Welcome to meaningful work matters. I'm your host, Andrew Soren, and today I'm joined by Jess Anison, a UK based positive psychology practitioner who works in organizations as a coach and change consultant. Jess is passionate about helping people find meaning in their work, but she also understands that sometimes you can have too much of a good thing. In this episode, Jess shares insights from her recent research on the complex relationship between stress and meaningful
work. She says that stress and meaning go hand in hand at work, but sometimes they shake hands in some pretty complex ways. Listen on to hear Jess on the benefits and challenges of stress and meaningful work, and how greater self awareness and intention can help us protect our well being. Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host,
Andrew Soren, founder of Udaemonic by Design. On this podcast, we'll dive into the world of meaningful work, explore its complexities, and examine its impact on people and the organizations they're a part of. Each episode features insightful conversations with cutting edge experts who are successfully navigating the challenges of meaningful work. We hope to offer you ideas, frameworks and tools to unlock potential and design work that's fulfilling, impactful, and supports everyone's well being.
Subscribe or follow us now and let's make meaningful work matter Jess Aniston, welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. It is a delight to be able to have you here. I got to see you present a little bit about what you're going to be talking about today at the European Conference of Positive Psychology, probably about a month and a half ago, and I was so excited by what you presented that I wanted you to come onto the podcast and tell everyone about it. So welcome. I'm glad
you're here. Please just introduce yourself a little bit to our audience and tell us what makes your work meaningful. Oh well, thank you Andrew, for having me. Yeah, it's an absolute honor. And when I look at the list of the previous guests that you have, my impostor feelings absolutely kick in. So it's wonderful to be here. I really, really appreciate it. So, yeah, as I say, my name is Jess. I'm a leadership and a careers coach and a positive
psychology practitioner. So I use positive psychology through my one to one coaching, but also running positive psychology inspired and informed development programs for organizations. I'm based in the UK. My work spans a number of different sectors, but quite a lot of it is in the civil service, which is our term for kind of government departments, government agencies, that sort of side of the house, but also higher education and the private sector. As well.
I've made the move into coaching and positive psychology relatively recently, so I'm quite a newcomer in that sense. But prior to that, I had a 15 year career in organizational change, major projects, which was, yeah, interesting and challenging, and we might touch a little bit about that as we go.
So I think you asked me what makes my work meaningful, and I think nowadays it's very much around helping people, and particularly in ways that bring some of these positive psychology ideas to a much kind of wider audience, a non expert audience. I think when I sort of inadverted commas found positive psychology a few years ago, it was like, ah, yeah,
this is the thing that I wanted to kind of explore and study. I'd looked at doing psychology for my bachelor's 20 odd years ago, but it was so focused on, you know, mental illness and what was wrong with the world and what was wrong with people. And so actually, to find positive psychology a couple of years ago was really, really helpful for me. So a big part of my meaning now is about bringing that to a bigger audience and making it real for people. But meaningful work's always
been really important for me. I think it's always a matter to me that I've done something that I found important, significant, that I've contributed in some kind of way. It's delightful to just hear you describe a little bit of your background. I feel like when I'm talking to you,
I'm speaking to my tribe, my people. It's nice to be able to talk to other practitioners, specifically people who work in organizational development, organizational change, who are thinking about positive psychology and how we can use positive psychology really wisely within the context of that work, which is
not always easy, it's not always obvious. And one of the things that I'm very excited about talking with you about today is the ways in which I think that as practitioners within this field, we have a bit of a, an ethical obligation to be able to talk about the whole spectrum and not just the positive aspects of it. So I think that's where we're going right now. I know that you and Adam Davidson recently published a paper that was possibly a part of your master's thesis,
is that right? Yeah. In applied positive psychology that looked at the relationship between stress and meaningful work. And so, as I said, I got to see you present a little bit about this at the European Congress of positive earlier this year, and I was struck by all of the wonderful complexities that you were able to paint with this research. So let's dive in. Let's do it one step at a time.
