Can I fulfill my higher purpose in a corporate job?
For as long as I can remember, I have been rebelling against my corporate job.
In my twenties I worked so hard to achieve it, and once I did, I realized I hated it. I felt stuck and fooled. As if somehow I had been tricked to follow the breadcrumbs of glory, only to find out they lead nowhere.
Looking back, it has been more of a love-hate relationship, because I do love so many aspects of it. I love the people who often turn into life-long connections and best friends. I love the fancy offices, the intellectual challenges, the nice clothes and the belonging.
It has been easy and it has been providing for me, but it hasn’t felt like my purpose. And I desperately want to find my purpose.
Finding my purpose felt like an obsession
Finding my purpose felt like an obsession to find the ONE THING I was put on this earth to do, and it certainly didn’t feel like I was going to find it within the glass-covered buildings I travelled to on a daily basis.
It also felt like I didn’t fit into the corporate culture. I could play the game, but in my heart I knew I didn’t fit. I didn’t dare to be myself fully, because I feared I was too soft, too spiritual, too anti-corporate to ever “make it” in that world.
So I hid myself, played the game and felt like an outsider.
In my early thirties I finally quit my job to explore what felt like the polar opposite – yoga, meditation and coaching. We moved from Finland to the Philippines to live on beach, and when I left I swore I would never return to corporate! I was finally free, I was finally independent, and I would never go back!
When two years into that exploration of freedom I realized that I actually missed the corporate life, I felt confused and bewildered to say the least.
Following the breadcrumbs back to the office
Things begin and things end, and I could not pretend to love the beach life anymore. I wanted to wear pantyhose and boots, and I wanted to work with other people again.
So I went back, but this time decided to stop focusing on the external. It didn’t matter to me anymore what my “career” would look like, in fact I didn’t want a career. I just wanted to do work that was stimulating, work with fun people and enjoy my life.
This liberated me to go after projects that were simply fun, to do work that came easily because it was close to my true nature, and I stopped working for promotions and external achievements.
And what followed?
Promotions and external achievements.
I know Esther Hicks talks about it all the time – stop wanting and you shall receive. You cannot find what you think is lost, and when you stop telling yourself you are lacking something, it is free to come to you.
It’s still quite spectacular when it happens to you (no matter how many times I have lived through it).
Could there be purpose within these walls?
I never thought about a managerial position. In fact, I always very clearly steered away from it thinking it’s absolutely not for me.
Until I took part in a workshop focusing on psychological safety within the workplace. At the end of the workshop everyone had to write down their ideal situation, and without an exception everyone (including myself) expressed a wish to have more diversity within leadership positions, more women, more people who had highly tuned interpersonal skills and who were softer.
We all wanted more softness into the harsh halls of corporate.
This meeting changed everything for me.
I realized that instead of wishing for these magical women to appear from somewhere to lead us, why not become one myself?
WHY not me?
Why NOT me?
Why not ME??
This question would haunt me the following months, and it would not leave me alone. Because the only possible answer was DAMN RIGHT, ME!!
And a new, deeper purpose was born.
A purpose that doesn’t want to get ahead for me, but for all the others who are coming after me. A purpose that wants to guide the next generation of corporate women, showing them an example of someone soft, someone spiritual and someone different taking space in the management teams.
Someone to lead with the heart, to encourage diversity and stand up for inclusion.
Someone to change the corporate culture one encounter at a time.
Leading with the heart
As it always happens, when we allow the Universe to do its work through us, magical things happen.
After declaring my intentions during the summer months, I watched the most intricate game of chess taking place, all in my favor. There was more support for me from all directions than I have ever experienced. I was able to rise with such flow and simplicity, just by being myself.
What a homecoming and revolution. I was able to be 100% myself and succeed!
I started my first managerial position in November. I feel proud, but also quite like my son must feel learning to bicycle with his support-wheels on the side of his little bike.
There’s just this one question that kept coming back.
How can anyone fulfill their higher purpose in a corporate job?
Bringing it all together
Was there a way for me to bring all of me into my corporate job to find fulfillment, or was I doomed to have side-hustles to satisfy my sense of purpose while working for “the man.”
One morning I meditated and got quiet, and asked my higher self: Can I fulfill my higher purpose in a corporate world?
And my soul answered:
Where ever you are, you are fulfilling your higher purpose.
When ever you are being fully yourself, you are fulfilling your higher purpose.
And I realized, in one big swoop of a moment, that our higher purpose is not tied to a job, a place or a particular activity.
It’s tied to being true to the uniqueness that we are.
It’s being yourself and letting go of the rest.
Letting go of the expectation that you have about what you should become in order to be purposeful. Letting go of the expectation that only by doing something you are purposeful, and therefore forever searching outside of yourself for that place of purpose.
Letting go of the plans you have for yourself, and allowing what you are to shine through. Allowing you to be you, in every way possible.
This way, in every single interaction, in every single moment, you are fulfilling your higher purpose.
This realization has made me feel liberated and free. I am allowing myself, maybe for the first time ever, to fully love the corporate path I’m on. It’s not 9-5, it doesn’t suck my soul and it’s not hard. I am soft and soulful, and I will remain this way.
What will come of it is not my business. My business is to show up as I am, fully, and to do the work that lights me up. And I know in the process I will light up the world as well.
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Hi, I'm Kaisa
I’m a INFJ/HSP/HSS chasing joy, sensations, experiences, emotions, contradictions, LIFE. I’m here to share my experience of existence with you in the hopes that we feel connected at heart and strengthened by our shared experience.
“May we all know ourselves as the Universe created us. May we all know life as we were meant to live it. May we all love purely, deeply and totally. May humanity discover its divinity, and may we all dwell in the peace of the Universe” – A Course in Miracles