Ep. 155. Finding Your Purpose During a Crisis | with Corey Blake

Today our expert guest is Corey Blake, the founder and CEO of Round Table Companies, publisher of Conscious Capitalism Press, as well as a speaker, artist, and storyteller. He’s won 15 independent publishing awards and has been featured on the cover of The Wallstreet Journal as well as inside The New York Times, USA Today, Inc. Magazine, Forbes, and Wired.

Corey’s work has always been about helping people — and now the world needs that help more than ever. Since 2018, he has been working with PayActive to solve the paycheck-to-paycheck crisis that is hitting America. When the coronavirus started to hit the US, many people who were already living paycheck-to-paycheck were getting hours reduced or losing their jobs. When he saw how this was impacting the world, he knew that this was an area that he needed to contribute to more.

Talking with people during the crisis, he started to notice some themes that have rippled through the different communities he interacts with. Amongst younger entrepreneurs, there was a quick reflex to save themselves: lay off employees quickly and mercilessly in order to stay afloat. Meanwhile, in the conscious capitalism community (in which Corey is a pillar member), there has been a tremendous amount of compassion for the workers.

When Corey was still in the space of not knowing how to be of service to the community, he took part in a call for a leadership academy and it finally clicked. He started offering vulnerability art installations at conferences and events that were all about taking people from isolation to connection, and they worked. When you look at one of these vulnerability walls, all the anxiety about how different people are melts away; we realize we are all fragile individuals who are dealing with problems.

Almost nobody alive has ever lived through something like this in their lifetime, and we don’t know when it’s going to end or what life will look like on the other side of it. That often forces us to sit with our thoughts, think about who we are today, and rediscover our identity. Corey offers some strategies people can use to purposefully find their new identity and make sense of their place in this:

• Finding your purpose is usually done over a longer period of time. It requires constant investigation, a relentless state of inquiry, and awareness is essential for picking out that purpose. Watching ourselves from the outside throughout this crisis is incredibly helpful. If you can watch yourself as an observer, it’s easier to extend some grace.
• Ask different questions: Who is that version of me that’s showing up? What else is available? What is the universe saying to me?
• List all of the things your company does or owns and decide if the world needs those differently than how you usually utilize them.

If you want to take action but you don’t know what to do, this is the work that has to be done. Sit with yourself and ask good questions. And if you find something that you can do, you need to start putting it into action right away. The world needs what you can provide.

The Biggest Helping: Today’s Most Important Takeaway

“Extend ourselves some grace right now. Be kind to ourselves. We’re all having experiences we’ve never had before, probably at a compounding ratio that can be so overwhelming. We can be unkind in moments. We can be super judgemental in moments. We can want to come to blows with our spouse or our kids or our animals as we’re all cooped up together. Ultimately, the more we can extend kindness and grace to ourselves as we go through this, the more we will do so outwardly.”

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Thank you for joining us on The Daily Helping with Dr. Shuster. Subscribe to the show on Apple Podcasts, Stitcher, or Google Play to download more food for the brain, knowledge from the experts, and tools to win at life.

Resources:

• Learn more: roundtablecompanies.com
• Purpose Worksheet: roundtablecompanies.com/purpose
• Art Installation: unitedbycovid.com
• LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/coblake