And maybe let's start with stress. It's something that we all know, it's something that we all feel probably on too regular a basis, but it's probably one of those things that we don't unpack a lot. So one is stress. Tell us about it. The way you summarize it is absolutely right. I think we've almost taken it as a bit of a kind of a fait accompli. It's just a feature of the modern workplace. It's just a feature of what it is to be in the workplace at the moment.
So stress is when we experience challenging circumstances or demands that exceed our resources, that exceed our ability to cope. So at work, these could be demands such as complexity problems, tight deadlines, tricky organisational politics, toxic behaviour, whatever else it might be. Job insecurity, perhaps. So there's a whole set of demands and we experience these demands subjectively. The things that you find particularly challenging may not be such an issue for me, and vice versa.
It really depends on how we kind of see things. But then we each have these different resources as well. So they could be personal resources, such as self efficacy, believing in yourself, optimism, resilience, being able to find kind of ways forward. It could be social support. So perhaps having a supportive line manager, supportive colleagues, friends and family that you can. That you can talk to and offload with, and that sort of thing.
It could be coping, sort of coping, sort of techniques such as a good exercise regime, keeping things in perspective. So we each have these demands, we each have these resources, and when, in our personal view, those demands exceed our resources, we're going to experience this thing called. This thing called stress. And as you've indicated, it's absolutely widespread. So, Gallup, do this annual state of the workplace report, as you'll know, and sort of consistently
over the last few years, 40, 41, 42%. It always hovers around that mark. 42% of us experience considerable stress on a daily basis. Now, it's not always bad for us. So actually having a, you know, mild stress, occasional stress, can actually be really, really beneficial for us. It can help us grow and develop, pushes us out of our comfort zone. It can be the thing that enables us to create more of these resources. We can actually build our self efficacy,
for example, by. By having situations that challenge us a little bit. But when that stress is really acute or really chronic, and the fact that 42% of us are experiencing it on a daily basis, you know, would suggest that this stress is chronic, we're not getting the chance to reset our stress cycle. We're not getting the chance to recover. And that's when it can start to cause problems, mental health problems. There's a link to depression,
physical problems. It's related to increased cardiovascular disease, immune functioning. We're less good at work. We're more likely to require time off. We're not going to be as productive. It may well spill over into personal life, affect our family time, affect our ability to relax and kind of unwind when we're not working. So, as you say, it's something that's become this kind of part of life. But actually, when we dig into it, we can examine the component parts a little bit more closely.
There's two pieces in there that I just want to pull out because I think that they're super helpful. And folks listening to this might not know that. There's actually this theory, some of which you've just summarized very beautifully, called the job demand resource theory, which is that balancing act between kind of the
stresses or the demands that are brought to, to us. It sounds like when you are talking about stress, you're kind of making a synonym to a certain extent with demands in the job demand resource model. Is that true? Is that a fair assumption? Yeah, I think often we use these kind of resources, these words, a little bit interchangeably. So I think my recollection of
the job demands resources model might be a little bit shaky. So forgive me if I've got this wrong, but I think Bakker and Demiruti, who developed the model, really saw the kind of the outcomes of that disconnect being strain, and they've got kind of a proper definition for strain. But I think, actually, it feels sensible to me to re kind of package it up as stress, because actually that's kind of how we experience it, if you like.
Yeah, that's great. And then we have resources, and we have resources to bear to those stresses. And I think sometimes when we think about the job demand resource model, we think about it like a balancing beam or a scale of some sort and like, how much stress is too much, how many resources do we need to counterbalance? And those resources can be all sorts, as you described, from social resources to actual, you know, technological resources to systematic resources to
psychological resources. There's all sorts of things that we can bring to bear. But I think that in some ways, maybe instead of the balancing beam concept, it's maybe nicer to think about it as harmony versus dissonance, because depending on the situation, depending on the individual, we can take a lot. We can maybe
take a little. It really depends. So, but thinking, what do we need to create harmony in our lives between the amount of stresses or demands or strains that are placed on us and the necessary resources that we need becomes a really important aspect of this. And then the second thing that you talked about that I'm just rehighlighting because I think it's so important, is that not all stress is bad stress. There are researchers out there who talk about eustress
versus de stress distress. So eustress, good stress, you, as EU is the kind of ancient Greek for good stress, and there's lots of good stresses in our lives, and then distress is bad stress. Too much. Too much stress in the wrong direction, too much strain. So, so, yes, all of this kind of weighing down into, okay, so we've got, we've got, we've got this kind of reality of stress in our lives. How does that play into meaningful work? What's the connection to meaningful work?
