When Needs Meet Meaning: Lessons from Anne Brafford [Part Two]

Welcome back to Meaningful Work Matters. This is Andrew Soren and if you haven't listened to part one of our conversation with Dr. Anne Bradford, stop what you're doing right now and go listen. This is part two and we dive into Self Determination Theory, one of the most influential frameworks for understanding

human motivation. Anne shares her insights on how the needs for autonomy, competence and relatedness play pivotal roles in fostering meaningful work, especially in challenging environments like large law firms and other high stakes professions. We discuss how organizations can better support employees, intrinsic motivations leading to greater well being, engagement and resilience. Tune in to learn how to build work environments that nourish, not drain, our sense of purpose.

Welcome to the Meaningful Work Matters podcast. I'm your host Andrew Soren, founder of eudaimonic 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 in let's Make Meaningful Work Matter. Ann Bradford welcome back to Meaningful Work Matters.

This is our second episode with you. Our last episode was all about the law profession, about identities, about meaningful work, and about some of the extraordinary positive deviance that is existing amongst both an emerging generation of lawyers and some pretty incredible practices that big law firms are taking to reshape work in very concrete ways to support the identities of those who are in the

profession. So I'm excited to have this conversation, to dive into the second part of this conversation which is all about this wonderful theory called self determination theory, which I believe was something that you actually started thinking about your PhD as the thing that you were going to be studying. So tell us a little bit about what is self determination theory and how did you get interested in that? Determination theory is a very big part of my life.

It is what I found. I first started looking into the theory over ten years ago now and it happened that a one of the biggest studies ever done for lawyers, for practicing lawyers, was based on self determination theory and what that the story the study was led by Professor Larry Krieger, who's a law professor in Florida and he said everyone focuses on lawyers being ill and what makes lawyers ill. I'm interested in what makes lawyers well and

he wanted to invest. It's A big positive psychology question. It was a big, it was a big psychology positive psychology shift. And he had already done research with law students using self determination theory and tying it to their own mental health and wellbeing, how they did on the lsat, the exam that we take to get into law school, and some other pretty important measures. So he believed self determination theory

was important in the context of the legal profession. So he decides to do this big study, what makes lawyers well, and it was based on self determination theory. And the results were astonishing that like in social science research, if you get, you know, correlations of like 0.3, like you're often happy, you know, that you, that you got something that large because.

Small, small to medium effect sizes, small. To medium effect sizes are good because humans are complex and so figuring out like all the different things that contribute to our happiness, our wellbeing, our engagement, like, it's always, it's, it's many factors. And so you don't necessarily expect very large effects because, you know, there's multiple things going on. What Professor Krieger's study found is very large effect sizes like 0.6 and above. And so that just means like,

wow, really big. And so I knew enough back then when I saw this study to say, there's something real going on here and I want to understand this better. And I knew sort of what self determination theory was about in the master's program that we both went to. It's introduced but not really talked about in any real deep way. So this study is what triggered my interest. So that was like 2015 or 2016. So I started taking a deep dive into what is

this? And the gist of it is that we could start with the idea of basic psychological needs. What the theory proposes is that for the purposes of flourishing, optimal functioning, motivation, we all have three basic psychological needs that need to be satisfied. We either need to figure out how to satisfy themselves, or even more so, our context needs to help support those needs. The first is relatedness or connection.

So it's the idea both of close, high quality interpersonal relationships and also a sense of belonging in groups or communities that are significant to us. The second is competence, which is the idea that we need to feel effective, that what we do actually has an impact in our environment. So it's satisfied by things like feeling that I'm growing and doing well and learning kind of just for the sake of doing it, because humans have this drive to learn and grow. So that's confidence.

The third is autonomy, and this is a Need that is confusing. It's the most confusing for many people because when you think of autonomy, people often think of like independence. You know, I don't need anyone. I'm sort of isolation. And under self determination theory, that's not what autonomy is. It's more about the idea of volition and authenticity.

So do I feel like I'm doing this because I'm being compelled or forced to do it, or do I feel that I am self authoring, that I am doing it because I am choosing to do it and because it aligns with my values and my identities. So it has a very strong authenticity component to it. When people often talk about it, they kind of focus on this volition that I don't feel forced, or they think of it as independence. And it really is much more complex than that. It's this idea of am I internally driven?

