This transcript has been edited for clarity and checked against the available source transcript and recording. Filler, false starts, and obvious transcription errors have been corrected without changing the speaker’s meaning.
Intro#
James: Hello, and welcome to Graduate Theory. My guest today graduated from the University of Technology Sydney in 1994 with a Bachelor of Business and a Bachelor of Law. In that same year, she started working as a research analyst at the investment bank Citigroup, later moving into small-company equity sales.
After working at Citi for nearly 10 years, she moved to Credit Suisse, where she continued to work with small companies. In 2006, my guest took a new role as executive director of small-company equity sales at Goldman Sachs, becoming managing director of that same area four years later. In 2013, she started work as a partner at Reunion Capital Partners, and in 2018 she completed her Master of Coaching Psychology. In early 2020, she started her current coaching brand, On Purpose.
On Purpose supports leaders and teams to operate effectively in today’s complex business environment by teaching conscious leadership. My guest today helps leaders work on their inner game towards self-mastery and wisdom, enabling them to act with authenticity, integrity, courage, and compassion so that breakthrough performance and results can be achieved.
Please welcome to the show the wonderful Lidia Ranieri.
Lidia: Hi, James. Thank you very much for that lovely introduction. I’m really looking forward to our chat today.
What Does it mean to be ‘On Purpose?’#
James: It’s clear you’ve had an outstanding career. Your coaching brand is called On Purpose, so what does it mean to you to be on purpose?
Lidia: The name came to me because I was trying to think of a business name that captured a number of things. On purpose means doing something with intention, and if you’re doing something with intention, then you’re doing something consciously. I wanted to bring that in, but I also wanted to overlay the idea that, at some stage in our lives—whether it starts in our teenage years or in early adulthood—we yearn for a connection to our purpose, whatever that may be.
It’s a vague thing. People rarely have real clarity around their purpose, and it’s not something that you can know with your head; it’s something that you feel. Having done the master’s in coaching psychology, I became interested in working with people to ensure that, whatever they’re doing, they feel that connection to the thought, “This is right. This is my path. This is what I’m meant to be doing.”
Alternatively, when you’re in a role because of a lot of extraneous factors, but inwardly you’re suffering or waking up with that dread of, “I just don’t want to go in today,” or, “I don’t want to do this,” I help people have the courage to explore, with intention and consciously, what feels more like their purpose. That was the reason for the name.
How do you find your purpose?#
James: The idea of almost following your gut in what you’re doing has come up in a few of the episodes I’ve done so far. That comes back to what you’re saying: purpose is hard to describe and something that you never really find, although you know when you have it. Following your gut has come up a lot, and it’s quite important.
Are there any steps that you would take to find your purpose? It’s difficult, but how can we find it?
Lidia: When I work with people to explore this, one approach is to use a visual cue. I had to give a whole presentation on this topic, and when I was putting together the slides, I included a collection of images I had found of children around four or five years old: one dressed as a doctor, one as a superhero, one as a little scientist in a science lab, another standing on a stage singing, and another in dance clothes.
I use these images because, when we go back and unravel it, purpose is strongly linked to two key things. The first is our strengths. We love to use our strengths. They’re our God-given talents; they’re innate. When we give them expression, it feels really good. It feels natural, like we’re doing the right thing. The second is what’s important to us: what we value. Why does one person value doing a certain thing while another person values something else? It all links into this intricate internal system that has this knowing.
When I encourage clients to come up with these images for themselves, I might use the example of the child standing on stage performing and invite them to think about a time when they had such an image for themselves. The point of that image and metaphor is not necessarily, “I want to be a singer, an actor, or a performer.” It may mean that, but it also indicates that something within you really enjoys expressing itself to an audience.
You may need to find a role that allows you to give a lot of presentations because, when you’re presenting, you feel on, energised, and vital. You love seeing the responses from the people sitting in the room where you’re giving your performance.
For others, it may be the child in the lab coat. Curiosity may be a burning feeling within them, and they need to work in a way that ignites their curiosity about the world. It’s those inroads that link to finding our purpose.
