A Strategic Reorganization of Your Self

Matt Stevens · September 30, 2026

I spend a lot of time thinking about organizational strategy.

Mission. Structure. Alignment. Resources. Roles. The relationship between what an organization says it exists to do and how it actually spends its time.

A couple of years ago, during a period when I was thinking particularly deeply about alignment—both organizationally and personally—I realized there was one organization I had never really subjected to the same scrutiny.

Myself.

I had accumulated more than two decades of professional experience, along with interests, relationships, values, creative practices, and ways of seeing the world that didn’t fit particularly neatly into a résumé.

I knew how to describe what I did.

I was less certain I could describe what it was all for.

So I decided to conduct a strategic reorganization of myself.

More than one mission

I started with questions that would be familiar in almost any strategic planning process:

Why do I exist?

What am I here to do?

How will I know if I’m doing it well?

I quickly discovered that one mission statement wasn’t enough.

There was a professional answer to those questions, certainly. But there were other answers too—things that mattered enormously to me but weren’t really the business of my employer.

Eventually, I began experimenting with three nested layers of mission: professional, personal, and soul.

The professional mission was the easiest to access. It asked what I bring to my work, who benefits from that contribution, and what purpose drives it.

Mine became:

I am a bridge builder, designing collaborative solutions that empower communities, elevate worker voice, and create equitable pathways to success in Hawaiʻi. I foster partnerships that challenge the status quo and inspire sustainable, long-term transformation—for both individuals and the collective good.

Writing that down was surprisingly clarifying.

It described my professional mission rather than the mission of any organization employing me. An organization might provide a particularly powerful place to practice it, but the mission itself could travel with me.

Then I moved outward.

My personal mission asked different questions: How do I want to live? How do I want to relate to others? What values do I want to embody even when nobody is evaluating my performance?

And finally, my soul mission asked questions that initially felt almost uncomfortably expansive: What feels timeless in me? What creates energy even when nobody is asking for it? Where do seemingly unrelated parts of my life connect?

That was where things got interesting.

The parts that don’t fit

One of the most important influences on this thinking came from Ramaswami Mahalingam’s University of Michigan course, Mindfulness, Dignity, and the Art of Human Connection.

The course introduced me to what Mahalingam calls the Banyan Tree Mindset: a collection of mindfulness practices using different metaphors to explore how we encounter ourselves and other people.

One that stayed with me was the Weaver’s Mind—an invitation to understand identity as layered, dynamic, and continually being created.

I began imagining my own identity as a tapestry.

Professional identity is one visible motif. It matters. We may spend decades developing it. It contains our skills, responsibilities, accomplishments, and the contribution we make through our work.

But it isn’t the whole fabric.

There are relationships and values. Experiences and identities. Creative practices and contradictions. Things we’ve learned to show the world and things we haven’t quite figured out how to name.

Some threads appear prominently on the front of the tapestry. Others disappear behind it for a while. And there is always more thread left on the spool.

This metaphor helped me understand something I had been struggling to articulate.

I had spent much of my career working with data and technology. I was trained as a statistician and had worked as a data scientist. Those identities came easily.

Artist did not.

And yet I had been making music for years.

Endurance athlete seemed like another unrelated identity entirely.

Leadership belonged somewhere else again.

When I started looking at these things through the three layers of mission, however, the boundaries became less convincing.

Running gave me space and rhythm for thinking. Music strengthened my comfort with uncertainty, experimentation, and emergence. Mindfulness changed how I listened. Data gave me tools for testing what I thought I understood. Leadership created opportunities to bring these ways of seeing into relationship with other people.

They weren’t competing identities.

They were feeding one another.

The organization wasn’t the container for all of this.

I was.

What gets left out

There is nothing inherently wrong with allowing our professional identities to become prominent.

Work can be deeply meaningful. Organizations can give us community, purpose, resources, relationships, and opportunities to contribute to something much larger than ourselves.

But professional environments necessarily see only part of us.

Job descriptions describe the contribution an organization needs from us. Performance reviews evaluate how we’re making that contribution. Résumés compress decades of experience into the portions another organization might find relevant.

Those are useful tools.

They’re also incomplete maps of a human being.

The problem isn’t that they’re incomplete. The problem comes when we forget that they are.

That’s why one of my favorite parts of this exercise became what I started calling spillover space.

After reflecting on professional mission, I invited myself—and later other people doing the exercise—to notice anything that surfaced that didn’t seem to belong in the professional box.

Don’t discard it.

Don’t make it relevant.

Just write it in the margins.

Maybe it’s a value that has nothing to do with your job. A creative impulse you’ve neglected. Something you want to protect. Something that feels embarrassingly earnest. A question you can’t answer yet.

Catch the thread.

You can decide what it means later.

From personal practice to shared practice

I developed much of this framework while participating in the HANO Fellows program of the Hawaiʻi Alliance of Nonprofit Organizations.

The fellowship gave me something deceptively simple: enough space to reflect more expansively about my own leadership and the different parts of myself I was bringing to it.

A year later, I had the opportunity to return and share this emerging practice with the next cohort of HANO Fellows.

I didn’t ask them to produce polished personal mission statements.

Instead, we moved through the layers one at a time: professional, personal, soul.

We wrote. We left room for spillover. We listened to one another.

And when people shared, the instruction to their partners wasn’t to improve what they had written.

It was to mirror.

Here’s what I heard that felt powerful.

I wonder if there’s another thread waiting to be woven.

The goal wasn’t strategic-plan perfection.

It was generous attention.

A strategy that leaves room

I still revisit my three mission statements.

Some language continues to feel exactly right. Other parts feel like artifacts from the person I was when I wrote them. New threads have become more visible. Others have receded.

I don’t think that means the strategy failed.

Perhaps we’ve borrowed too much of our understanding of personal purpose from organizational mission statements, which are often written as though the objective is to arrive at a sufficiently elegant sentence and then laminate it forever.

Human beings aren’t particularly cooperative with that model.

We change.

We discover things.

Different parts of us become important at different moments. Things that once seemed unrelated suddenly reveal themselves as deeply connected.

The point, at least for me, isn’t to produce the definitive statement of who I am.

It’s to become better at noticing the tapestry.

What have I allowed to become visible?

What have I left out?

What threads seem to keep finding one another?

And what might become possible if I don’t insist on knowing, just yet, what the finished pattern is supposed to be?

A useful strategy doesn’t have to tell us exactly who we must become.

Sometimes it simply helps us see more clearly what we’re already weaving.