Why would one begin a business leadership workshop at the 9/11 Memorial and Museum?
I was stepping out of 7 World Trade Center in downtown Manhattan having just spent some time touring the New York Academy of Sciences and deciding it would be a great home for Soul Purpose NYC — a conference and workshop designed to connect leaders to their wellspring of inner purpose and their unique vision of outer impact.
I looked to my right and realized I was just a few steps away from the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. I stopped, looked and listened for a bit.
I was familiar with the museum and memorial. Enso had worked with David Paine and Jay Winuk of 911Day.org, helping them galvanize millions Americans to do acts of good on this day. David and Jay had both worked with the Obama Administration to make 9/11 an Official Day of Service.
But that is not why I stopped.
I stopped because I felt something important was happening in that moment. In the Soul Purpose workshop programming, we work with something called 360˚ Receptivity. That is, opening the aperture of our consciousness to accept information, guidance, and innovation from all around us, from more expansive places that just that very limited archive between our ears. My aperture was open. The 9/11 Memorial and Museum was just next door to where Soul Purpose NYC was going to be held. Was this purposeful? Was there an opportunity here that could benefit the journey toward purpose of the workshop participants? Was there an evolution of the programming that was introducing itself to me in that moment? I let it sit but deliberately didn’t get attached to the thought based on another process from the workshop called Preference vs Purpose — a guided activity designed to support participants in opening to new ideas without immediate attachment to a preference. This way we avoid potentially missing or resisting something much bigger available for us toward purpose.
One week later, I am helping facilitate a workshop at Georgetown University and discovered a participant seated just across the table from me was Senior Director of Education for the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. Now I was really listening. Our information was traded and soon we were having a phone call about the possibilities. That evolved into a collaboration with one of our Soul Purpose NYC speakers and master experience designer, Barb Groth, co-founder of the Nomadic School of Wonder, and into what I believe could be one of the most powerful opening processes to a workshop on inner purpose, impact, and leadership, imaginable.
Why, of all places, would it make sense that the 9/11 Memorial and Museum could evoke that possibility?
As a transformative coach who has worked for many years helping high-impact leaders seeking to bring their experience, skills, and lives to endeavors of greater meaning, purpose and impact, I have learned there are certain triggers in life that pivot people in that direction.
One of them is that seemingly random break in everyday life and work when we momentarily experience the aliveness and joy of being in service to others and our world. The other, usually through a challenging life experience, is truly waking up to the reality of the finiteness of our existence and coming face to face with the imperative to make something meaningful of it in the time left.
I can fully relate to both as they were the precise catalysts that caused my own pivot in the direction of inner purpose and meaning:
The finiteness of existence: Being eighteen years old and having a doctor walk into my hospital room and tell me I had metastatic synovial sarcoma and that people with my scenario could only expect to live another eighteen to thirty-six months.
The joy and aliveness of being in service: Years later, having seemingly “arrived” as a president of a large agency, but finding the only joy in my workday being when, as a peer-to-peer volunteer for cancer centers and support groups, I would get a call from a newly diagnosed sarcoma patient and be able to bring peace by being a voice of survival and of the possible blessings within the experience. The aliveness I felt in those moments, and the awareness of being in the middle of a very finite life, had me resign from that position and seek an entirely new vocation that could help me live in that aliveness all the time.
The finiteness of existence and the meaningfulness of service as catalysts toward purpose. Is there a place on the planet that more exemplifies and teaches those two great catalysts than the 9/11 Memorial and Museum — its halls, exhibitions, testimonies, artifacts, and its very location, all monuments to life and heroic service in the ultimate sense? Heroic stories of purpose like Jay Winuk’s brother Glenn. On 9/11, Glenn was partner in the law firm of Holland & Knight. He was also a volunteer firefighter and EMT. In the midst of the chaos, after evacuating his own people from a nearby building, Glenn raced to help rescue the people in the towers. He perished when the South Tower collapsed. He was found with a medic bag by his side and protective gloves on his hands. Is there a stronger example of a business leader answering the call to purpose and service? Is that why the universe had me stop, look, and listen in that moment coming out of 7 WTC? Is that why I found myself seated across from the Museum’s Senior Director of Education a week later?
On September 20th, at 6:30PM, in the 9/11 Memorial and Museum, a group of business leaders, entrepreneurs, and creators of all kinds, will gather first in the Museum’s auditorium. They’ll hear from a person who was there that fateful day, and who, as a result, transformed the direction of their life and work toward inner purpose, meaning, and impact. They’ll then be asked to journey into the museum, with a purposefully crafted quest in hand designed to transform something they encounter into a teacher. The next morning, with that learning written in heart and on page, they’ll arrive just next door to 7 , make the journey up to the New York Academy of Sciences, and begin life’s most profound journey toward inner purpose, impact, meaning, and aliveness.
