There’s no shortage of advice telling us we need to find purpose in our work. And for good reason – having a sense of purpose in our businesses can increase both engagement and fulfillment. In our personal lives, a sense of purpose can even help us sleep better, feel healthier, and live longer.
Yet most of the advice on discovering purpose at work assumes workers are in a traditional office setting and have direct access to the beneficiaries of the work, leaders and reward structures to motivate them, face-to-face interaction with co-workers, and are part of a supportive work environment. When you have a home-based business, you don’t usually have that. A recent study found over 52% of U.S. businesses were home-based and almost a third of Americans are doing some at-home freelance work.
When a new business is first created, there is often lots of passion and excitement, but this can wane when the challenges come along. Working from home offers unique challenges that make discovering purpose – and reaping the benefits that come from it – difficult. You need to be self-motivated, don’t have a lot of social interaction with peers, and communication with beneficiaries is mostly faceless and not in real-time.
If you work from home, how can you overcome these challenges to discover purpose?
Emerging research on how to craft work as purposeful offers these three tips:
1. Find ways to talk to the people your business impacts.
One of the most powerful ways to boost your sense of purpose when you work from home is to find ways to talk to the people your job impacts.
In fact, research shows spending just five minutes with your business’ beneficiary can quadruple your levels of motivation and performance.
Instead of just resigning to the fact that you don’t have direct interaction with people, it’s psychologically vital to structure contact with beneficiaries into your work cycle.
Try once a month to meet face-to-face with at least one of your customers. Ask them how the product or service you provide has impacted their lives or why they do business with you. Write these stories down and keep them in a document or journal. Revisit them often when things get hard.
Or, you might host a video conference regularly for customers to be involved in your next strategic decision or launch of a product or service.
When you involve your stakeholders, you’ll be cultivating what researchers call “task significance” – the knowledge that your business does make a difference in human beings’ lives.
2. Write your purpose down, and keep it visible.
When you write a goal down and look at it every day research finds you’re more likely to achieve it. The same is true with purpose. When we write down the human-centered purpose of our job and keep it visible, it grounds us and can serve as a critical motivator in difficult times.
Take a moment and try to answer this question: “Outside of what you do, how you do it, or what you get for what you do – why does your work exist?”
The answer is your purpose.
You can also use the below format which helps keep the beneficiary discussed above at the center of your purpose:
“My job exists to (action verb) (who?) to (think/feel/do what?).”
By stating your work’s purpose and keeping it visible in your workspace, you can create a mental anchor to your “why.”
3. Develop an abundance mindset.
It can be tempting for people with home-based businesses to focus on fixing what’s wrong – from frantic lead generation to being your own technology support team.
When we spend most of our time thinking about what can be better or fixing things it can result in a scarcity mindset. The problem with scarcity thinking is that it can deprive our brains of the cognitive space for future-oriented thinking, problem solving, and meaning-making.
Spend some time reflecting on how often you spend in your day trying to address what you don’t have or what is not working. Now, schedule time into your day to focus on cultivating your future, creative problem solving, or brainstorming new opportunities.
This time will be well-spent. People who think in abundance regularly have a greater sense of purpose and are more generous, creative, and inspired.
