What's Your Fulfillment ROI?
Is Fulfillment Elusive? – My Journey?
This question has been a burning one for me for about as long as I can remember. I’ve always wanted to live a life of purpose, to be fulfilled. To find that sweet spot where I was aligning my deepest passions to the world’s yearning need. And man did I try to find it in a lot of different places: tech start up, social justice, ministry, corporate America, consulting, coaching, and on. While I would find fleeting moments I would label "fulfilling"; they were just that: moments. It was by no means a state of being, but a moment in time.?
And frankly that bugged the crap out of me. I mean yes, I had been flitting from one engagement/career like a moth at a lantern convention, but like that moth I was SUPER excited each and every time.?Eventually I had to acknowledge my approach to fulfillment wasn’t working. So I was stuck at a fork in the road.??
OR??
And to be honest, I was leaning towards Path A, even going so far as to lift my foot and orient my body in that direction. When, BOOM! it’s March 2020 and the world has decided everyone is going to socially distance our collective selves down Path B. And so began my journey to go slow so I could grow deep.?
What Exactly Is Fulfillment?
Fast forward about 18 months to the end of 2021 and a I’m rocking with a sweet team of four Flipsters and feeling that sweet fulfillment. Then we lose a big client; I start to ruminate on the why; and realize man do I feel tired. Quickly I start losing that sweet feeling. In this space, I start butting up against one of our cultural pillars:?
?“No Work | If it feels like work, stop. If it persists, talk about it.”??
And I think: “Not again.” So, I take our culture seriously and I start talking about it. And God bless this awesome team, they listen. We reflect. They create space. They respond. I grow. Frankly, fewer awesome things happen on this planet than this type of interaction. In the end the idea of the Fulfillment ROI starts to coalesce (captured in the sweet infographic below).???
It's such a simple formula. Value Created > Energy Input. Yet, the implications have been far reaching for me personally and in business. I've stopped using the term “work” to describe what I do (which fits well with the pillar stated above) and started talking about “catalyzing” (reducing energy requirements) and “vectoring” (acting with purpose and impact to improve value creation). So now I could answer the below.?
I'm still a work in progress with this, having gone through a few more iterations on how Flip the Script best drives towards impact over outcomes, both internally and externally. Yet even in the harder moments, having the framework of Fulfillment ROI has really helped to pinpoint where this issue is: Too much energy drain? Find ways to catalyze. Not seeing the value? Find ways to better vector.
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Don't Forget About The Buckets
This topic also touches on another concept that comes up in our work (umm, I mean catalyzing and vectoring ??) at Flip the Script. We call it the 3 Buckets and it's a way of visualizing how we're engaging our energy. Basically we all have three buckets we can put our energy into:
By focusing on your Fulfillment ROI you naturally will start finding ways to reduce the investments in your Anxiety/Distress bucket. You will also find clarity on how to best utilize your energy in the other two buckets to create value (however it is you define it - both intrinsically and extrinsically).
So What About Sustainability???
A big “a ha” for me was realizing that the Fulfillment ROI formula has a secondary impact: It feeds sustainability. It does so by addressing the question of “What stops sustainability?” The answer to which turns out to be the reverse formula: Energy Input > Value Created. By working on improving your Fulfillment ROI you flip the formula back and can course correct unsustainable activities. Once you are producing a positive ROI, this then acts as a buffer to stave of momentary bumps in the road because these bumps inevitably are felt as increased energy investment or reduced value creation.??
So helping maximize our Fulfillment ROIs we increase the chance to weather the storms and keep us on the sustainable path.??
An Example: The “Great Resignation”?
As a current example, let’s look at the phenomena sweeping the nation (and world): The “Great Resignation”. Seen through the lens of the Fulfillment ROI this situation and its solution make a lot of sense. It’s a natural next chapter to the “Great Pause” we collective experienced in 2020-2021. As people were forced to hurry up and wait, many aspects of our lives and work got called into question (aka we reassessed the Value Created).??
We also had some real life examples of how we could perform these different roles in our lives, as many aspects were stripped to their bare essentials, like “What can you truly get done when isolating at home, possibly with the rest of your family also doing so, and worrying about every trip from this shared space/home/prison?” From this position we started to see the proverbial Matrix of how our energy inputs impacted our created value. Many realized some of these weren’t “worth it” (aka not providing a positive ROI).??
And so we are now in a period where people are consciously questioning what is “worth it”. Which is to say they are assessing their Fulfillment ROIs.?
It's such a simple formula. Value Created > Energy Input. Yet, the implications have been far reaching for me personally and in business. I use the terms "vectoring" and "catalyzing" pretty much every day. When I'm struggling with why something isn't making it happen this concept becomes my litmus test to pause, build awareness and make conscious choice. Sometimes it does make things feel harder as their is truth to "ignorance is bliss" but the underbelly of that truism is that true growth doesn't happen by accident (aka in ignorance) and growth is what eventually flips a negative Fulfillment ROI. Finding ways to feel more fulfilled in anything, involves learning how to reduce the energy needed to create the value or increase the value of what is being done.
What’s Next?
For organizations and individuals feeling the impacts of this new chapter and wondering what to do, check out some of the examples given in the infographic above. I promise you the energy invested here will provide you the value. How’s that for meta?????