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A note of clarity

To have something in your pocket you can always refer to when you need guidance- a little note of clarity that keeps you on track- is something we all wish for. 

As kids, our parents and guardians provided this. But as we grow older, we open ourselves up to the many voices out there in the world which distract us continuously from our inner truth and bring confusion.

Over the course of the last 3 and a half years, I have been blessed to help many entrepreneurs focus on their inner guidance. One of the goals of this work is a personal mission statement.

Such a statement is much more than a plaque on office walls or a message on your website. It is the foundation that holds your work in place. It aligns what you do with who you are while making it amply clear to the world what you are here to give- why you matter.

A lost art

Finding and writing your mission statement is a lost art. One that requires dedication and sheer will, but it is possible for anyone. 

In this thought nugget, I would like to share 5 points that can help you get started with yours:

A mission statement…

…is always built on your core truth: What is your personal central conviction?
…is always short and easy to understand. Confusion is the enemy.
…makes it clear what human value you are here to give.
…makes it clear who this value is for: Who will benefit the most from it?
…is unchangeable. Even as times change, your mission statement doesn’t.

Let’s use my personal mission statement as an example:

“I guide people to recognize their inner truth and apply it in their work so they can find fulfillment and serve their value to those who need it most.”

1. Core truth: My conviction is that our potential is our story. We must own it.

2. Simplicity: The statement is one sentence long and worded in plain English.

3. Value given: Guidance towards self-ownership.

4. Value receiver: Those who seek fulfillment and purpose in their work.

5. Permanence: All of my work will always be about this statement.

Emotional attachment to a mission statement is of extreme importance. If your heart does not rejoice at the sight of it, you need to dig deeper. After all, the mission statement is your deepest desire made visible through words.

If you want to start unearthing yours, reply to this email or schedule a call to find out what it takes to get to a level of clarity and focus that will lead to fulfilling, Happy Work.

Schedule a call

Warmly,

Olivier Egli 

Listen to our latest podcast episode → Do Happy Work 

28 Questions of Reflection  → Questions

Many remember this famous quote by Bruce Lee, but I am afraid that time and interpretation have not served the author’s intention well. So this wisdom, which I happen to consider the most fundamental of humanity, has lost a lot of its edge.

Dedicated readers of this newsletter will know about my obsession with apple trees. They stand as icons of nature reminding us to live according to our truth, relentlessly and unapologetically. However, there is a specific quality to this that is best visualized with the analogy of water. 

Water

Water, like us, has a specific nature. It behaves in certain ways depending on the circumstance. These ways are the rules of its game. They are not up for discussion. 

If water flows downhill, it will penetrate any opening down to the size of its molecular structure, H2O. There are many more rules it has to abide by, but these are the most common ones.

And when water does what water does, we say “it flows.” But what this denotes is that it simply behaves according to its nature, which is flow. 

Another way to put this is to say that it “follows the path of least resistance.” 

This doesn’t just mean that it will flow around obstacles, but that it will not go against its own rules. Water will not resist its own nature. 

This is the secret to life and the recipe for HAPPINESS.

Truth

When you discover who you truly are, you connect with your truth, your rules, your nature. All you need to do is follow this nature without any resistance and your reality will become that of flow. 

Consequently, you will become like water, or air, or an apple tree. This, and only this, will be the source of a deep state of HAPPINESS from which your Happy Work can emerge. Water’s Happy Work is everything it does while following its nature. 

Humans

Again, water is water. It can’t be anything different. But humans can. And that’s not always a good thing. We fool ourselves into embracing and following a nature other than our own; into believing that there is a truth other than our OWN truth. 

That’s when we lose our flow. That’s when we introduce resistance and when we fall out of our HAPPINESS and become chasers of dreams that aren’t ours.

That’s when we open ourselves up to fear and invite a transactional mindset. Suddenly, we are not like water anymore, but like water that tries to be wood. It’s an impossibility, but one we don’t realize until it’s too late, and we break. 

Be water, my friend. 

I invite you to do the work. Liberate yourself from that which binds you, open yourself up to YOUR truth, recognize your OWN rules and FLOW according to them and nothing else. Happy Work is a choice.

As always, if you ever want to chat or have a question—I’m only an email away.

Warmly,

Olivier Egli 

Listen to our latest episode → Be Like Water 

28 Questions of Reflection  → Questions

Here are THREE questions to reflect upon today.

1. What weighs you down?
2. What lifts you up?
3. What do you need to get rid of/shift in order to do the things that bring you joy?

These questions are designed to help you start a conversation with yourself; to discover the most important of all things: 

WHO YOU REALLY ARE.