Childhood is a fertile place to do some of this exploration because psychologists have found that children enter very naturally into what we call the flow state. One of the renowned researchers and psychologists in this area was Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, who did a lot of research. Various other psychologists have also worked in this area.
What they’ve found is that, when we enter a flow state, we’re doing something truly engaging but just challenging enough. When we get to that place, we can do it for a very long time. Time doesn’t even occur to us. We enter a timeless state, focus on the task, and stop focusing on ourselves.
The flow state is the state we want high-performing athletes and corporate executives to enter, but you can only enter it when the activity genuinely engages you and you have intrinsic motivation around it. That’s why childhood is such an interesting place to start exploring: we don’t have any of those conditioned statements—“I should,” “I ought to,” or “Everyone says I must”—that create beliefs within us. We are just who we are, so we can look back and say, “I really loved doing that.”
Of course, there are practicalities such as earning a decent income. You need to map some real-world considerations over those inner motivational states, but childhood is a good place to start finding your purpose.
James: I’ve heard from friends who went down one path and then changed direction that it was a process of winding back their lives to the stage where they made a key decision. Maybe it was what to study or which subjects to pick in high school. They went back to that crossroads and reassessed whether it was the right choice. Even though you have to wind back a little, you can start going somewhere else that resonates more with you.
Lidia: That’s right. Life affords us many opportunities to come to a crossroads. They present themselves at different times for different people, but those crossroads emerge because we’re being invited to answer the question, “What is it that I really want to do?”
We think about that as, “Do I want to do this subject or that subject, this course or that course, or this job or that job?” But beneath the surface, the question is, “What part of me needs expression here? What part of me do I want to give expression to in an outer-world context where I’m applying myself every day?”
Knowing your strengths and values can help you navigate those decisions so that you’re more closely aligned with giving yourself that expression. From a psychological standpoint, that’s what leads to fulfilment, life satisfaction, and happiness.
James: Do you think it’s possible to find your purpose holistically, or is it a moving target that you’re getting closer to over time? Perhaps you never really get there. Sometimes you think, “I’m going to find my purpose and do this. This feels good, so I’m going to keep going—but maybe it’s not quite right.”
Do you ever reach the stage where you can say, “I’ve found exactly what I’m going to do. This is it. I’ve finally made it”? Or is it always a moving target where you’re getting closer and finding your way?
Lidia: I think we burden ourselves with the idea that there is one purpose. Some amazing individuals may be born to a purpose. For example, you might think that Michael Jordan was born to be one of the best basketball players the world has ever seen, but that would rob him of having any purpose now because he’s not doing that anymore.
I like to think that we have a purpose that may be a staged experience. My purpose in a particular role and at a particular time may simply be an apprenticeship. I’m in a learning mode; that’s my purpose right now. I’m in a skill-acquisition mode, and it needs to be aligned with where I have a natural interest and can develop real competency because then I feel good about myself. I need to do something where I can see myself improving; otherwise, I get demotivated.
Purpose can be for this moment in time: this is the right place and the right role for me, as long as I’m giving the fullest expression to things that make me feel vital and engaged. When that has run its course—for reasons we’ve all experienced but can’t necessarily explain—your interest starts to wane. You think, “This just isn’t doing it for me anymore. I’m not that interested.” That’s a sign that it’s time to move into another phase.
It’s still your purpose because, as you say, you never arrive. It’s a journey of giving yourself the opportunity to express yourself at your fullest capacity and highest level of functioning. Some phases are for learning. Other phases may involve working on something to prepare for the next stage. They’re like Lego blocks: they build on each other.
You may then have a peak experience, and that peak experience—Michael Jordan is an example—may last for a number of years. It may be acclaimed, revered, or recognised, but it might not receive outward recognition. It may simply be your own experience of a golden era. Then it changes and your purpose moves into something else.
Our purpose is interwoven through a journey in which we change in wisdom and experience. Our age and stage of life also determine what we’re more attuned to. I like to help people by unburdening them of the idea that there’s one thing. There are many paths to getting there, and they may all lead to what I think everyone wants: that peak expression, that golden moment, and a way to sustain it.
