How to reconnect with your purpose

Joe Hudson Celebration at The Mindful CEO: 

This month, Im honouring the work of a special voice in leadership coaching: 

Joe Hudson

Joe is the “coach behind Silicon Valley’s unicorn CEOs”. He is one of the most sought-after teachers among the world’s top leaders at OpenAI, Alphabet, Apple, and numerous other companies (the list is endless). 

I am deeply honored to have Joe as a guest expert on the faculty of my annual CEO Cohort program.

And to celebrate his contribution, the following weeks will be dedicated to some of his transformative ideas for leadership.

If you'd like to read more from Joe himself or participate in his acclaimed AoA training programs, you can find the information here. 

Stop searching for your purpose.

Start recognizing what's already living through you.

There's a cruel irony in the modern obsession with finding purpose.

Walk into any bookstore, scroll through any social media feed, and you'll find endless promises to help you discover your life's meaning.

Yet notice something curious: the people who are genuinely thriving, who wake up with that unmistakable fire in their eyes, rarely talk about having "found" their purpose. They're too busy living it.

This paradox reveals a fundamental misunderstanding about the nature of purpose itself. We've been asking the wrong question entirely.

The Search That Keeps You Lost

"How do I find my purpose?" seems like a reasonable question. It implies purpose exists somewhere out there, waiting to be discovered like buried treasure.

But as executive coach Joe Hudson points out, this question contains its own trap. It assumes you were somehow born without purpose, that you could possibly exist separate from it.

Imagine a dog anxiously wondering how to bark.

The absurdity is obvious, yet we do exactly this with purpose. The very act of searching creates a denial of what's already present. Every moment you spend hunting for purpose is a moment you're not recognizing the purpose already moving through you.

Think about it: even your searching has a quality to it. The way you search, what draws your attention, what you can't stop thinking about, these are all expressions of something deeper trying to emerge. The search itself is purposeful, though we're often too busy searching to notice.

Your Purpose Isn't a Destination

Here's what changes everything: purpose isn't about what you do. It's about how you're being while you do it.

Consider someone whose life takes them through seemingly disconnected chapters: artist, entrepreneur, parent, teacher. Looking at the surface, these might appear random. But look deeper at how they approach each role. Perhaps there's always a thread of bringing order to chaos, or connecting people to their creativity, or revealing hidden patterns. The activities change; the essence remains.

This means your entire career could collapse tomorrow, and your purpose would remain intact.

Because purpose isn't your job title, your company, or your role. It's the particular quality of presence you bring to whatever you're doing. It's why two people can do identical work, yet one feels deeply aligned while the other feels empty.

The Compass You've Been Ignoring

If purpose is already present, how do we recognize it?

Your body knows before your mind does.

Notice the difference between two types of effort. There's the grinding effort of forcing yourself through something misaligned, the kind that leaves you depleted even when you succeed.

Then there's the effort of stretching into something that scares you precisely because it matters so much. This second type might require enormous energy, yet somehow it gives back more than it takes.

Purpose lives at this edge, where fear meets calling.

It's found in whatever makes you think, "This is too big for me, but I have to try anyway." Not because someone expects it, but because something in you will wither if you don't.

One executive I know described it perfectly: "When I'm aligned with my purpose, even hard things feel like swimming downstream. When I'm not, even easy things feel like drowning."

The Moment Purpose Becomes Choiceless

There's a maturation that happens when you stop fighting your nature. At first, living your purpose feels like a choice you have to make repeatedly, often against resistance.

Should I speak up in this meeting? Should I take this creative risk? Should I follow this unconventional path?

But gradually, something shifts. It's not that choices disappear, but that alternatives become increasingly unbearable.

You develop what one leader called "allergic reactions" to anything that pulls you away from your truth. The cost of self-betrayal becomes so clear, so immediately felt, that living any other way stops being an option.

This isn't limitation; it's liberation. When you know with bone-deep certainty who you are and how you need to move through the world, decisions become simple. Million-dollar opportunities that don't align? Easy no. Scary leaps that do align? Inevitable yes.

Purpose as Living Process

Perhaps most importantly, purpose isn't a fixed destination you arrive at. It's a living process that evolves as you do.

The purpose that drives you at 25 will transform by 45, not because you were wrong before, but because purpose deepens and refines itself through living.

What starts as "I want to help people" might evolve into "I help leaders see their blind spots" and eventually into something even more precise and powerful that you couldn't have imagined at the beginning.

This is why trying to figure out your "ultimate purpose" through thinking is futile.

Purpose reveals itself through engagement, through following what calls you now, through paying attention to where you feel most alive and where you feel most resistant.

The Question That Changes Everything

So instead of asking, "How do I find my purpose?" try this: "Where am I resisting my purpose right now?"

Because you already know. In this moment, reading these words, some part of you knows exactly where you're playing small, where you're choosing safety over truth, where you're letting fear override calling. That resistance, that friction, that's not a problem to solve. It's purpose trying to break through.

The tragedy isn't that you lack purpose. The tragedy is that you've been looking so hard for it "out there" that you've missed it living through you all along, in how you love, how you work, how you struggle, even in how you search.

Your purpose isn't lost. But perhaps, in all that searching, you've forgotten how to recognize yourself.

The invitation isn't to find your purpose, but to stop pretending you don't already know what it is.

What would change if you admitted what you've always known you're here to do?

(If you want to dig deeper, listen to this great podcast by Joe, that inspired this writing)

Yours,

P.S. For Leaders Ready to Transform

These insights come from real conversations: with founders who carry the weight of their vision alone, with CEOs facing unprecedented complexity, with leaders sensing it's time for profound change.

If something here resonated, perhaps we should talk.

I work with a small circle of leaders through three paths: the Wise Leaders Fellowship (my nine-month journey for CEOs beginning with silent retreat), deep 1:1 coaching partnerships, and organizational transformation mandates.

The Fellowship's next cohort is forming now. Reply with a brief introduction, and let's explore what's possible.

P.P.S: And because you deserve it - here is your bonus.

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