hyphen, and we will mix it up periodically in this article). Entire sections of bookstores are dedicated to the topic, and its cousin, self-help. How does it apply in a work context?

Since we know employee engagement scores haven’t been that good across most industries in the past 10-15 years -- although somewhat paradoxically, they did improve on COVID-era surveys -- it likely stands to reason that work is not necessarily the path to self-fulfillment, except for the lucky few whose work aligns with their innate motivations.

That’s underscored in an article by Wharton professor Stewart Friedman called “Get More Done By Focusing Less On Work.” Friedman argues that there are four major commitments in your life:

• Work
• Home
• Community
• Self
  

A ‘Four-Way Win’ is when you integrate the areas to an extent, and then make a tweak that essentially benefits all of them. Simple in thought, right? Harder in execution. (Here’s another Friedman article on designing Four-Way Win experiments.)

Here are the results of one of his studies, conducted across 300 professionals:

‍

In short: shift your attention away from things like work and towards home, community, and self -- and you can be happier and closer to self-fulfillment. 

The other aspect of the “self fulfillment and work” intersection would be these ideas around purpose and mission, which are very commonly discussed at jobs, especially by executive leadership in big, all-hands meetings. The problem can be, as outlined in “You Don’t Find Your Purpose; You Build It:”

Most of us will have multiple sources of purpose in our lives. For me, I find purpose in my children, my marriage, my faith, my writing, my work, and my community. For almost everyone, there’s no one thing we can find. It’s not purpose but purposes we are looking for — the multiple sources of meaning that help us find value in our work and lives. Professional commitments are only one component of this meaning, and often our work isn’t central to our purpose but a means to helping others, including our families and communities. Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose takes the pressure off of finding a single thing to give our lives meaning.

“Acknowledging these multiple sources of purpose” is a notable part of that paragraph. Self-fulfillment, at work or at home, doesn’t come from one simple source. There might be a source that drives the most of it -- say, your relationship with your partner, or even a core product you owned the development of -- but purpose and self-fulfillment are multi-tiered and multi-input. 

What should we know about finding self-fulfillment, the potholes along the way, and some strategies to get there?

Achievement vs. fulfillment

This is perhaps best encapsulated in this Tim Ferriss-Tony Robbins podcast episode. 

“Achievement” tends to be more tangibly-measurable things, like the size of your house, your salary, number of vacations in a year (pre-COVID), etc. “Fulfillment” is more intangible and can refer to quality of relationships, feeling connected to others, outreach, and more. 

They use Robin Williams as an example. It’s not a perfect example, no, because one of the reasons that Williams committed suicide was tied to a medical diagnosis -- ostensibly he was becoming demented, and he didn’t want to live that way. 

But the Ferriss-Robbins argument is that he achieved a great deal professionally, but perhaps wasn’t fulfilled ultimately. You can say the same about many artists over the years, from James Dean to Vincent Van Gogh.

So that’s the first brick to understand: achievement and fulfillment are not necessarily the same thing. 

Higher-order strategies for self-fulfillment

A good list to begin with:

• What are your core values? What are concepts in life you won’t budge on? Treatment of others is usually a place to start -- do you value inclusion into the group, or focus more on self? Are your values more political or fiscal in nature? If you know your core set of values and can live them day-to-day, you are on a path to potential self-fulfillment.
  

• What are your real hopes and ambitions? For generations, people tended to define this in terms of owning homes, children, finding a partner (that order was wrong, but you get the picture). That life path might be changing for a number of reasons. Now will ambitions be more about experiences, travel, nights you can’t ever forget with friends? It’s a shift we’re seeing in real-time, and COVID already made a lot of people question their priorities and commitments. 
  

• Accepting your true self: This can be hard for many people, but it’s an important part of the path to self fulfillment. You need to understand who you are at core, which means both the parts of yourself you’re proud of and the parts you’re not. You can still endeavor to fix the parts you’re not proud of -- you should! -- but denying them won’t help you at all.
  

• Understanding the role of change: It’s inevitable. Over the course of your life, you will see friends move away, friends have kids and change their own priorities, pets pass away, grandparents pass away, parents eventually pass away, jobs pivot, jobs be lost, and more. There might even be divorce or other factors in there. As Brene Brown says: “No one skips the second act of life.” 
  

• Live in the moment: Sounds like trite advice, and often can feel that way, especially during COVID. But increasingly, finding self fulfillment means living for now and putting aside future anxieties and other nonsense. It’s not easy, but it’s doable.
  

If those are the higher-order paths to self fulfillment, what are some of the actionable, day-to-day strategies to get there?