I think that's exactly right. And I think that that was really kind of what led me to do this research. As I said before, meaningful work had always felt really important to me, even when I was a kind of a child. And as a teenager, I knew I wanted to do something kind of that contributed, that made a difference in some way. And, you know, throughout my previous career, I'd had lots of roles where doing things that felt deeply meaningful.
I spent five years working on the planning and the delivery of the London 2012 Olympic Games. So, really high profile, high pressure, but really meaningful. Being able to put your city on this world stage, give a really great time to the athletes, to the spectators, to all of the circus that goes around Olympic Games, but it was also quite stressful. And then a few years later, I was the director of change for the Open University, which is Europe's largest open access university.
So giving people that haven't had a chance of going to higher education, maybe for whatever reason, second chance at that. So, again, really meaningful. I was surrounded by people that really believed in that organizational mission, but it was also really quite stressful at times. And so when I was thinking about what to do my research on for my masters, I just couldn't shake the feeling that there was some kind of connection between these two things.
And that was what kind of really led me down this path. As you know, most of the empirical research, there's not a great deal of it, but that which there is says, you know, meaningful work is really good for well being, improves life satisfaction, can improve general health, lower depression, also really good for kind of organizational performance, engagement, productivity, you know, all of that kind of good stuff.
But aside from a couple of sort of, you know, seminal papers, Bunderson and Thompson with the zookeepers, for example, there's not much about any kind of unintended consequences, any kind of dark side. And so I really wanted to dig into this, not least before of all, and I think this goes to what you said at the beginning, I'm a really, really big advocate for meaningful work. I really want people to enjoy the benefits of it. But nothing in life is so
simple that it's ever wholly great. And I didn't want to be part of a kind of a culture or a movement that was pushing the positive aspects without acknowledging kind of the broader context. So that, for me was really important. I think Katie Bailey described meaningful work as having intricate tensional knots, and that really resonated
with me. And so I think with the research, I kind of wanted to pull on a couple of those threads, meaningful work and stress, and just see what those knots might look like and what might happen. So that's really kind of what led me to the two. Great. And so how did you go about doing it? I know that you did a whole bunch of really interesting qualitative research. So what was your, in simple terms, what was your approach to doing this research project?