And the theory has multiple, multiple components. As I learned the theory, I realized there's lots of layers here. There's a lot to go, there's a. Lot of layers and you just learn, you learn more and more and more about the theory and then about yourself as you learn the theory. So I'm just going to talk about like one other big aspect of it, and that is autonomous motivation.

And what the theory proposes is that when our needs are satisfied in our context, we are more likely to be autonomously motivated in that context. And self determination theory took a break from other kinds of motivation literature, which often looked at motivation as you have it or you don't. It's like an on and off switch. You're motivated or you're not. Self determination theory said not quite that motivation varies on a con, on a continuum of quality, of low quality and high quality.

And quality is determined by how autonomous we feel when we're doing something. So we could be a motivated, meaning there's no motivation at all. I don't know why I'm doing this. I'm just doing it like an automaton. Like either I really don't feel like I'm effective, I can't be effective, or I don't care. And there's, I think lots of workers who can, you know, probably feel that

that's them in their job. As you, as you move on the continuum, you get to external motivation, which is, I feel forced, basically forced or compelled, either out of fear or because someone has a reward that they're offering me. So it's not really, it's very poorly internalized. It's not because I find it valuable or interesting. It's because someone is doing something external to me that's pushing me around.

Then there's introducted motivation which a little even more tricky because it's like it's partially internalized. It's partially part of my identity. I heard it described once as like swallowing something whole without digesting it. And interesting it can be. It's, it's when you, you're doing something because you feel guilty or your self worth is a, is at risk. It's very ego driven and it can have

both good and bad effects. Like sometimes, you know, if my mom wants me to do something and so she's guilting me into it, it's not like I do it because I love her, even if I don't like to do, even if I don't want to do the thing and that's not that damaging. But if you're doing it like really to protect your ego or because someone is, you know, that you don't care that much about is only guilting you into it, it can lower your performance and have some

bad effects. Then you get up to the more autonomous, higher quality types of motivation. Identified motivation. It's kind of right in the name. I'm identified with it, which means I value it, it's meaningful to me, it's significant. And the highest sort of more pure form of motivation on this continuum is intrinsic, which is I do it because I enjoy it or because it's interesting.

Integrated motivation gets tricky. What integrated motivation means is all of who I am, all of my different identities are harmonized and I think an example is helpful. So at work you can be highly identified with your work and even enjoy it. And you're focusing all on it, feeling highly motivated. But you've, you've compartmentalized yourself so that you're ignoring your, your family identities or your friends like the things

that are you outside of work. If you are, if you are compartmentalized in that way, then you are not integrated and that can have some negative effects. So what we, what we want in the workplace is this, the higher quality forms of motivation and we need identified. Like intrinsic motivation isn't always perfect in the workplace. Like we want to have it as much as we can but sometimes work isn't enjoyable and you're not, you know, it's not going to be fun, it's not going to be interesting and

you're not going to enjoy it. So we need, we really need, you know, the identified motivation to anchor us as well. Maybe I don't enjoy it, but I do find it important or meaningful or significant, and I understand its significance, then that keeps the energy driving, driving you

so that performance continues. And what the like now, you know, 40 years of research and hundreds of workplace studies show is that when you have this high quality autonomous motivation, you have all the things you want, you know, in an organization, in employees that it has, it's highly related to engagement.

Some people talk about autonomous motivation as synonymous with engagement because your whole self is engaged, to mental health, to job attitudes like job satisfaction and turnover intent, organizational commitment, organizational citizenship behaviors. Kind of like think of the things that we organizational psychologists measure and autonomous

motivation is related to it. And psychological needs are very important because they help, they contribute to the fostering of autonomous motivation and also themselves are related to these positive outcomes. So for workplaces, it's like asking the question of how do we in our organizational practices and leadership styles support autonomous motivation? Well done. That was, you covered so many bases there in like a relatively short period of time. That was a phenomenal primer

on an extremely complex thing. And also the, you know, the thing that actually, quite frankly, drove me to be interested in positive psychology to begin with. I mean, when, when I went through the, the MAP program, the Masters of Applied Positive Psychology program at University of Pennsylvania, which is, which is how both of us know each other, I was working for a big bank in Canada and, and I was, I was leading a coaching program, a coaching for performance program.