If you want to dive deeper, download my 28 Questions guide → HERE

I thought about this for a long while because the topic of love tends to trigger a lot in human beings. 

Do love and business mix? 

The answer is YES, but only if we understand what LOVE is.

Love is an all encompassing energy. I think most of us agree on that. But this is where things get difficult. Unlike its popular romantic depiction, where it is associated with “being in love” and tying yourself to a person or a thing, real love is about a completely different sentiment rarely portrayed in the movies: Being free of conditions. 

Real love, or unconditional love for that matter, is the state of giving yourself and the world permission to be, and as such, to expand. 

It is the consciousness that gives room and freedom and allows you and others to bloom. Such love looks at itself and the world with great satisfaction and is free of judgment. 

Love is the ability to dwell in such an experience and to make this the reality of your life so that it motivates your thoughts, feelings, words and actions. 

It is a gentle space creator, a generous freedom giver. 

So you can see how this definition opposes the prevailing notion of love- bind yourself to a person, limiting their freedom and your own, and subjugating those we “love” to our ideas and opinions. That isn’t real love. That is fear. 

True love means to respect your own freedom and to give what is needed in order to expand as a human being- first to yourself and then to others. 

And that is what LOVE in BUSINESS must do: exist to create, hold and share space with others so that we all bloom. To never inhibit the freedom of others but to deliver value that allows for everyone involved to expand, free of judgment. 

You may call it leadership, but it is really the ability to forward your unconditional love in a professional setting. 

To openly declare: I see you for who you are, I recognize your needs and serve you with what I deeply care about. 

We are all capable of such love and the healing and thriving energy it produces.

Allow for it in your business. 

Learn to shift your conditional, fearful mind to become an agent of unconditional love. 

Reach out and I will gladly get you on that road.

Role models- many of us have them. People we look up to. Have you ever reflected on what it truly is that you admire about them?

Our inclination to find leaders and teachers comes from the time when we were little and impressionable and our parents told us how to behave in order to secure our place in the world and find “success.” 

This has created an attitude of “looking up” – and so we have become used to thinking there is always someone better than us. While it is perfectly natural behavior to seek out sources of inspiration in order to advance oneself, the imitation game is definitely not.

Idolization has quietly become a very much accepted cultural phenomenon, striping people of their self identity and slowly degrading them to a general average norm. Entire groups of people desire to become someone else- not just be like that but become them. Or they give themself to worshiping their idol.

And this is where the heartache sets in: When people fall for other people because they see them as greater than themselves, they lose the ability to learn something about themselves from that person because they are blinded by the desire to be them. This is by no means the fault of the idol but of those who project their idolization upon them.

But what is this teaching that an idol or role model brings into the world? Nothing but the subject of all my writing: Human Value. Every single idol is nothing but a person that is relentless in the sharing of their value. Their teaching is not “be me” but “be like me.” Every true leader is here to inspire in us the trust and confidence to find a great leader within ourselves. 

Every great persona is not here to force us into their shoes, but to fill our own shoes. I hesitate to bring up religion but it must be said- the idea of Jesus is one that has separated the world for ages. Was he here to teach us about ourselves or to submit us to his supremacy? The former activates our self-ownership (if he created us in his image, that means we too are great), the latter denies it.

I kindly ask you to do a little early spring cleaning and clean out your “idol closet”: Who have you let in there and for what reason? Do you aspire to be them, or are you genuinely inspired by their example to tap into your own self? Inside-out or Outside-in?

Maybe it’s time to let some of your idols or role models go.

I know, I know… there are tons of analogies around journeys and adventures when it comes to our lives. And yet, despite the fact that we grow up with stories about them, in fables, myths, tales and lastly on the tv screen we fail to understand the true significance of adventure in our lives.

The proof can be found in the way we live and in the things we go after in our work. Seldom are the occasions on which we truly dare to take a risk. Rare are the opportunities we grasp to follow our wild heart. 

We are too busy securing a safe and secure lifestyle and our place amidst a society that, in all honesty, does not care too much about us in the first place. Our work has become the exemplified struggle for this safety. As such, it also has become the antithesis of the hero’s journey. 

To be a hero means to face the odds of the self. What do I mean by this? It means that all the teachings of the greatest myths and stories are just here to encourage us to walk through the door and start our journey to our true self: To rediscover what we are about, to abandon the false self we have adopted early in our lives, to slay the dragons that keeps us “safe” and finally emerge into the light of the world fully conscious of our purpose, our tools and our path.