Yeah, so it was qualitative study, as you say, using a grounded theory approach. So grounded theory is great for when there's no existing theories. The picture looks a bit messy, a little bit kind of complicated. You've got no hypothesis to test. You really just want to kind of scratch around in the data, really, and see what comes bottom up from it. You also do the analysis in parallel with the data capture. So rather than collecting all the data and then analyzing it, you're required to do
that in parallel. And then that means that you can iterate the questions that you're asking. And I really liked that aspect of being able to go down some rabbit holes, pull on some strings, change some questions and adapt some focuses. There was an element that stayed static, but I really liked that ability to go with my participant, with my interviewee and see where it took us. I'm also a bit of a Brenny Brown fangirl, and she uses grounded theory for her sociology
research. And I forget what the specific research was that I'd heard her talking about on a podcast, but the way she described the process was just so compelling. And so I had to fight a little bit with my kind of supervisor, because they were a little bit like, oh, you know, maybe stick to something a bit simpler. But I was like, no, I'm going to do grounded theory. Haven't regretted that for a second. So that was the approach. The participants were people who self
identified as finding their work meaningful and stressful. So I purposefully created a sample that felt, you know, kind of fulfilled both aspects of that, those criteria. And they were a range of genders, range of ages, private, public, charity sectors. We interviewed each person and then categorized and coded their responses. So different levels of coding, kind of following the grounded theory approach, looking for themes, looking for similarities,
looking for differences. And some of the findings emerged quickly. Others took a little bit more time to come through. But another aspect of the grounded theory approach is a significant emphasis on reflexivity. So all the way through taking copious memos, noting down what I was thinking, what I was feeling, what I was curious about, all of that stuff. And so whilst that didn't form data set, it was a really, really helpful process of pulling it all
together. So, yeah, so, as you say, it became my master's thesis. And then last year we published in Frontiers in Psychology. So towards the end of last year. Which is an incredible. I made that bit sound easy, but as you know, the publication bit was not easy. It published. It's wonderful. And I think that
so much of. So it's really helpful for us to have examples of grounded theory and specifically qualitative research in positive psychology, because so much of positive psychology is really focused on quantitative methods and so much of it is very positivist. Positive psychology is very positivist. So it's helpful to be able to just balance that or add different methodologies. And I think that this is a really strong example of what that kind of qualitative
study can look like. Now, as part of that, you collected, as you said, a whole bunch of sub themes as you started to have these interviews. And so I'd love for us to kind of walk down kind of the different sub themes. I think that one of your participants, I remember you saying, described the relationship between stress and meaningful work as being something that went hand in hand. So some of those complex handshakes, because they seemed definitely complicated.
Yeah, I love that. I loved the phrase from my participant, hand in hand, but I also like your six complex handshakes. I think that's exactly kind of how it is. Essentially, what we uncovered were what appeared to be kind of multiple, bi directional. So two way relationships between the meaningfulness that somebody's experiencing and the stress that they're experiencing and some of these relationships were helpful to well being,
and some of them were harmful. So meaningful work could be both good for stress, help mitigate alleviate stress, but it could also create or exacerbate it with these things, it's often easier to have a kind of a diagram in front of us. So obviously, if somebody's listening through the podcast, that might be a little bit harder. So I'll try and kind of describe those relationships, but I will say, I. Will say that if you are listening right now and you want to see that
image, we can actually place that image in their show notes. So go to Eubd CA podcast and you'll be able to find this episode and the image that Jess is going to be describing. Perfect. No, that's great. Thank you, Andrew. So let me talk through these six handshakes. I guess the first handshake is really meaningfulness, creating or exacerbating stress. So people who care deeply about their work and draw a lot of meaning from it are likely to experience
more stress as a result. Participants describe how the passion that they have for their work can cause them to have, you know, higher expectations than they might otherwise would have. If there's a risk that those expectations, those standards aren't going to be met, it can cause a lot of frustration. They can feel upset about the missed opportunity that might have been had if
things had happened as they wanted to have. Participants talked about not letting people down, you know, doing, doing the work at almost any cost and at almost any personal cost to them. One participant saw it as a linear relationship, so the more he cares about it, the more potential there is for stress. So lots of different examples. The vast majority of the participants identified this as being something that they recognize meaningful, worth creating and exacerbating their stress levels.
I'll come on to the second handshake, because really, this is a flavour of number one, if that makes sense. It's not really a different relationship particularly, but what we found was that this ability of the meaning to create or exacerbate stress was particularly true where there was a significant volume of work. So when there's always more work to be done and it's meaningful work, it's much
more likely to kind of create that stress. One participant, a doctor in the UK, described it as being a bottomless pit of meaningful work. He could just keep going, just keep working. It's meaningful stuff. He will never get to the bottom of this, this sort of pit of work. And I think when we think about the modern workplace. Working long hours is quite normal. It's becoming harder and harder to switch off. You've got emails and stuff, instant messages coming to your phone.