So our job was to teach managers in the retail side of the bank how to coach for performance. And that whole entire program that I had pretty much inherited was really premised on a way of thinking about psychology that was really rooted in behavioralism. And that behavioralistic way of thinking about coaching was that a manager's job is to basically manage extrinsic motivation, to really kind of anchor themselves down at the low end of that continuum that you talked about.

You know, a manager's job is to be a consequence provider. They're either providing, you know, they are determining, you know, it is manager's job to determine the behaviors they want to see in their employees a little bit like, you know, one might in their dog, and then provide positive or negative rewards that were going to move the employee closer to the direction of the behaviors and that they wanted and that the better the manager was at being able to do that, the more

high performance that they would be able to get. And high performance in that way. And they, in that, in that manner meant discretionary performance. Like they are going to go, they're going to work harder and they're going to do more of the behavior that you want them to do

by you being a good consequence provider. And, and I. There were many of us who were coaches in this program who had come from other kinds of coaching disciplines that, that made us kind of disgusted by this work because it, it just, it struck us as so asinine to be, to be thinking that, that the way that we would get high performance out of people is just to basically treat them a little bit like dogs and to determine what behaviors we wanted for them

and to be responsible for providing positive or constructive consequences until they did those behaviors and continued to do them. And it was also very clear that frankly, as soon as those managers stepped away, most of that performance would just disappear too. And it just totally missed the boat on the fact that they were like human beings. Right? Like it is the old carrot and stick model, like you're a donkey that we have to punish or entice. I do think that the challenge is. Oh, go ahead.

No, no, no, go for it. You think that the challenge is the. The challenge is that accountability has to be there as well. And so how do you do it in an autonomy supportive way if you don't have accountability? Humans are humans like you. You, you may not get the behavior that you want. And also you can ruin the team spirit dynamic. Oh, totally.

Not everyone is being held accountable. So it is, there's, you know, there's good stuff written on how, how do we integrate these of accountability is, is important and it also shows people that they matter. You know, that I'm paying attention to you, but do it in a need supportive way. And don't think people are like this, you know, the on and off switch of either I either have to punish you or I have to entice you. And there's nothing else going on inside you

that's going to internally motivate you. And that's I guess the thing, that's the thing that, that I think, you know, so many of us who, who who know about coaching know fundamentally, right, that this is. That our job as coaches is to try to activate those other things within you that are going to help you and others, you know, create systems of accountability that are fundamentally based

on something that you care about. And that's where to me, self determination theory is just such a beautiful, elegant and very useful way of thinking about what some of those things are that we can understand both for ourselves, but also for teams to be able to create the context of high performance, to be able to satisfy the needs of individuals to be able to help them

ultimately identify what is meaningful and important. So I guess that's the place where I want to go next is what the relationship between everything you just talked about and meaning is. So let's, let's go there. There's growing body of research. It's been going on for a while, but a couple of researchers have really been focusing on it in the past 10 years of showing this very close association between what self determination theory is saying and the experience of

meaningfulness in work and at work. The first is starting with the, the needs part of it of the supporting psychological needs at work that there's now multiple studies showing that need satisfaction is highly related to the experience of meaningfulness. And there's both just correlational studies which show all needs have, you know, moderate to large associations with meaningful work. And then there's some longitudinal studies which can get more at causation of what really is

causing the experience of meaningful work. And what really has popped out is autonomy and this, this other newer concept called beneficence, which I didn't, I didn't mention when

I was first mentioning the needs. And under self determination theory there, there's now this new concept, newish concept of beneficence that it, it doesn't meet all the technical requirements of a psychological need, which does not matter for our purposes because for our purposes of work what it matters is it's effects and it's the, I'm going to just call it a need. The beneficence need is like the idea of having a positive impact in other people's lives of benefiting others.