That which makes a great hero is the same as what makes a modern-day pioneer, a trailblazer and leader- wisdom of the self, knowing your unique potential and obligation in this life. That is what creates conviction and the desire to act. We all know these people. They enter a room and fill it with their presence. They appear on global stages, share their truth and suddenly the world is not the same anymore. Their ideas, songs, projects, speeches make us pause for a moment and think. They make us change our behavior and reconsider things. That’s because they went on this most perilous but also natural of all adventures and connected with their truth, and now that they have this truth they have no choice but to share it, unapologetically.

A hero’s success is not the victory at the end because there is no end. A hero’s success is to show up as the hero of their story each and every day. 

This is the reason why I compare happy, fulfilled living with the existence of a fruit tree: We have to go on a dangerous journey just to find out what kind of tree we are, what kind of fruit we are here to bear. Once we live in this knowledge, we have no other choice than to be that tree. 

Knowing and owning who we are removes all questions and incertitude from our lives and makes it irrelevant to fight petty wars and measure ourselves up against anyone else because we are now walking in our own unique light.

A hero is self-reliant and self-dependent. She or he does not need the world to validate their existence and relevance. This simple yet difficult thing is the very definition of happiness. Think about it, happiness is what every story of mankind has ever been about, and will forever be about. We crave it. It is worth more than gold.

The first step in writing your story is acknowledging the lust and hunger you have to go on your life’s adventure.  

It is common to think that value is the thing we give and receive as part of a transactional exchange. You give an item and receive money for it. But limiting value to this means furthering the hurtful notion that life is nothing but a series of transactions we have to tip in our favor. Nothing could be farther from the truth. True value is the lifeblood of expansion. It’s what fuels happiness in you and others. True value expresses emotions and it spreads emotions. Transactions don’t have this power as they are limited to their bargaining power.

When two people meet for the first time they have the choice to engage in a transactional value exchange by promoting features that the other person might find interesting, and which might result in a favorable outcome, or they can opt to share their truth and express what they truly care about. Something which is not aimed at winning, but at celebrating oneself. “This is who I am, this is what I stand for. If it resonates with you, I am willing to share it with you.”

This is quite a paradigm shift from what the world teaches us- to sell ourselves. Offering your true value is not about selling, it’s about offering. You only put selling first when your value is limited to the benefit you expect from selling. But when the benefit is the joy of sharing your personal value, we stop selling and we start offering, giving and celebrating.

In a restaurant business, this is the difference between hosting (celebrating) and connecting people with food inventory (selling). What comes from this is an experience that is either emotional or transactional. An emotional experience means that someone catered to our hidden needs, gave us something we didn’t expect but secretly wished for, exceeded our hopes and dreams and nurtured our own desire to find and express our value. It creates a memory, an indentation in our timeline.

It makes us smile and makes us emotionally involved. We ask questions, we investigate and become involved. 

We are not just the passive consumer and onlooker that transactional restaurants and hotels ask us to be. When you stay at a hotel that shares real personal value, you stay at someone’s place, you get exposed to someone’s personal view on the world and you get to share that view with that person for a moment.

In a time where offerings are becoming more and more generic and exchangeable, we have lost the ability to cater to hidden needs and to express our deepest desires in our work as value. This has resulted in the Amazons, Hiltons, McDonalds and Walmarts of the world. All of which are undermining our emotional experiences on the daily, turning wonderful opportunities for discovery and growth into mere transactions.

If you know who you are and decide to express this truth as value via your work you can finally start painting your world in your favorite color and allow for those who long to see this color to experience it wholeheartedly. Stop going for the ever same hues just because you think they will sell, because there is evidence for it and because everyone is using them. Find your own color and splash it on every wall you can find. 

True personal value is not for everyone, and this is a good thing! We cannot have the entire world as our friends, we cannot serve everyone, we cannot agree with everyone. Our house is only so big, and true value requires us to pay attention when we give it. Stop wanting to supersize your businesses. Make your business small enough that your value remains connected to you, but big enough that those who need it can see it in its entirety. And true value is ALWAYS seen!

Lastly, don’t doubt yourself. True value is a powerful drug, Its effect is highly intoxicating. The one who follows it is much like the painter who’s feverishly creating a masterpiece because she has to. They don’t do it to satisfy a crowd but to bring out what’s inside of them. It makes them unstoppable, self-guided, uninfluenced and self-reliant.

Doesn’t this sound like a very enticing proposal for work? Know this: the world is waiting for you to do it and will repay you for your courage in doing so.

As many of you might know by now, the foundation-story I share in all of my publications is the necessity of ownership over the self. This is the one prerequisite for a meaningful life- to know who you truly are, to see your truth and to express it in the world via actions. 