And so people described how despite often being tired or worn out and knowing that they're not really doing their best work anymore, the fact that the work is meaningful makes them much less likely to stop. They're less likely to withdraw this discretionary effort. And this is having a significant impact. Yeah, yeah, no, as I reflect on those two first categories, and they're very similar and they're also distinct. So we've had deaf Thompson on this podcast talking about the zookeeper study that
you described before. And it feels like that caring deeply aspect of it is very, very much kind of what Thompson and Bunderson found in their research with zookeepers and all of the complex relationships that that had. We've also had Donna Gaffney, who is a nurse educator and works specifically in healthcare settings. I think that very much speaks to the bottomless pit space. You just kind of mentioned that one of your participants was a doctor.
This, especially over the last few years, in the context of the pandemic. In the context of the aftermath of the pandemic, this bottomless piss, this pit of just enormous volume that never ends, creates an interesting distinction. And I see how those things are both related, but also a little bit distinct. Yeah, no, helpful and really helpful to kind of add those extra things
in. I think people described how, you know, some of the kind of the implications in terms of not seeing their family and friends and some of the sadness around that, you know, not prioritizing their family because their work is so meaningful and kind of knowing that that's not quite the right balance, but yet not being able to or not wanting to make, make a shift in that. So, yeah, quite an interesting set of kind
of responses for that one. The third handshake looks at the impact of meaningfulness and stress, but actually finds a helpful relationship, specifically that meaningful work can help us to tolerate and alleviate stress. And generally what we found is that participants tended to accept that the stress was in service of something they cared deeply about. So, yes, this is stressful, but actually it's for something I care about. And so actually this is going to help me keep
going. I'm not going to quit. I'm not going to throw in the towel. I'm going to. I'm going to keep working through this. One of the participants said something along the lines of, can cope with the stress if it's something I care about. But if it's stress for stress's sake, I can't really cope with that as well. Another one described how, you know, even. Even the very, very hard days were worthwhile because she believed in what we. What she was doing.
So I think that was the kind of the first evidence of a helpful relationship between the meaningfulness and the stress, which was now really interesting. It makes me think, and I think that your next one, too, probably goes there in that direction, too. But about some of the people who've come on this podcast specifically talking about positive activism and its relationship
to meaningful work. So Sarah Steffens, from a union perspective, or Todd Kashin from a principled insubordination perspective, talking about the fact that in many ways, the act of doing something deeply meaningful, you know, that is stressful, but that stress is the reward to a certain extent. Like the meaning is so important, it really adds a tremendous substance to your life.
Yeah, absolutely. I recall the participant saying something along the lines of, you know, I wouldn't, you know, if it was meaningless, but easy, or even meaningful and easy, I wouldn't. I wouldn't be here. You know, this wouldn't be enough to keep me. So there is something inherent about the two things that I think is. Yeah, really fascinating. So I'll turn now to looking at handshake number four, which is the impact of stress on meaningfulness. And this found that the
stress can reinforce the meaningfulness. So participants attributed this to the meaningfulness, reminding them of what they were trying to do, reminding them of the importance of their work, and helping them see that the outcomes of their work, even if those outcomes are really kind of hard for matter to them
and are contributing in some way. One of the participants who works in adult social care, so helping elderly people come out of hospital into a care home, into a sort of a respite kind of care home, described how when things were particularly hard about one of these kind of logistical sort of challenges that she had, finding the right bed, organising transport, you know, communicating with the families and stuff when things were difficult, those were
the ones that she really remembered and really appreciated, because at the end of the day, she could, you know, feel real pride in what she'd done, and it helped reinforce the kind of the meaning of it. And another participant talked about how maybe there was a positive reinforcement thing going on because he basically said,
anything I'm stressing about must be important to me. So kind of even taking aside some of those more cognitive thoughts about the meaning of what he's doing, just the simple fact of him stressing it out. It made it feel more meaningful to him. So I thought there was something really interesting there. That I'd kind of like to dig into at some point. So we've got reinforcing meaningfulness. And the next one is reducing meaningfulness. Go there.