And what the research has found is both autonomy and beneficence have this very strong relationship with the experience of meaningfulness. And you can hear, just like in the idea of beneficence having a positive impact on others, I think many people would define that as meaningfulness as that's what creates meaningfulness in many people's lives. So, so not at all surprising that it's related to meaningfulness, autonomy. We need to unpack it a little bit to understand how it is, how it's related,

why it's related to meaningfulness. And I, as I mentioned earlier, it's, it's one of the needs that has kind of the most misunderstanding around it. But when you look at what autonomy really is, it's. Do I feel I used the word authentic earlier? Like am I engaging in authentic self expression? And that's defined mainly by your values, your values, your preferences, your interests, all these Things that make up the content of our personal identities are what motivate us and make us feel aligned.

That when we are behaving and expressing ourselves in alignment with values, that's how self determination theory defines authenticity, which is different than how others define it. Right side note, if you're interested in this conversation and you have not heard part one of this podcast episode with Anne, go back and listen to last week's episode which was all about identities and the realization of those different values in action. Okay, continue.

So the autonomy need event is very much wrapped up in identity because it doesn't have autonomy. The autonomy doesn't have content without identity. It's like when I say that I'm, that I'm, you know, expressing myself in an integrated way, like what does that mean? I need to go look at your, I need to go look at our identity to find out what do you value? What are your interests,

what are your, what are your preferences? And when I act in alignment with those, my autonomy need is supported, is satisfied. So when you hear like, what autonomy, how self determination theory defines the autonomy need, then you can immediately see the link to meaningfulness.

That when I am able to be self expressive at work, that I, my talents, my strengths, my interests are being invited into my work, being asked for that I get to contribute this part of me, it creates this experience of meaningfulness that, you know, one of the ways that we define meaningfulness is this tight fit, the fit between myself and my work,

you know, especially my values. So when my autonomy need is supported, now we see like, now that we understand it better, not surprising that it is also strongly related to meaningful work. And in the longitudinal study, autonomy and beneficence were unique predictors of meaningful work, like above and beyond competence and relatedness. And to me that, like, that doesn't mean those others aren't important. Like you were still, the needs are highly interrelated,

so all of them are important. So if I was like autonomously doing my work ineffectively, like I was just doing a crap job, I couldn't figure out how to do a good job that's not going to be experienced as meaningful, or if no one around me cares about me or cares about my work, you know, and is, is expressing that they care about my work fulfilling the relatedness need, probably not going to feel meaningful. So all of the needs are very interrelated

and tightly intertwined. So we, you know, as scientists, we study them as, as distinct concepts. But I think holistically it is like, how do we do these all together because they are very interrelated. And then there's a research on autonomous motivation. So those are the psychological needs. Then there's the other big part that we talked about of this autonomous motivation continuum. Before you go there,

can I, can I just interject for one second? Because I think that there's, there's something around what you've just described around autonomy that, that again very much connects to other things that I care a lot about, which is the idea of eudaimonia and specifically the idea that what eudaimonia is fundamentally about is potentiation. Like all of these words. But the idea of, I mean what you literally, the term eudaimonia is

good spirit or daemon. So we all have this potential or good spirit that lives within us which, which is the best version of ourselves. You know, it's, it's, you know, the, the metaphor that that is often used is the kind of the, the mighty oak tree that exists within the acorn, right? We, we all have this incredible potential that in the right context, which is probably

where we're going to get to fairly soon. You know, one way of thinking about that potential is that if, if my needs, if my psychological needs are, are met, and specifically if I can, if I can ultimately be the most autonomous version of myself, I have the freedom to be the best version of myself. That, that's, that, that's a lot of what I think that autonomy is all about. And, and often the reason why Eudaimonic well being and self determination

theory are often talked about hand in hand. I mean, some of the most significant, you know, theory that has been done on Eudaimonic wellbeing, both by Carol Riff and you know, D.C. and Ryan, who, who are the fathers of self determination theory, you come together in that sense of. These are things that help us ultimately become the best version of ourselves, help this good spirit ultimately

potentiate. And it's one of the very premises of self determination theory, like an assumption about human nature on which self determination theory is founded, is that we are all naturally motivated toward growth and integration. We want to do, we want to do well in the definition of our culture, you know, of our surroundings. We want to be connected with others. We also want to be self