When I talk to executives about performance and the idea that it’s marked by certain externally recognised success factors, those factors can be a component. But in truth, peak performance is a level of optimised functioning. To arrive at your most optimised level, you first need to establish competence and be good at what you’re doing.
To sustain highly optimised functioning, we can’t constantly peak. Performance curves are like a sloping hill: they may rise gradually and then drop off sharply. At the top of the curve is peak performance. You build up to it, and just beyond peak performance is an extra stretch—the other edge of the hill before you slope down—which is your stretch zone.
If you don’t step back from peak performance and the stretch zone, and go back down the hill towards the recuperation zone, you can’t sustain peak performance. Beyond the stretch zone is overwhelm, where performance drops off rapidly and sharply. That means exhaustion, burnout, health issues, or some kind of physical, mental, emotional, or spiritual crisis because we can’t sustain ourselves at those peaks.
Sustaining ourselves in these peak moments is a dance: we go there and taste it, but sometimes we have to go back down the hill. In the context of purpose, we have big moments where we’re on fire and everything is going our way. We’re winning deals, the business is growing, and we’re working long hours, but it’s a pleasure. We might work weekends because we’re engaged in a creative process and loving it.
After something peaks in us—in the activity, the event, or the delivery—we have to step back. That’s still our purpose. Our purpose can still be in the recuperation zone, where it doesn’t seem as “on” because we’re getting ready to re-enter. It will be a different set of circumstances, people, and challenges, but it will still reignite that fire. If we don’t recuperate, we can lose our ability to engage with our purpose.
How can we avoid burnout?#
James: You talked about climbing the hill and getting close to falling off when you reach the top. How do you know when you’re getting to that point? You’re at the top, in the zone, and things are going well, but you’re also close to working too hard and crashing. How can we avoid falling off the back of the hill so that we can come back up and sustain that performance for longer?
Lidia: Self-awareness is a huge differentiator among people who can sustain themselves. We’ve been conditioned to view success through what I think is quite a narrow lens: we look only at outcomes. But if we reconsider the markers and criteria for success, we can broaden the base while keeping the outcome as the objective: “I want to get this promotion. I want to deliver this project. I want to win this deal. I want to break into this market.”
Alongside the outcome, set other intentions: “I want to be able to do it and maintain my fitness. I want to do it and still have good relationships with the people closest to me. I want to do it and maintain my mental health by giving myself opportunities to have some mindless moments.”
When you’re engaged, you’re so on that the mind gets heavily utilised. Sometimes even sleep isn’t enough, or you may be behind on sleep. We need to set goals alongside the outcome goal, then think creatively about how to solve for all of them. If I’m going to work especially hard on this, I need to give myself time that week—20 minutes for meditation, for example—and I must do that.
When you listen to high-performing people talk, there is a real discipline to performing and recuperating. Certain researchers have coined the term “corporate athletes” for executives. The difference between professional sporting athletes and corporate athletes is that corporate athletes don’t have an off-season. They don’t have a team of masseurs ready to help them condition for recovery, but they need it just as much.
You have to structure recovery into your performance plan. Youth forgives a lot of ills: when you’re young, you can party hard, go all night, get up, and do it again the next day. But even though that’s doable, you don’t know how much better your performance could be with rest, recovery, good food, and all the things we do to support athletes. We should also do those things to support ourselves.
We need to think about ourselves in that way: when am I on? When do I need to be really on? How do I prepare for that performance? I need to take care of my health, sleep, and water. The playing field is the only difference between an athlete and a corporate athlete. The physiological expression of pressure, and dealing physiologically with the performance demands of your environment, is the same.
James: That’s a great analogy. Compared with traditional athletes, there tends to be less focus for corporate athletes on recovery, ensuring that their mental health is okay, and working on their physical health. It’s important as you go through your career to pay attention to these things so that you don’t burn out or ruin friendships and can keep those parts of your life in a good place.
Common threads when working with High Performers#
James: When you sit down to coach high-performing people, what are some common problems they have? What tools do you use to extract even higher performance from them?
Lidia: How do you get even more performance out of a high performer? It comes back to how we define high performance. If we’re defining it only by outcomes, there are ways to push yourself harder. In an executive context, you can turn down the volume on everything else in your life and focus on that outcome. You might get high performance, but the questions are how sustainable it is and at what price.
