What's Your Passion & Purpose with Alaina Love

Welcome to SkyeTeam's People First! In this series, we explore the people side of successful business and careers. We all have a story to share, a leadership journey that we are experiencing.

We'll be interviewing authors, business leaders, thought leaders, and people like you to uncover the latest ideas, resources, and tools to help you become more effective at work - and in life. As it turns out, the secret is cultivating winning relationships. Business is personal, and relationships matter!

So, sit back, and grab a coffee as Morag and Alaina Love ask the question, "What's Your Passion & Purpose?"

Chapter Layout:
0:00 - Open
1:23 - What Did You Want to Be When You Grew Up?
2:09 - What flavor of Doctor?
6:21 - Navigation
10:25 - Ramifications
12:17 - Passion & Purpose
15:25 - This Isn't Everything
17:40 - Archetypes
21:12 - Fix Me
22:40 - Living Your Passion
24:48 - Inclusion
29:38 - Leading You
31:05 - Final Thoughts & Wrap

Links:
Website: https://thepurposelink.com/
Book: https://www.amazon.com/Purpose-Linked-Organization-Passionate-Leaders/dp/0071624708/ref=sr_1_1?crid=3AN6ODHXCEBU6&dchild=1&keywords=the+purpose+linked+organization&qid=1611423155&sprefix=purpose+linked+org%2Cfashion%2C192&sr=8-1

Transcript:
- [INTRO] Welcome to Skye Team's People First with Morag Barrett.

So welcome to the latest episode of People First, where we explore the leadership journey that has brought our guest from where she was to where she is and we'll take you to where she's going. And my guest this week is Alaina Love who is the CEO of Purpose Linked Consulting and the co-author of the Purpose Linked Organization: How Passionate Leaders Inspire Winning Teams and Great Results. Alaina describes herself as a recovering HR executive, an executive coach, a global speaker and a leadership expert. And she's passionate about everything, well everything to do with passion. And her passion archetypes, and we'll learn more about archetypes, are builder, transformer and healer which is most apt. And I'm also honored to call Alaina a friend and a fellow member of the Marshall Goldsmith 100 Coaches. So Alaina, welcome to People First.

Thank you so much. It's such a pleasure to be with you today.

This is going to be such an interesting conversation because your journey has been windy and windier than many. But as with every episode, I always start with the origin story. So when you flash back to when you were a young girl, you're in elementary school, the teacher comes up and says, Alaina, what do you want to be when you grow up? What was your answer?

I wanted to be a doctor. That was my answer. I remember in grade school, reading this book about Elizabeth Blackwell, who was the first woman doctor. And just falling in love with her story. And since I've read, someone's written another book about her and her life and how her journey came to be. But I remember reading about it and thinking to myself, I want to be that, I can do that. And so that's where I began my journey and it's sort of stayed on a path of healing, but not in quite the way I expected when I was seven years old.

Okay so medicine and being a doctor, that's a broad spectrum in and of itself. So what flavor of doctor did you want to be and what flavor of doctor do you end up being at the beginning of your career?

You know, it's really interesting. I ended up studying medical technology originally, when in my undergraduate studies which is a field that basically has you doing all of the research studies on a patient when a patient comes into a hospital, the laboratory studies, clinical chemistry hematology, microbiology, that sort of thing. And that was great preparation. It led me to getting into Tufts University School of Medicine up in Boston. And I went to med school there. And while I was in school, my initial thoughts were I think I really like hematology cause I loved solving problems. I didn't know whether I wanted to do that, oncology, forensics but it was sort of all that investigative, you know interesting forms of medicine for me that were, I thought fascinating. And I thought, you know I'm not quite sure what this is going to turn out to be but I'm just going to going to go on this ride and explore all of these fields of medicine as I'm a student and start to figure it out. But I knew that I deeply loved the connection with patients. So it was going to have to be a field where I felt like I had daily close patient interaction and it wasn't just, it was definitely for me, it wasn't surgery. I wasn't going be a body and fender person, go in and fix something and I'm done. I needed a longer-term connection. But during my first year of medical school, my sister passed away. And that happened in the spring of my first year. And I came home from medical school that summer. And the day after I got ho...