Yeah, absolutely. So that basically identified the opposite stress reducing meaningfulness. Lots of different examples of this one person who basically said, I found my work really meaningful. But then there was this question about redundancies in the organization. Me and my team were at risk. And actually, that really reduced the meaningfulness that I felt. And I thought that linked really well to your paper with Carol
riff about decent work. Because obviously, one of the aspects of that is having that security. So for her, she said it was a really meaningful job. But it almost disappeared overnight. When the redundancy kind of cloud came over her. Never materialized. Because, actually, maybe I hadn't seen it. Perhaps other people hadn't seen it quite as importantly as she had. As her team had had. So I think, yeah, experiencing stress can raise questions
for people, I suppose. Does this really matter if I'm not able to make progress, if they're hampering what I want to do? If leadership aren't supporting me on this, you know, perhaps it's not worthwhile as much. So, kind of questioning that. And our last one. Yeah. So the last one really is the one that kind of brings it all together effectively. They can feel like one and the same things work. Meaningfulness and stress can be two sides of the same coin, one participant said.
Another person described it as kind of egging each other on, proactively egging each other on. And that could be an upward spiral, a virtuous sort of circle. But it could also be a bit of a vicious cycle, kind of depending on the circumstances. The paper of the paper's title is, a few things in life are easy and worth doing. And that was a phrase that one of the participants, dad, had used to say to him to kind of, you know, just to jeem
on when he was a teenager. You know, keep going. And it just felt like such a perfect summary. That actually there is this inherent relationship between something being worthwhile and being challenging. So, yeah, it formed the title of the article. For that reason. That summary just sounds so much like, in many ways, so much of the research that is done in the space of well being. That there's different perspectives of well being.
There's a perspective of well being that's all about trying to increase the amount of pleasure. And reduce the amount of pain that you have maybe called the hedonic well being. But there's this other kind of well being, eudaimonic well being, which is really about doing hard and difficult things. And that is not necessarily something that will always make you happy, but is something that will be deeply fulfilling, deeply important
in life. And it will bring probably a great deal of stress, and it will probably bring a great deal of meaning. And those two things, in all of these complex handshakes will. Will find all sorts of ways of creating harmony and dissonance in your lives. So that seems to be the kind of one major takeaway that I take from your paper. Yeah, no, I think that's absolutely right. One of the things that I found interesting was about the kind of the simultaneous aspect
of people's experiences. So a number of people said that they're experiencing meaningfulness, exacerbating their stress and alleviating their stress effectively at the same time. So this isn't sort of, you know, some months it's this kind of helpful relationship. In other months, it's harmful. At the same time. It can feel both helpful and harmful. Likewise, stress reinforcing and reducing meaning at the same time. So, again, it's that sense of, yeah, it's one and the same. You can't separate
it out. This isn't cyclical. This is the nature of what? Of what it is to live a worthwhile life, to do worthwhile work. So we know that stress and meaningful work have all kinds of reciprocal relationships. We know that you can care deeply about something and that can create or exacerbate stress, that it can feel like there's a bottomless pit of things that you need to be able to deal with. That stress can actually alleviate.
That stress can be something that is alleviating. So meaningfulness can actually help us take away stress from our work, but the stress can also take away the meaning from our work. And that really, the two of those things are two sides of the same coin in all sorts of different ways. So there's some good, there's some bad, there's some ugly in all of these handshakes. What should we do about it? There's a. What's the now what?