regulating. And it is based on this assumption that people are naturally have this positive motivation that's going to go in this direction and that their circumstances, their cultures, their surroundings can support it or thwart it, but they're not, it's not creating it. So it's not our surroundings that are Creating that internal motivation, it is already there. It is part of our human nature. And then our, our, the people around us, the organizations around us can

support it or not. But it is, you know, different than some theories of humans that is based on this very notion that we want growth. That's the direction that we're going to go in in our natural state. You were starting to talk about autonomous motivation and its relationship to meaning. Do you want to go there? Yes. So autonomous motivation, it's very, it's similar to the idea of the autonomy need

that I was just talking about. So when we're autonomously motivated, and when I say autonomous motivation, I guess I should define that autonomous motivation is those top quality. So when we talk about the identified motivation, intrinsic motivation and integrated motivation, those often are talked about collectively as autonomous motivation. They're the ones that when I am acting out of those motivations, I feel most aligned with who I am, with my values, with things

that interest me, feeling integrated. What the research has shown is that autonomous motivation is really strongly related to meaningful work. Like 0.83, I think in one study. And you know, if you, if you know social science, you know, like that's a mind bogglingly large number. So that there was some question is, is there really a difference between these concepts of autonomous motivation and meaningfulness? Maybe they're not distinct, but the, you know, the scholars looking

at this think they are separate. It just looks like it's clear that it is probably the case that you will not experience meaningfulness without experience autonomous motivation. So it's a very strong predictor of meaningfulness. So you're just not going to get it at work. You're not going get meaningfulness at work unless you have autonomous motivation.

Which means again like very similar to the idea of autonomy is that at work am I doing things because I value them and I find them meaningful or because I enjoy them and I find them interesting? Or am I primarily doing them because I am being forced to, compelled to, because there might be a reward in it? And all of our work is going to have like a mix of all of those things.

But the more self determined or autonomous we are in our work, the greater the benefits, including the experience of meaningfulness that when I'm, when I am engaging myself, my interests, my values, that's when I feel the most meaning. So the, then the question is, you know, for organizations, how, how do we do more of that? And there's a

great quote that I love from Eisenhower. It sounds sort of manipulative, but it really is what autonomous motivation is, is how do I get you to do what I want you to do because you want to do it. And it is like, when you think about work, that's really what we're doing. Like we're all jointly trying to get this work done together. And I want to figure out what connects with you, which might be different than what connects with me,

of why I find it significant or valuable. So figuring out how to, how to squeeze that meaningfulness out of the work tailored to different people is what's going to raise, like autonomous motivation for more people and have more people experiencing meaningfulness. That we could probably have a whole conversation right there about, you know, appropriate versus inappropriate ways in which organizations can squeeze that meaning out of people. But let's park that for a second. The ethics

of the squeezing. That's right. That's right. I have lots to say about that, but I won't in this particular moment. Instead, what I'll ask is, what does autonomous support mean?

Because there's a lot of this wonderful literature around self determination theory that basically says, you know, ultimately a manager plays a huge role in helping an individual find their autonomous motivation, connect to these basic psychological needs that in some ways, if you could rewrite a job description for a manager, it would be your job is to find a way to support the autonomous motivation of your employees. So what does that actually mean? What does it look like?

A lot of the up to now, like, the research focused on how do we get autonomous motivation, like in the workplace has focused on supervisors. And so I'm going to answer your question directly. And then I also want to talk about how we can do it for ourselves because many of us don't have good managers helping that autonomous motivation. So it's not an either or. It's like we are very active participants in whether we're

experiencing autonomous motivation. And the research on how we sort of generate autonomous motivation and self determination theory, it is largely focused on leader follower relationships. It's now getting more into organizational practices, which is great because we need more than just those supervisor relationships. But there's such close relationship with our supervisors that they kind of, they create the weather, you know, within their team, within their

culture every day. There's research showing that like the relationship that has the biggest impact on any work experience, whatever you want to measure, it's our immediate supervisor. So they're really important to how we experience our work. And most of the research has focused specifically on need support. How do leaders support needs? Because we know need satisfaction is Related is a predictor

of autonomous motivation. So one thing we can do is develop our leaders to understand what the psychological needs are, including beneficence, which is a really important one in the workplace. And thankfully there's intervention studies showing we can do this, this is developable. And there's a sort of separate from needs. Needs aren't

all there is. Like when you look at the research, there's, you know, small to moderate, sometimes large relationships between need satisfaction and autonomous motivation, but it's not all that's going on. So also teaching leaders, developing leaders to understand the difference between controlled motivation and autonomous motivation.