Self-fulfillment actions

Forbes has one good list, with some notable targets to consider:

• Marry a partner: There is a belief, largely because of the entertainment industry, that we all need to be head-over-heels in love constantly with our partner. That’s awesome if you find it, but most relationships go up and down, and teeter on the brink sometimes and are amazing in other times. It’s best to find a partner who will be there in the moments of child vomit, job loss, parental illness, etc. The stable partner has more value than the white-hot love, often.

• Prioritize wellbeing: This means two things -- (1) is get healthier and (2) is remove toxic, no-value relationships from your life. Sometimes you were best friends with someone from age 22 to 25, and at 26 based on a variety of factors, the value isn’t there anymore. Let them go. If they come back into your life, awesome. If they don’t, it wasn’t meant to be.

• Travel: This is often the biggest piece of advice given about self-fulfillment. It will definitely allow you to understand other cultures and belief structures, and open your eyes to more than always doing the same thing in your neighborhood and surrounding areas. Admittedly this is harder right now, but the world is slowly opening back up.

• Focus on relationships: They matter more than KPIs and deliverables, and if you read interviews with hospice (end of life) nurses, people who know they’re about to pass away pine the most for relationships and friendships over everything else.

• Financial independence: This doesn’t mean you need to be a billionaire, but you should have some money saved up and generally be able to live on your own for a while, because you never know when layoffs or other reversals can hit.

• Avoid becoming too comfortable: Excess comfort means you’re not challenging yourself enough. 

• Don’t argue for the sake of arguing: This advice makes the most contextual sense in relationships and on social media. In both cases, it’s a drain of energy that is better used somewhere else, like on a passion project.

• Get pets: This often becomes unconditional love (OK, maybe not a fish), and unconditional love is a good ingredient in the self-fulfillment stew.

• Personal accountability: Hold yourself accountable. When you screw up, own it. It’s OK. More on failure in a second.

• Read: It’s a way to learn new ideas, take yourself out of the day-to-day, and enter new worlds that can excite you.

• Love yourself: Perhaps the hardest, but the best, advice of all for self-fulfillment. If you don’t love yourself, chances are no one else will or can.

A note on self fulfillment and failure

You might inherently think that in order to achieve self-fulfillment, failure is an “anti,” i.e. you should run from failure. In some ways, the opposite is true!

First of all, it’s nearly impossible to appreciate success in life if you haven’t failed. If you’re always winning and on top, that must be nice -- but how do you even know you’re on top without experiencing the valleys to go with the peaks?

There’s a business case here too, actually. Turns out the highest stock growth since 1985 is a lesser-known company called Balchem Corporation, which makes flavorings and nutritional additives for animal feed. Their stock has grown 107,099% — that’s not a typo — since the year Back to the Future came out.

Well, on the path to that 107,099% growth, they invested in a new coating technology and it bombed. In 13 months, they lost 53% of their market share. Major failure. Layoffs. Senior leaders were distraught.

And still, they came back and had the best stock performance in a 35-year period. They did it by understanding where they failed, instilling patience in their people, and coaching them up around resilience and grit. 

Now, amazing stock returns are not necessarily “self-fulfillment,” no -- although to some, they might be. But the bigger point is: failure is often necessary to achieve success, be that financial or self fulfillment.

Can we manage self-fulfillment in others?

Semantically, no, since the self portion of self-fulfillment implies that the employee would need to reach his or her level of fulfillment on his or her own. 

However, it can be helpful to see COVID work-wise as a managerial fulcrum point. 

For years, we viewed managers as process-keepers who make the trains run. That’s still their role to some extent, although a lot of the “trains running” part has been given over to technology in the last decade (think CRMs). 

Managers now need to focus more on people development, checking in with their teams, one-on-ones, helping them develop resilience in tough times, and more. All of these things are elements of personal accountability that the employee also must own, but COVID laid bare the idea that managers just control process and approve things. They need to be working with people, and helping their direct reports on the path to self-fulfillment is part of that. They can’t be responsible for the entire journey, no. But they can check in with employees about:

• How things are going
• Roadblocks
• Struggles
• Aspirations
• Ambitions
• Next steps
  

Some managers recoil at this idea because they don’t want to be seen as “friends” with their employees. There may be some justification to that, but the post-COVID management era should ideally focus more on these attributes of effective management, as opposed to the procedural ones. Will every manager need to be a self-fulfillment coach? No. But they will need to try and build a relationship beyond questioning deadlines.

How does Fingerprint for Success help with self fulfillment?

We can help through personal coaching (both AI and human) and our suite of tools that help the development of both effective communication and high-performing teams. 

Ready to finally understand what self fulfillment means to you and how to achieve it? Sign-up for our fast AI coaching program today.