How can you discover your “professional mission”?

Reading time: 6 min

by Alberto Aleo and Alice Alessandri

On the pages of this blog, you have often heard us talk about how important it is for companies to focus on a higher purpose that goes beyond mere profit and, more generally, to do the same for ourselves and our job. Staying true to your “professional mission” is essential to make your actions consistent, to find your bearings when confused or challenged, and to become more memorable and distinctive in the eyes of customers or stakeholders. Moreover, a clear purpose is a source of motivation: driving the team forward and involving everyone in something bigger.

In short, there are many reasons why it is important to have a clear and shareable professional mission. But how can you identify it? This is a question clients often ask us during training sessions and consultancies, and we have decided to answer it in this article. So, if you are still unsure or do not have a clear idea of the ultimate purpose behind all your daily efforts, keep reading!

Evolving needs.

Some time ago, in an article dedicated to Maslow’s well-known hierarchy of needs, we talked about how important it is to understand where our motivational drives are located. If, when asked “Why do you go to work every morning?”, we still answer “So that I can eat every day!”, it means that our professional mission is still located very low in the hierarchy of possible reasons and purposes. Of course, there are desperate situations in which survival really is the only thing one can focus on, but in many cases, a professional mission can be more sophisticated, perhaps through reflection or working on self-development, and even by taking a few risks in order to work your way up.

Many of those who get stuck at the bottom of the pyramid actually choose to do so, with varying degrees of awareness, by giving up on their own ambitions.

All we can do is remind them of how precarious and unhappy life can be if you settle for a low-level purpose. Sooner or later, you lose motivation, performance declines, and the chances of losing what you have increase, even though you think you were defending it through this withdrawn strategy.

Knowing how to identify your own level within Maslow’s framework is certainly important, but it’s not enough. The model offers only a general answer to what drives us and what our goals are. To clarify our professional mission more accurately, we need to add one more step.

A step before reciprocity.

We have already discussed reciprocity in the context of networking strategies. What we want to emphasize now is that the law of give and take contains an interesting formula to better understand who we are and what we have to offer the world. In turn, this can also help us discover our professional mission.

The law of reciprocity, inspired by the principle of action and reaction, reminds us that nothing can be received unless something has been offered first.

If we look closely, the nature, quality, and quantity of what we receive are strictly related to what we have given first. For example, if I want to receive kindness, I must offer kindness, which means I must be kind to those around me. This all seems perfectly logical, but if what I offer and what I receive are so closely linked, we could reverse the question in the title of this article and ask ourselves: “What do I want to receive from my work and from my business activity?”

Although many are confused about their professional mission, which is strongly connected to what they can “offer” to the market, many more know exactly what they want from their work, and will therefore find it easier to answer this new question. The reflections in the previous paragraph will also help you answer it. For example, if you have concluded that, within Maslow’s hierarchy, you find yourself at the level of esteem, then esteem is what you want to receive.

At this point, the question becomes: “What can I offer in order to receive esteem in return?” This definitely brings us closer to identifying our professional mission, but one piece is still missing, and we will address it in the final paragraph!

Professional mission: we are what we do.

We have therefore found a way to understand what we can offer through our job or the business we manage. Let us now take one final step together in the search for our professional mission, with the help of another pyramid-based model, this time developed by Robert Dilts, who introduced the concept of logical levels. According to this theory, every aspect of our life is connected. These connections occur on different planes, and a change at the higher levels has an effect on the lower ones. What happens in a lower layer is therefore a function of what lies above it.

Aligning logical levels means ensuring that there is consistency between what is above and what is below. However, the responses we receive from the context and environment in which we operate (the first level) might not seem consistent with the behaviors (the second level) we are expressing through our actions, or with the skills and abilities that we recognize in ourselves (the third level).

Most of the time, consistency really does exist. We simply fail to see it because we do not look at the causes that have produced certain effects objectively enough.

Let’s go back to the example of the previous paragraph: we discover that we are seeking esteem and, thanks to the law of reciprocity, we become convinced that in order to satisfy this need, we should first offer something. Let’s imagine you have discovered that in exchange for esteem, you need to offer respect, professionalism, and competence. By making use of Dilts’ pyramid, try to define the nature of this offering in greater detail by specifying which behaviours (the second level) you should adopt in practice, which skills (the third level) will support you, and which values and beliefs (the fourth level) your idea of professionalism and respect is based on.

At the end of the process, you will have discovered what is important to you and the qualities that characterize you.

These are the pillars of your professional identity (the fifth level) that make you stand out. Now look at the professional figure whose traits you have outlined and ask yourself how this person can serve others, what purpose (the sixth level), i.e., your professional mission, they can take on as their duty.

Despite the help provided by frameworks and methods, we realize that identifying your professional mission is by no means easy, but it is not impossible either, and it is definitely essential.

Remember that travelling, reading, meeting people, and challenging yourself are very effective ways of “discovering yourself”.

Whatever happens, once your professional mission* becomes clear to you, follow it without hesitation. It is your duty, even before it is your right, to do so. The world is poorer when talent and passions are wasted.

* We want to stress that we mean “mission” as a true calling, like that of a missionary, because we think of it as the role of someone who is in the service of higher purposes.

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