Fulfilment - The Missing Link
Lately I’ve been pondering the idea of fulfilment: satisfaction or happiness as a result of fully developing one's potential, to be fully filled, completely satisfied.
It popped up on my radar recently while listening to a Tony Robbins podcast. He was talking about the art of fulfilment and science of achievement. In short, achievement is a science, it has a formula that you can follow to meet a goal. Fulfilment though, is an art, it’s different for everyone, personal. You can be successful but still not feel happy, and you can be happy without experiencing success, but a sense of fulfilment brings the two together.
Think about it like this: success pertains to the achievement of a goal, something tangible, like a sporting title, academic award or financial status. It’s also contingent on some kind of interaction with others - a coach or mentor, teachers, or business partner. It’s an external state.
Happiness is a feeling of contentment, being at peace with the moment and accepting of the circumstances you find yourself in. Happiness is always partnered with gratitude, an appreciation of what is. Happiness, Ekhart Tolle tells us, resides in the Now.
Fulfilment is about an emotional or spiritual state that is far less definable. Fulfilment is a sense of satisfaction which is attached, not so much to the achieving of a goal but to the process that supersedes it. It’s closely aligned to your sense of purpose or mission, the impact you want to have in the world.
When I first decided I wanted to be a life coach, some years ago, I began to seek out as much learning and inspiration I could. I was hungry for it. I turned over so many rocks in my search, clicked on hundreds of links to free webinars and downloads, listened to thousands of hours of videos and audio tracks, consumed a stack of books, blogs and articles. I wanted to know how to help people be happy. At some point I became disillusioned with what I called the happiness revolution.
Somehow the search for happiness had become entangled with notions of success and it just didn’t feel right. So much of the content out there offered formulas for success under the heading of “how to be happy doing what you love!” I read a ton of content about how to set and achieve goals and find real success, which was of course evidenced by a flood of money. Needless to say, I wasn’t successful.
In the midst of my discontent I wrote about the relationship between happiness and success in a blog post and wrote this analogy… because I like picture stories.
A kauri tree (substitute oak/cedar/redwood as preferred) was once only ankle high but it was, nonetheless, a kauri. Happiness is like that - even when it's small it's still happiness. Success though, is the achievement of a specific, measurable goal. Continuing the tree analogy, success is reached when a predetermined condition is achieved, such as attaining a height of 5 metres, or breaking through the forest canopy. That's success for a forest dwelling tree.
Now I can extend this picture and add to its depth. Fulfilment, for the kauri, comes from providing shelter to other seedlings, a home to birds and insects and holding the soil firmly to the mountainside. It begins to fulfil this purpose before it successfully reaches the height of the canopy.
As the tree continues to work toward its goal of breaking through the forest canopy it’s happily being a tree (and not fretting about how it could be a vine) and feeling fulfilled in its role in the forest.
Now that’s a picture I can be comfortable with.