The case for a spiritual practice for mission-driven founders

As a child, my mother was an entrepreneur trading with local Indian merchants and my father was a controller with a national retailer. My parents left their roles to become pastors. Founding Fairbridge was inspired by my upbringing steeped in business and service. Last week, I completed the nine-month Gotham Fellowship designed for executives looking to integrate faith and work. It was a rewarding experience. In this note, I wanted to advocate the consideration of a spiritual practice to a fitness repertoire for mission-driven founders. I also wanted to organize and solicit feedback on the raw material I am working with for mine.

The Philosophy

Trust in institutions is collapsing rapidly. Mission-driven founders have a rare opening to step up, lead and drive societal progress. And, while many already invest in mental and physical fitness, a third pillar that’s often neglected, and that can unlock powerful alignment is spiritual fitness. To be clear, this isn’t about morality. It’s about integrity at the core; a foundation that nurtures inner strength and leads to clarity of purpose that fuels bold, high-performance leadership and extraordinary results.

The Proposed Framework

A solid practice begins with building a strong core, developing the right philosophy of work, and entering the right relationship with the divine.

A. Strengthening the core

A strong core is a result of gaining command of our true self, our real beliefs, and from a commitment to continuous examination.

1. An intentional worldview: Our default worldviews comes from ambient consumption. They are more pre-cognitive and narrative than propositional and intellectual, meaning they are shaped by story, imagination, and lived habits. Effectiveness begins with regularly examining and truthfully living out (functional vs. philosophical) our worldview while engaging others and culture with conviction.

2. Tapping into the power of origin: Our upbringing is the raw material from which we build our purpose. To lead and live with clarity, we must engage our inner landscape with courage and honesty. In his song The Catch Up, Drake says: “Being humble don’t work as well as being aware.”… Virtue is not the destination; a true understanding, acceptance, and coherence of self is. Grace abounds, not so we can abuse it, or flog ourselves, but to gain sober perspective of our true selves so we can show up with power.

3. Application: A firm grasp of self is the fertile ground in which to invest our talents, treasure and time in contribution to the world. The mission-driven founder applies herself through faithful presence. Faithful presence means being vocationally excellent and socially engaged while rooted in integrity. It’s managing to engage culture without losing one’s unique differentiation and achieving influence without seeking domination.
   

B. Executing with humility

I have witnessed many mission-driven founders suffer burnout, become cynical, and enter into despair when they realize the world doesn’t give a blip. Removing ourselves from the center of our work is incredibly liberating.

1. Serve the work only: In her paper, Why Work. Dorothy Sayers says “The only true way of serving the community is to be truly in sympathy with the community, to be oneself part of the community and then to serve the work without giving the community another thought. Then the work will endure, because it will be true to itself. It is the work that serves the community; the business of the worker is to serve the work.” The gallantry of saving the people unfortunately carries the fatal seeds of resentment.

2. All work counts: In her book Walking on Water, Madeleine L’Engle proposes an excellent philosophy of work, encouraging us to rid ourselves of the crushing burden of significance, and rather to approach our work as contribution to a larger collective. Think of a lake…the great, but few contributors are rivers, others are tributaries, and most are a trickle, but they all feed to the beauty of the lake. This humility allows the divine to multiply our work beyond the limitations of our insecurities, imagination, and reach.

3. Integrity matters: Tenets of moralism: justice, fairness, equity etc. are powerful tools. For the mission-driven founder, integrity means to wield them with conviction informed by discernment of content and context. And because founders operate in contested spaces, they bear the added weight of engaging competing worldviews with judiciousness. Integrity is not a moral imperative, it simply is pursuit of excellence through words and actions that are aligned to a set of principles. Founders with clarity can preserve the mission integrity for longer as their ventures scale.
   

C. Channelling the divine

The power of the divine has been neutered by a fixation on moral checklists, endless debates on who belongs, and apocalyptic speculation. Meanwhile, God invites us all to be humble collaborators in the critical, creative, and stimulating work of stewardship; to harness our distinct giftings and quirks, to weave a beautiful tapestry. We are invited to simply be conduits of what is already happening:

1.  Creation is good: A philosophy of life that begins with what’s wrong is crippling. In it’s original design, the world is a good place, the design is perfect. Humanity’s work enters the divine when it contributes to the restoration of that order.

2. Experience in community: The divine accomplishes its goals in community. Community provides the creative tension, the accountability, and the unexplainable energy that power big pursuits. Community is messy, but finds success through gratitude, promise-keeping, truth telling, and hospitality.

3. Divine work can't be contained: The divine achieves its objective of advancing human flourishing through confounding methods, methods that often defy human reasoning and logic. Inspired work is good. And, good work invites us in: It's objectively excellent, delights deeply, sparks inspiration, does not discriminate who it serves, and most importantly it can be created by anyone
   

In summary

For the mission-driven founder, a spiritual practice can open the window for a special collaboration with something much larger than the self: A partnership with the divine achieved through reinforcing alignment within the self and working with others in humility to unlock revelation that drives extraordinary results.

FYI.

I didn’t want to bother everyone with a resource list that leans towards my faith of choice, but for those who are interested in discussing spiritual practices or in learning more about how we can walk together, or in the curriculum of the program I just completed, please reach out.