Leadership Matters

CHAPTER 10FIND A JOURNEY THAT FEEDS YOUR SOUL

I believe the challenge of our time is, as Seth Godin puts it, to ‘find a journey worthy of your heart and soul’. We live in a time when, for the overwhelming majority of us, our essential needs are met. We have access to nutritious food, safe and comfortable accommodation and an increasingly high standard of living, with more people travelling abroad than any previous generation, yet the incidence of mental illness grows at alarming rates. I will leave those working within the sector to decide whether this is a result of a rise in numbers of those suffering mental health issues or a reduction in the stigma attached to mental illness and more reporting around it, or a combination of both. Regardless, as a society we have a problem, and it is not going away. How much this is a problem for ‘society’ to solve and how much it comes down to the personal responsibility of each of us to do more to meet our needs is an open question.

The challenge, or journey as may be, is to find what feeds your soul and invest in that. It need not be ground-breaking, scary or pushing your limits, but it does need to be pursued with integrity because it is what matters to you and not about the image of you it creates. It's the thing you do when no one is looking, when it is not captured and shared with the world who will assess you as an individual in 0.6 of a second before moving on. While it might not need to be on the edge of our physical limits, I ...