Truth. Growth. Repeat.

Chapter 20 measuring your truth gap

This chapter is about aligning the real-world behaviour of your business with your authentic motive as its owner.

I personally believe that as soon as you’ve defined a True Purpose, you’re obligated to pursue it. You know in your heart of hearts that it’s worthy, that it’s valuable, that it will make a difference to the world. Yes, it’s scary because just about every True Purpose I’ve seen involves breaking a number of business conventions. But if you don’t set about implementing your True Purpose — for real — then all that good work you’ve just done will be wasted. You’re effectively denying yourself and the world a better future.

So how do you do that? Where do you start?

In our workshops, we start with another one of those killer questions. We ask business owners to put themselves in the shoes of an unbiased consumer and ask themselves, ‘If someone told me about a business with this stated purpose, how would I expect them to show up to me?’

It’s an insanely powerful question. It’s the clearest, most honest starting point I can give you to help you align your behaviour to your newly defined purpose.

What this question is doing is setting you a task: to review every way your business currently projects itself out into the world and see how well it aligns with your purpose. How you serve people, develop products, advertise, treat your staff, write your press releases, handle social media, and so on (and so on and so on!).

If most of these ...