Controlled motivation is based on, you know, a controlling style of leadership, which is what we were talking about as sort of this carrot stick approach, command and control, which is what a lot of organizations were founded on, including law firms. And it's, it's easier, right? It's sort of easier to force people to do stuff than to inspire them

to want to do it. And so it's sort of understandable that like good people, good, good leaders, good hearted leaders can fall back on that style because it's probably what was modeled to them. And it's easier than getting to know everyone and figuring out what they're motivated by. But again it's, it can harm well being and also motivation to perform. You mentioned like in the coaching context that once that, you know, the external motivator

goes away, so does the performance. Like if I'm not here threatening you anymore, you know, or offering a reward, what happens? Like your performance can fall away. So helping them understand like what autonomous autonomy, supportive leadership looks like, even teaching the needs and also just what else, what is it that you're trying to do? What you're trying to do is motivate them to want to do it based

on something that matters to them. Right? And the best way to do that is really getting to know the people that you work with, of understanding what are their values, what are their interests, what are their priorities. So many of us just think about, you know, we think everyone else is motivated for the same reasons we are. And so that's how we lead. Like, well, that would motivate me. It doesn't necessarily motivate the very diverse

people on your team. So the only way, the best way to understand how to engage in behaviors that will generate autonomous motivation is getting to know the folks and then tailoring your style, tailoring your leadership style to them so that they feel that their work is significant because it matters to

them. And I think that can sound daunting to some leaders, like let's go to my context to law firms that our partners are so overwhelmed themselves and I think there's not enough attention to their autonomous motivation and supporting their needs. Like we're not feeling filling their cups, you know, and we expect that they're going to be able to fill the cups of, of the people that,

that they're leading. So this needs, we need to have a more systemic approach when we're looking at it, but just looking at the, at the leader themselves of helping them learn things like perspective, taking structuring work in ways that people can feel effective and not incompetent and creating high quality relationships like these are behaviors that, that can be taught and is they're very practical.

They're I think some of the leadership concepts like transformational leadership and some of the others, the concepts can get too heady. It's hard to understand like pract, what am I supposed to do? And I think self determination theory helps give us that guide of need support and understand what like controlling versus non controlling looks like. That's right, yeah. What's important to your people? How do you listen? How do you help them craft their work in

alignment to the things that they care about? It's interesting as you say that because of course going back to what meaningful work is, which is work that is significant and worthwhile, really the big thing that we are asking managers to do is understand, listen to understand, ask about what might be significant and worthwhile for people and then help to create the conditions where that might be possible for them to realize within the context of the organization and

what the broader perspective is like. That's kind of the recipe for high performance. And as you say, it's a lot easier said than done. There are skills that you will never find in an MBA curriculum. And what's more, I think a lot of people have trouble even answering those questions when you just throw it to them like what's important to you? Tell me your values is not a question that we're used to answering which maybe gets to the next thing that you wanted to talk about, which is how

do we do these things for ourselves? Because that's probably an important thing for us to do if we have any hope of job crafting our way into more meaning. Yes. And one more thing I want to add because I think it's so important, I think it's one thing that lawyers need to be better at is the idea of framing like it's not only supporting psychological needs, it's framing the Work. But you know, one important job of leaders is shaping

reality. And what it means is helping the people that you're work, you work with understand its significance as it relates to you. So if we're just working, working, working, getting on to the next thing, we can miss lots of moments of significance unless we have someone stopping and shaping that reality for us and say, look what just happened. Look what you did. Let me tell you why this was important to the project, to the client. And I think lawyers are definitely

not taught to do that. Like lawyers get promoted because they're good lawyers, not because they've learned some of these good skills to be good leaders. So they don't realize that that's part of the job. No one did it for them. And it doesn't occur to them that the lawyers they're working with aren't doing that for themselves now automatically seeing the meaningfulness in it. So I think the idea of framing is also a very practical skill that can be taught that many leaders don't naturally do.