When I work with clients, I’m there to facilitate, not dictate. It comes down to what they want to achieve. I might challenge and question them. At the executive level, people often aren’t surrounded by others who tell them, “That’s a bad idea.” They’re usually surrounded by people who say, “Yes, I think that’s fantastic.” Part of being an executive coach at those high levels is providing a safe place to be challenged and helping an executive open up to perspectives they might not otherwise get in their standard day-to-day role.
Getting more performance always comes down to the significant role of self-awareness. I use sporting analogies because they’re easy for us to relate to, as opposed to what an executive might face in their day-to-day work. Think about professional golfers who have to step up to the green and take a shot in that moment. They’ve been preparing for this moment for years. The difference between a great shot and a poor shot isn’t so much their skill—they’re highly skilled at this point—the difference is their inner game.
What’s your self-talk? Is it positive or negative? Are you telling yourself, “Oh my God, I’m going to throw this. I’m going to flunk it. I’m not feeling good,” or, “I’m really pissed off with somebody in my life,” and allowing that to have traction inside you in this moment? What’s going on internally differentiates performance in that moment, and the same applies to executives.
At that level, it’s no longer about having mastered your field, the skills of your industry, or its politics. It’s about your self-talk and your ability to dial down distractions so that, in the moment when you have to focus, you focus only on the task.
When it comes to high performance, the subtle shifts occur between good and great performance. The difference is that great performers can forget themselves within the picture of performance. They’re no longer self-focused; the self has disappeared from the frame. The only thing they’re thinking about is the task.
When you reach superior performance, the goals you set are no longer outcome goals such as, “I want to hit that shot and make it in one.” It’s about the process. The process goal becomes, “I’m going to approach that shot in a calm and relaxed state. I’m going to take a moment consciously to ensure that I get into a relaxed state.”
You work on whatever cues you need to trigger that relaxation response. Some people have words, some have images, and some channel feelings to get their physiology into a more relaxed state instantly. “When I approach that shot, I’m going to drop my shoulders. I’m going to clear my mind. I’m going to take a breath. I’m going to filter out every bit of background noise.” That’s how you draw truly extraordinary performance from someone who is already very high-performing.
James: I’ve heard similar ideas before: don’t focus on the outcome; focus on doing it the best way you can and having the right process, then the outcome will take care of itself.
How does Lidia achieve high performance?#
James: How do you do that in your own life? Do you have any processes or rituals to extract high performance from yourself?
Lidia: Personally, I’ve been on a long journey of deliberate, conscious cultivation of self-awareness. When we’re trying to do anything—whether being in conversation with somebody else or doing something challenging or difficult—our default state can be frustration or annoyance. Thoughts and feelings emerge that are counterproductive to what we want to do or to allowing the best part of ourselves to be expressed.
The journey of self-awareness is like building a muscle. You notice what’s shifting and changing: “I feel that frustration rising. I feel I’m getting defensive in this conversation.” The skill is almost becoming an external observer of yourself, as though you’re beside yourself.
As you notice those things, you develop tools and skills that help you stay in a neutral space of curiosity: “I’m getting frustrated in this conversation or experience. I wonder what that’s about.” You remain more open to information and cues in your relationships and working life. It also helps you realise, “I’ve taken on this work, and I should have known that these things about it don’t sit well with me.”
It’s a hyper-awareness in which you become far more attuned to noticing your ego and keeping it from controlling your reactions and defensiveness. You can gather more information, make more conscious choices, and remain aligned: “I’m going to say no to this. It’s okay to say no,” or, “This person is telling me something important. I need to be open and listen because I can learn something.”
You don’t approach life with the attitude, “I need to be right, and I need to know.” You approach it as, “I don’t know everything, and that’s okay.” It doesn’t say that I’m inferior or lesser; those are judgements of the ego. If I can stay open and curious, I can gather more information to keep shoring up a foundation of feeling confident and good about myself, aligning with my values, and using my strengths.
Self-awareness as a journey and a tool is the bedrock of how you operate in your personal life. It’s the bedrock of great leadership and of creating high-performing teams. It’s the bedrock of that process.