I think the first thing, and probably the most important thing, is about being aware of these potential dark sides. So, absolutely, you know, I'd encourage people to seek out meaningfulness in their work, you know, whether that's in their current role through job crafting, whatever it might be. But recognize that it's not a silver bullet. It's not going to cure all ills and it
might have some unintended consequences alongside it. I think there's unlikely to be an optimal amount, you know, a Goldilocks amount of meaning where these dark sides don't materialize. I don't think it works like that. I think there's a really interesting relationship between decent work. So that might be something that
could be worth kind of exploring a little bit more. I think, you know, if anyone listening to this, you know, as an individual, is finding their work both really meaningful and really stressful, I'd encourage them to reflect on what they're experiencing. Consider the potential relationships between the two things and how those are playing out. Maybe kind of, you know, privately journaling, maybe with the support of somebody, you know, a coach, a mentor, a friend,
think about whether that, you know, you can make any adjustments. So either to reduce or avoid or mitigate the impact of some of the stressors or boosting your resources, your coping strategies, making sure that you've got meaningful work as part of a broader meaningful life, that you can keep that perspective, that you're not putting all of your eggs in the meaningful work basket, but actually you've got that broader perspective. I think as organizations and leaders we
do need to be mindful of these unintended consequences. So again, helping people be aware of them, providing space to talk about them, understand them. Ideally, it's for organisations to also make some adjustments to kind of reduce the, kind of the negative impact, maybe balancing those very busy, high pressure, pressure periods of work with times when actually people can kind of ease off just a little bit and allow people to disconnect
during kind of time off and also role model good practice. So it's great when leaders talk about what they find meaningful about their work and share, you know, kind of what the other implications of that are and how they're managing things like overwork or kind of not holding work life boundaries as well. I think all of this is particularly important if the organization is championing meaning and purpose as a way of kind of motivating its people. You've got lots of big consultancies that say,
you know, meaningful work is the golden ticket. Your people will never leave. They'll all be really engaged and really happy. I loved Antoinette Bibles, you know, happy cows produce more milk, kind of sort of challenge. But I think that those efforts that leaders might take to encourage people to find more meaning in their work will come over as inauthentic even more quickly if they're not also acknowledging some of the darker sides, some of those unintended consequences and helping
their people manage that. So I think, yeah, if you're an organization that's interested in this space, absolutely. You know, use those great techniques people like Michael Stager, through the karma model and things like that, kind of have shared as a way of helping foster more meaning for people and be ready for a broader conversation about what that might mean in practice.
Thank you for not making that just a simple, here's a silver bullet answer, because I think that that is a key to all of this, that there's a huge amount of self awareness. In some ways, so much of it starts with self awareness, whether that self is at the individual worker level or whether that self awareness is at the manager level or whether that self awareness is at the leadership table level in terms of thinking about what it is that we're actually doing as an organization.
So thats extremely helpful. But I actually want to go back to the individual level because its something we havent actually talked a whole lot on this podcast is what does it mean to think about meaningful work at that individual level? And specifically, you talked about job crafting, but I know that you have a book coming out in the new year thats all about career crafting. So im wondering if you can talk a little bit about what that means and also what its relationship
to meaningful work and everything that youve just described. Oh, yes. So my current focus, as you say, is about how we can have meaningful careers over time, over the long term, recognizing, not ignoring some of these dark sides, but also recognizing that we change as individuals, we change the workplace and organizations change as well. So the book is called the working title, at least I don't think it's going to change career. How to conquer your mid career crisis and create
your most meaningful work life. So it's really targeted at that group of people who are, you know, middle stage of their career, maybe feeling a little bit stuck, a little bit unfulfilled, kind of starting to ask themselves, you know, I've done 1015 years of this. Is this what I really want to be doing for the rest of my career? And so through my coaching practice over the last few years and very much informed by the meaningful work literature,
it's not an academic book, it's a personal development book. It's very much for, you know, the kind of the normal person on the street, but it is absolutely underpinned by the science. It's nothing of superficial in that way. Through that coaching practice, I've really created this approach to career crafting that helps people create meaning in ways which are sustainable and personal
to them. So it starts by helping people kind of hear and heed the wake up call, recognizing that actually the situation that they're in with their career isn't quite right, they want to do something differently about it. Next, it's about enabling people to determine what's meaningful for them. As we know, there's so many definitions of meaningful work, there's so many conceptualizations, different views about sort of, you know, what the sources are of meaning.
