On purpose, liminality and experimentation
I've never been very good with beginnings. With knowing how to start. There's always a sense of hesitation, of questioning whether there's a sentence before the sentence, of a beginning before the beginning. In reality, this sounds true – even the new things in life we decide to pursue are always preceded by something – an event, previous experience, or our cultural and personal beliefs. I'm curious about what comes before, what shapes my decisions and how I slice this space and place a beginning to a new string of narratives, how I intersect what's already there, and make a conscious decision to call it a new beginning.
This, perhaps, is why I'm also not good with journaling. How do I know where to start with what's inside me? How do I hold my truths with compassion?
The answer might be simpler than I initially thought. While lying in bed last night, I realised that I've been engaging with three key concepts recently. These are: my purpose, experimentation and liminality (or, navigating in-betweenness and transitions). "These are my starting points", I thought. I saw them as seeds or centre points which I can grow and expand, rather than a linear process of beginning, middle and end. The ideas have been contracting and keeping me going for a while, I just needed to write them down.
Purpose
This was the topic of one of my favourite podcasts The Squiggly Careers a couple of weeks ago. The hosts, Sarah and Helen, provided a super helpful framework for discovering ways to be more purposeful at work, and I'd say, you can apply this for other areas, too.
I rolled up my sleeves and experimented with it. First, they suggested, it was important to get clear on your strengths. What are you great at, that gives you joy, makes you feel 'in the flow' and ultimately recharges you? Here are mine:
Purpose-driven – inspiring through purpose; committed to meaningful work
Growth mindset - dedicated to personal development and growth, and mentoring and empowering others to do the same
Creative – looking for innovative solutions
Visionary – capable of envisioning a better future, which drives positive change; with an intense desire to make a positive impact on the world
Empathetic and considerate – building team harmony
Secondly, your values. These are big personal values which will be true in any situation. They said you should focus on four values, but I struggled to shrink my list too much, so here are my top seven:
Purpose
Connection and empathy
Greatness and recognition
Originality and creating new things and ideas
Fairness
Freedom (of choice)
Growth and ambition
Then, the exercise asked to continue two statements: 1) I want to improve and do better… and 2) I care about… which is bigger than my job.
After completing these sections, I was able to craft a few variations of a new statement that felt true to me. I wouldn't call it 'my purpose' but it's definitely something I can relate to and behold with love and care. It's along the lines of:
‘Creating and empowering meaningful change to build a fairer and more inclusive world through purpose, creativity, and empathy’.
Being clear with myself on what I value and what feels purposeful to me has led me to start a new consultancy Access for Impact, which helps charities and other organisations to connect with more people by making their content inclusive, engaging, and impactful.
Experimentation
It wasn't just this simple exercise on defining my purpose with a clear, punchy statement that had led to my new venture. I realised that I'd shifted my mind from viewing success as this linear progression to experimenting with new opportunities that help me grow. But it wasn't just about growing. It was also about giving myself permission to fail and learn from it.
I came across a podcast interview with
, a cognitive neuroscientist, founder of Ness Labs, and author of a newsletter on creativity, learning, and mindful productivity. She also published a book last month, called Tiny Experiments, which, interestingly, was initially titled Liminal Minds and then changed before publishing.Anne-Laure's approach to experimentation has been super inspiring: for her it’s all about intentionality. She talks a lot about adopting a scientist's mindset and shifting goals into experiments, with an action you want to take, a specific duration and frequency, and a hypothesis you'll be testing. She recommends 'collecting data' like a scientist might do, without being too quick to judge the success of your experiment, and not to be fixed on the outcome you wanted to test. That way, even if at the end of your experiment you understand that you didn't enjoy it, or it wasn't sustainable, or it didn't bring you the revenue you were hoping for, it's still data that is helping you to define your next steps – whether to abandon, amend or continue with the action. This helps your mind shift from this binary thinking of either failure or success, and instead, look at your life choices as a portfolio of experiments which help you learn and adapt your approach.
It seems so simple, and not too different to what I've already been doing, without necessarily framing it as an experiment. For example, I've committed to writing a post on Substack every other Thursday for one year, as part of my curiosity and commitment to exploring the 100 things that give me joy and keep me going. The hypothesis I'm testing is that this process will give me a better understanding of myself and will lead to exploring things I might not have done before. And, another outcome I'm testing is whether this process (public process, as I'm discovering this as I go and publish it here on Substack), is also helping others to examine what brings joy and pleasure in their lives, too.
Which leads me to reminding you that I'm always willing to know if my posts have been helpful and interesting to you, so please feel free to let me know either in the comments or in a direct message.
Liminality
The third concept I've been engaging with recently is navigating transition in several different ways. We often find ourselves in this state of in-betweenness, without even realising it. Graduating to starting your first job, the times of changing jobs, pregnancy even when you're expecting your child but haven't started mothering them just yet, or being in between relationships – intimate or other – life is full of transitions.
For me, that liminal space has often been uncomfortable and even upsetting in the past; I've searched for ways to examine why, and also how to embrace change. Leaving my charity role at the end of last year was one of those, initially uncomfortable transitions, but there are so many others. Navigating progressive sight loss is perhaps the largest, and most complex of all. But there are others. For example, I wrote about the experience of living between (and also within) two cultures, the linguistic aspect of it.
Slowly, I began to learn not only to stay with the discomfort of these liminal spaces and the uncertainty they bring, but also to look at them from a completely new angle – with a curious mind, one that seeks exploration. I've been thinking recently that, if you're at a stage of your life when things feel a bit stuck, or if you're at a crossroad and don't know which way to take, this is not a space of lacking, it's the opposite – a space full of possibilities that only wait to be imagined, discovered and experienced.
Anne-Laure also talks extensively about how best to navigate and even embrace transitions. Unlearning is often more challenging than learning new behaviours and attitudes, but she shared her approach to creating liminal rituals, as she calls them, to help your mind process the transition.
She mentioned in a recent interview that we tend to try to "cross these liminal spaces as quickly as we possibly can, so we can get back to that sense of stability and safety. It's because we don't know what the rules are, and what the many directions we can explore are, but actually that sense of uncertainty," she says, "is also a sense of possibility." This is a powerful mental shift, because these "phases of transition are the fertile ground for reimagining what your life could look like, and potentially reinventing yourself."
Beautiful, isn’t it? I love it.
On that note, lots of love to you, too. Take care, and next time you find yourself standing on a threshold, try to enjoy the richness of possibilities ahead of you.
Until next time,
Nataliya x