How to grow self awareness#
James: Do you think you’ve always been self-aware, or is it something you’ve improved over time? If so, how did you do that? Did you meditate or journal, or did it come with experience as you realised why certain situations made you feel a particular way?
Lidia: I’ve meditated on and off throughout my life. There are times when it falls away, which goes back to my comment about things being there for a time and a purpose, then naturally moving away before you return to them.
I think everyone has the opportunity to increase their self-awareness. For me, the leaps in self-awareness came when I decided to study psychology. Before that, they always came through a crisis, setback, challenge, or disappointment. Rather than glossing over those experiences, staying angry, or avoiding thinking about them, I would dive into them and look around. I’ve always believed that every dark cloud has a silver lining, so I’d look for it.
If you look, it is there. There is always some learning, often about yourself, that you can incorporate. If you take it with you, you start to build up your interior knowledge about yourself: what you like, what you don’t want, what your values are, who you are, who you want to be, and what you want to avoid.
James: I recently heard an analogy about a tree requiring deeper roots so that it can grow higher. I resonate with the idea that going through challenges or setbacks allows you to polish the diamond through that pressure and then grow even further.
Does Lidia consider herself to be a high performer?#
James: You’ve had an incredibly successful career. Do you consider yourself a high performer?
Lidia: My answer is that, when it comes to performance, you need to take yourself out of the picture in some way. I view myself and approach life through the lens of, “What is it that I want to do?” Once I’ve determined what direction I want to go in, what task I want to take on, or what new thing I want to move towards, I set mastery goals: I want to do this, and I want to get really good at it.
Rather than focusing on achieving a title, promotion, or outcome, I focus on mastery. In my banking and corporate career, my goals were about building really good relationships. That’s what mattered to me: doing things that helped and served my clients, ensuring I was a trusted partner for them, and acting with integrity. Those were the things I set up, and whatever came of that came of that.
I set process goals, such as putting in the extra hour at the end of the day to review things, write a report, and consolidate my thinking. It would have been easy to head home, but I focused on those things rather than, “This is where I’m going, and this is what I’m aiming for.” I never aimed for a specific outcome. I aimed to do a really good job based on what mattered to me.
It’s a very competitive field. A lot of people in the advisory world get caught up in the idea of owning a relationship, which I always found unattractive. You don’t own a relationship. You have a relationship, invest in it, and support it. If there’s something of value there, that will be recognised.
I tried to take the ego out of it, and ego is fear. There’s a fear that, “I’ve got to make sure this person sitting at this firm, who is in a position of power, likes me.” When you’re coming from a place of ego, there’s a lot of fear behind making sure that person likes you.
Of course, the finance industry has lots of party tricks involving restaurants, bars, and the big expense account you’re usually allowed to use to build relationships. I was always quite reluctant to work in that way. That’s not to say we didn’t take clients out for lunch or go out and have a great night, but all my clients knew that wasn’t how I wanted to build our relationship. Those things were by-products of already having mutual respect for one another.
I always focused on being genuine. If I was building a relationship, I’d look for something in that person that I really liked, could respect, and related to, so that I dealt with them from a place of authenticity rather than, “You have a really important job, and I need to make you like me.”
James: That’s similar to what you were saying about goals versus processes. Instead of going straight to the goal of being friends with someone, focus on being a nice person and doing things the right way. As a result, you’ll have a good relationship.
What lessons did you take from IB?#
James: Are there any lessons about relationship building or other things you learned from your time in investment banking that you use in your practice or general life?
Lidia: It was an outstanding time in my life, and it was right for me to be there. I loved it. What I learned about myself was that I like to work in a dynamic way, where the days are unscripted. When I turn up, I don’t know what the day will hold, but I get to respond to it and meet it. I find that way of working stimulating.
I realised that I work best when I have a lot of autonomy rather than being told what to do. I always ended up pursuing roles where I excelled and that I loved, though I didn’t know this at the time. They were roles where I had a blank slate and, within the expected parameters, could decide how the role would play out.