This inside-out attitude is an indisputable natural principle many of you have learned to ignore. You submit what was once yours to prevailing beliefs that exist outside you without questioning them. By doing so, you invite foreign truths to take seat at your table and steer you in a direction opposed to your own. 

There are many foreign truths that take over one’s life: The way you see money, time, love, relationships, health and even your personal space. Whenever you shift your notion of them from being something that supports your happiness towards something that supports your place in society, you give up a piece of yourself. Amidst all these resources, there is something that is especially dire to lose: your dreams and your ability to dream.

True dreams are reflections of your heart’s deepest desires. When you are aligned with yourself and open to see yourself for who you are, your heart speaks to you in a constant dialogue. It instructs you on the things it needs to expand on but also where to draw boundaries. The ability to dream and to hear your dreams are your most important source of direction. It’s your communication line with your intuition. Those who have read “The Alchemist” by Paulo Coehlo should know what I mean.  

But there comes a time in everyone’s life where this ability is compromised and shifts from dreaming your personal dream to dreaming a more common dream. Growing up in Switzerland opened me up to the “Swiss dream” – the way Switzerland defines success and the goals that represent that success. Being a white male infused me with other specific dreams. Once I got into advertising these dreams got extended further. 

Over time, more and more of my authentic heartfelt dreams were overwritten with seemingly more relevant societal dreams that stood in agreement with my fearful mind that sought approval, respect and a secure place within society. 

Obsession with social conformity invites foreign dreams into the mind that clog the lines to one’s heart until our personal dream is just a rare and faint whisper. 

And yet, nobody can truly rid themselves of their heart’s desire. It resurfaces every now and then, in a quiet moment, in absence of distraction or when the doubt over the things you do on the daily and the world in general overwhelm you. If you are confused right now it is because of this disagreement. 

It is a general truth that we can only live in the outside world if we recognize our inside world first. Loving someone else requires us to love ourselves first. It is the same when it comes to our dreams. Your outside dreams are nothing if they are not in agreement with your inner dreams. They are confused narratives, disconnected and disjointed fragments of someone else’s dream. If you choose to live by them and chase them you choose to chase an illusion. And the thing with illusions is that they vanish as soon as you catch them because they don’t mean anything to you. 

So do yourself a favor and identify the false dreams you have. What are the things you do for no other reason than to live up to someone else’s opinion, expectation or judgement? 

What are goals and plans you have set that have no origin within you and that only seek to measure up with the world? 

And who are the real owners of these dreams?

You’ll be surprised by how many owners of your dreams there are, and how much they cloud your ability to walk on your path of happiness.

I am writing this because I am repeatedly asked to clarify the confusion around what happiness really means.

Time and again I have emphasized the importance that emotions have in our lives. They are synonymous to life because without them, we become hollow, instinctive creatures who only run on automatic reactions unable to make conscious memories.

With that said, the strongest emotion our heart craves is the one of happiness. I refrain from expressions like bliss and joy because for many they mean the same thing.

But it’s the prevailing understanding of what happiness means that creates much of the pain the world is enduring right now. I have said in the past that happiness is the choice between something we must attain or afford (sad work) or something we discover within ourselves and express through our work (happy work).

For the many billions who see happiness as a commodity we can buy- vacations, retreats, stuff- happiness has become a futile sensation. A numbing agent. A short break from the aches of life. Happiness in this case is the absence of the threats that the world poses. So with higher walls and tighter security, more botox, a flashier car and a better title people falsely assume they’re doing great. They think they are happy.

I spell this kind of “happiness” in lowercase because it is passing, must be fed with lots of hurtful actions and is at constant risk of being lost. There is no difference between a cocaine high and this sort of happiness. Both are illusive and lead to a loss of self. This kind of happiness lives outside of us because it depends on conditions outside of us that we cannot control but that we desperately seek to manage.

The uppercase HAPPINESS that is at the helm of happy work is completely different in nature. I like to compare it to an operating system or a general perspective that stays. This kind of HAPPINESS means that you are completely aligned with yourself because you know yourself inside out. It means that because you make the experience of HAPPINESS your guiding intention for every day, you recognize yourself first and then the world around you for what it is and move within it as exactly the person you are.

Contrary to the happy person, the HAPPY person lives inside out. Free of pretense and pretending, leading a non-defensive life. They don’t react to things to defend themselves, they respond with their authentic self to present themselves. You could call this HAPPINESS simply “falling into life.”

Now you might falsely assume that this entails that a HAPPY person is always smiling. This is, of course, far from the truth. Even with HAPPINESS at the core of our being we can still experience heartache and grief, but not because things happen to us but because we choose to have a healthy emotional response. 

This makes us the owner of our emotional reality, which is one of the greatest things you will ever experience.