Quick Win: How a sense of ‘meaning’ can save you when work gets challenging with Dr Gabriella Rosen Kellerman

Did you know that the best way to ensure happiness and focus is to ensure you have a sense of ‘meaning’ when it comes to your work?

But what exactly is meaning and how do you create it?

Dr Gabriella Rosen Kellerman is a Harvard trained physician, co-author of the international bestseller Tomorrowmind with Martin Seligman, and Chief Innovation Officer at BetterUp.

Gabriella shares:

-          🎯 What ‘meaning’ is and why it could help you out when work gets challenging.

-          ⚠️ What can happen if a manager doesn’t ensure their employees have meaning.

-          🌱 How you can create meaning for yourself with your work.

-          🔑 The vital, key part of helping create ‘meaning’ for employees.

Listen to the full interview with Gabriella here.

Find Gabriella’s book via her website or connect with her on linkedin.

My latest book The Health Habit is out now. You can order a copy here: https://www.amantha.com/the-health-habit/

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Credits:

Host: Amantha Imber

Sound Engineer: The Podcast Butler

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
How do you make sure that members of your team
are happy, committed, and satisfied with their situation in the workplace?
Do you just give them praise or have you been
able to grow some internal force within them that helps
drive them forward even when things get difficult. Doctor Gabriella

(00:20):
Rosen Calluman is a Harvard trained physician, the chief innovation
officer Better Up, and the co author of the international
bestseller Tomorrow Mind with Martin Seligman. In their book, they
tackle the challenges of thriving in our modern world of
work and offer guidance for leaders who are looking to
arm their workforce with the capabilities that will future proof
their company's success. So what does Gabriella's research say we

(00:44):
need to do to help you and your team thrive
in tough times? Welcome to How I Work, a show
about habits, ritual and strategies for optimizing your day. I'm
your host, Doctor Amantha Imper. On today's quick Win episode,

(01:10):
we go back to an interview from the past and
I pick out a quick win that you can apply today.
In today's show, Gabriella reveals the key to unlocking meaning
in the workplace and how you as a leader can
inspire your team to find it.

Speaker 2 (01:27):
So meaning is what my co atho Marty Salomon calls
a flabby concept. By what do you mean? There's a
lot of different meanings to the word meaning. The psychologist
make cal Stieger has this definition that there's three different
components to meaning. There's purpose, there's coherence, and there's significance.

(01:49):
So significance is that you know, my life has meaning,
there's some significance to me being here. Coherence is this
idea that there's a greater integrity of my actions with
something larger that it all somehow fits together. And purpose
is that there's something bigger than I'm kind of working
toward and pushing for. Mattering is what we think of

(02:10):
as like a very bare minimum level of significance, whereby
I feel that the labor I'm putting out there in
the world is for a purpose, it's seen, and it's
not forn and at a clinical psychological level, and people
lose a sense of mattering, they can't even get out
of bed to start the day, right. So the extreme

(02:31):
end of not mattering is depression in the workplace. Some
of our professions, some of our labors, are meaningful in
a colloquial sense of they might be attached to, let's say,
as a healthcare provider saving a person's life, and some
of us are doing labors that feel much more removed
from immediate meaningful impact for other human beings, for sense

(02:53):
of integrity, for service to the planet. As managers, whatever
we're asking people to do, we need them to be
able to feel that their labors have registered to us,
that they matter, that we see them doing that thing.
That is the bare minimum of a person continuing to
be motivated to keep putting in the effort day after day,

(03:14):
and in this day and age, when we as managers
are very often asking people, hey, that thing that you
work so hard on for six months, remember that stop
doing that thing and start doing this totally different thing
because the industry change, the world changed, what the market change,
whatever it was. That's a crisis of mattering. That's a

(03:36):
crisis where the employee is asked themselves, why did I
just do that for six months? And why is it
going to matter for me to do this next thing?
So that's where we define the sort of bare minimum
of what a manager needs to do to help people
stay motivated, and really what we owe people if we're
asking them to work on something, we owe it to

(03:56):
them to witness that work and to have it be
seen and to have them feel that that was not
all for not.

Speaker 1 (04:03):
How do you approach that as a later in terms
of remembering that, Because there's so much to remember and
to do to be a great leader these days, I
feel like their responsibilities are greater than ever. It seems
very basic, but I can imagine that a lot of
ladies don't do it. How do you think about it
in your role?

Speaker 2 (04:21):
Yeah, by the way, I think about it all the time,
and every time I share this insight and this idea
of as managers, when we ask people to pivot, I
think about at that exact moment, where am I asking
my team to pivot and where do I need to
remember to go back and do this. So I do
try to pay attention to it most at these pivot moments.
I try to pay attention to it. When we are

(04:42):
reading out on metrics and performance, you know that's a
moment where your team might miss a metric, but it
might be a for a reason that was out of
their control or despite the fact that there was a
lot of effort that was put in and so how
do you witness the effort, how do you witness the
intent even while helping the team grow and evolve to
the next chapter. So I try to narrate the utility

(05:07):
of the effort as much as I can when I
know that we're shifting away from or trying to learn
something about where it could be better, because I know
that's when it's the threat happens. And then in general,
when we have good hygiene and good practices around recognition,
which is something I think all of us can get
better at. But recognition is an antidote, and it's almost

(05:30):
a vaccine for a crisis of mattering. If people feel
you're someone who's recognizing them and who's seeing what they're doing,
then they'll be more trusting about leaving something behind and
going to something new.

Speaker 1 (05:41):
I hope you enjoyed this little quick win with Gabriella.
If you would like to listen to the full interview,
you can find a link to that in the show notes.
If you like today's show, make sure you you'd follow
on your podcast app to be alerted when new episodes drop.
How I Work was recorded on the traditional land of
the warrangery people of the cool And Nation