The same thing plays out in my career now as an executive coach. When I sit down with a client, I don’t start a session in a scripted way. I have some vague ideas: we’ve been talking about these things, so it might be helpful to move in this direction. But that’s a loosely held plan because I have to be present in the moment for whatever is coming at me.
They may have had something completely unexpected unfold in their world, so I’m meeting them in that moment: “What is this? We need to look at it. What is happening for them, and what might be the best responses they can make?” It’s extremely dynamic.
I learned that about myself in the world of investment banking and stockbroking. Even when I was a research analyst, I loved deep thinking, being an analyst, exploring, and building relationships. I genuinely love relationship building, so that carries into what I’m doing now. I enjoy building trusted relationships, and I’m genuinely curious about people.
Even when I was working in banking, the deal and whatever was happening in the market at the time were interesting and gripping, but I enjoyed understanding why. That’s what got me interested in leadership. Whether among my fund-manager clients, the companies that were clients, or the firms we might have been conducting a transaction for, I was fascinated by the differentiating components of what made a good leader and why.
I was always interested in how other people responded, particularly to a CEO or CFO doing the rounds and trying to sell an IPO, for instance. It was fascinating to see which people responded positively to those who displayed certain qualities and characteristics versus those who didn’t, because ultimately every investor is answering the question, “Can I back this guy?”
There are subtle things we do when sizing somebody up: are they reliable? Are they good at what they do? Can they deliver? Can they solve problems? In the context of large sums of money, can I place my faith in this person delivering the outcome?
Those things still apply to what I do because I’m still looking at executives who have that gravitas and ability to deliver. It always comes down to self-awareness. The people who have their measure know themselves well and know what they can promise. There’s a real difference between someone who thinks, “I hope this sounds good,” but doesn’t have a rock-solid foundation inwardly, and someone who comes from a solid place of knowing what they can deliver, even within a fluid external environment.
Lidia’s advice for graduates#
James: I’ve got one last question, which I ask every guest. If you were graduating from university again and starting in the workforce this year, what advice would you give yourself?
Lidia: You need to take the pressure off yourself to have an answer today about what you need to do or should do. Inevitably, you’ll probably start out doing something and find yourself, even 15 or 20 years down the track, doing something completely different. You don’t have to have it all figured out.
It’s also important to understand your true nature. Some people say, “I’m just going to do what feels right and what I’m interested in,” which is a great place to start. Others are more strategic: “I’m going over here because these are leading fields in terms of the economy, and they pay well.”
Wherever you’re led in your thinking process indicates what you value and what’s important to you, so you need to listen to that. As long as you’re not doing something solely because you think you’ll get a financial reward, follow what your inner voice tells you that you want to do. It will lead to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else, which leads to something else.
There is no wrong turn because you’re accumulating knowledge and experience. The wrong turn is doing something that holds no interest or appeal, doesn’t light you up, and doesn’t stimulate you in any way. That’s your wrong turn, and you need to think about doing something else.
I took that wrong turn very early in my career. My first job out of university was at a law firm, and I thought I would pursue a career in law. Within three months, I was going home with a dead feeling. I knew, “I can’t do this.”
When I told friends and family that I was aborting that mission, they thought I was mad. They said, “You’ve just finished a law degree. You’ve got a great job with a great firm. You can’t do that.” I said, “No, I definitely am doing that. This isn’t the right direction for me.”
I went home and asked myself whether I wanted the partner’s job—not in a Machiavellian sense, but in an aspirational context. If I didn’t want the partner’s job, I had nothing to aim for there. The process steps didn’t make sense to me, so I needed to find something else.
The differentiators for me were the dynamism, every day being different, and an unscripted way of working. They didn’t exist in that role, but they existed in what I went on to do. Did it have to be stockbroking? No. It could have been anything that allowed me to have that unscripted, more dynamic way of working.
James: A theme throughout this podcast has been listening to your gut and having self-awareness about the things you’re interested in and the paths you want to take. As you said, there isn’t necessarily one path to those feelings and that end result; there are many ways to reach that feeling of wholeness and satisfaction.
Outro#
James: I think we’ll end the podcast there today. Thank you so much, Lidia. That has been a fascinating conversation with so much value for the listeners.
Lidia: Thanks so much, James.