So to really help people recognize what their sources of meaning are and what that might mean in practice. So, you know, contribution, autonomy, relatedness, helping people, whatever it might be, getting really clear about what that means for them. And then once they know what they're looking for,
really work out what they want to do about it. So that could be changes within the role that they're currently in, assuming that they're working, job crafting, so changing the tasks that they do, the relationships that they have, how they think about and frame their work, but also potentially bigger career shifts as well. So possibly changing, changing job, changing organization, maybe changing career, but really importantly, taking an initiative approach to those changes
to help de risk it. So this isn't a throw everything up and do something very different overnight kind of thing. That's just not realistic for most people. But it is about how you can make small changes to test out what other things might look like and how meaningful or not they actually are in practice. Because what you think might be the case might not actually be the reality. As you know, meaningful work isn't sort of a once and done thing.
It's something that you've got to maintain. So there's some stuff in there which is around helping people, savorous meaningfulness, reflect on it both individually and as groups. And then all the way through, we keep an eye on these possible dark sides so that we can navigate, we can tread that line. We're not going to get overwhelmed, kind of stuck with them. So, yeah, very practical. Lots of exercises either for people to do on their own or to do with. With a colleague,
with a mentor, with a coach, whoever else it might be. It's a bit of a labour of love and kind of ironic. It's both deeply meaningful for me to be writing this thing and also quite stressful. So, yeah, I'm looking forward to having it published next year. You're getting to walk your talk with all the various handshakes that you get to do with yourself as you go through the process. Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. The good, the bad and the ugly. That's right.
When should people expect the book to come out? So this first part of next year, 2025. So it is almost written. There's going to be some illustrations, so it's going to be quite visual as well, which we're currently doing at the moment. So, yeah, I'm really looking forward to seeing it take shape. Fantastic. And in the meantime, if folks want to learn more about you, your practice, read the paper that you've written. Where would you point them? Yeah.
Great. So I have a website which is www.jessannison.com. i think we'll make that available with the show notes, if that's okay. And there's a blog there, so there's some sort of easy reading kind of thoughts on this. But there's also a link to the paper, which was in frontiers in psychology. There's also a link to register for more updates on the book as well. If it's sort of sparked a thought for anyone, please do keep in touch. And yeah, love to share. Terrific.
Jess, is there anything else that you think I should have asked you about the topic of meaningful work today? Oh, that's a good question. The short answer, the simple answer, the one I'm going to give, is no. It's been a really lovely conversation and I'm really, really grateful for it. It has the preparation for it, the thinking about our conversation today has sparked loads of thoughts for me about different things to
uncover and all of that kind of stuff. So, yeah, not least of all, this relationship between meaningful work and decent work. Rose a couple of questions for me about what might this look like? Is it some absence of decent work which is creating some of these dark sides? Or if your work is both meaningful and decent, do these dark sides disappear or become lessened? So I think it's raised lots of questions, but perhaps not ones to unpick too much right now. No, that's a
great set of questions. It makes me think of David Bluestein and his way of thinking about the relationship between meaningful work and decency. And my guess is if you plotted those out on a two by two and looked at high and low meaning high and low decency, you'd find a different relationship to stress and meaningful work at every single one of those four different places. So yes, we now have like a topic for a whole another podcast episode.
Jess, thank you so much. I really am grateful for all of the wisdom that you shared, the nuance and the ways in which you navigate the complexity of this topic is refreshing. It's exciting. I'm thrilled to know that you are in the world offering your service to individuals, to organizations, and to the broader community, offering this as a way of building greater good within all of the research and practice
of positive psychology. Thank you. Oh, thank you. It's been great, Andrew. And yeah, really, really honored and thrilled to have been able to share some thoughts today. So, yeah, thank you. Thank you for joining us for another episode of meaningful work matters. If you haven't already done so, be sure to subscribe to our podcast on your favorite platform. And if this episode resonated with you, please take a moment to leave us a review. Your feedback helps
us make this podcast better and reach more listeners. You can connect with me, Andrew Soren, on LinkedIn, or visit www. Dot Eubd Dot ca to learn more about eudaimonic by design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleague and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making meaningful work matter. See you next time.