There's a social science term called implotment, which I think is like a beautiful term, which is like, how do we find the narrative, the context of our jobs? How do we think about the plot of my employment? Yes, I've never heard that term. So yes, framing and implotment sound like similar ideas. And so then turning to the idea of helping to support our own needs, which I do think is just an incredibly important point in organizations where you just don't have a lot of great leaders and so you

can't necessarily depend on that. And self determination theory, research, like it really, when we were starting on these ideas, like they were really only focused on this relational idea of both leaders. And also there's more research now about colleagues as well, about how colleagues can support each other's needs. And now more recently, there's been more of a focus on like needs crafting is one of the terms that's used.

And needs crafting is sort of just like what it sounds. It's like job crafting, but it's thinking very intentionally about what are my psychological needs and how can I proactively acquire like the resources and connections that I need to help satisfy my needs. And that requires something you mentioned earlier, which is self awareness. Like, if I don't know what my values are, what my needs are, if I haven't taken time to reflect on them,

then I'm kind of a bumper car. Like, I'm not really acting intentionally in my life in a way that's going to Help support my own needs and my own sense of meaningfulness. So that taking of time to reflect, which I think lawyers aren't fabulous at, like it's just busy, busy, busy. And I don't think lawyers are alone in that. But it's just getting your work done is in an excellent way is the main focus and not a lot of development of self awareness of but and how do I do this in a way that

is most engaging for me. And there's another big component of like the self awareness idea of a strong connection to mindfulness of if I am a bumper car every day acting in a mindless way, I am not going to be able to get my needs satisfied. I am going to be very reactive to my environment. I will behave potentially out of alignment with my values and goals because I'm just being reactive. And I'm not going to be aware on a moment to moment basis as to what are my values and

needs. And so acceptance and commitment therapy act like has this idea of psychological flexibility that I think is so aligned with this issue of everyday behaviors to help us satisfy our own needs. And the idea of psychological flexibility is just you know, in the moment being able to be mindful and not reactive so that we can pursue our goals and values in that moment. Right. Which is just exactly

what this is about. Of our ability to get to help support and satisfy our own needs really depends on that ability to take the moment, be mindful in the moment, know what our values and goals are in the moment so that we can shape our own behaviors in a way that is supportive rather than forwarding what it is that like we ultimately want and our goals and alignment with our values. So this is very. Those are very like generic concepts but I think you can like there's

exercises that come can come out of this. There's now research like on needs crafting of how you do this in a very practical, you know, worksheets with thinking about what your needs and values are. There's already like great values activities and exercises that lots of folks do. Very similar to those of just taking some time regularly to reflect on what what are my needs, what are my values? How can I get them?

What's not being met? How can I get them met better than what they are Is an important component of this idea of getting our needs satisfied. Experiencing meaningfulness that can you know, help buffer bolster us when we might not be in environments that are being very supportive all the time. I'll bet that you have some of those tools probably that you share in the role that you lead around kind of worker well being within the, within the law profession. I'm sure that, I'm sure that you have

a whole bunch. You are, you are also a queen of worksheets. And so I love my research. My worksheets. Your resources. That's right. So perhaps if you feel like it, you can send them to us and we'll put them in the show notes for this or at least a link to some of the resources that you do have to help people think about needs, crafting and other things. Wow, Anne, this was so incredibly helpful and profound and really, really interesting.

There's not a whole lot of great popular press books about self determination theory and there should be, but there is one that if folks are listening and you want, you want to understand more about self determination theory, Drive by Daniel Pink is a good place to start. He talks about kind of all the elements that we've kind of described. Although I think in some ways you do an even better job than Daniel Pink did back in the day when he wrote Drive.

I thought you were going to mention my book. And then there's your book. Then there's your book. So Ann, tell us about your book. My book is, which is coming into the second edition. It's almost, you're almost into the second edition of it now, aren't you? It is. So it's called Positive Professional. So second edition probably won't be out for six months or

more. But I am working on it. It's called Positive Professionals and it's about like high performance supporting high performance and engagement based on the science that we've been talking about. And it sets up some of what I believe are the major pillars of, of fostering engagement. Again, engagement and meaningfulness are almost synonymous. And so the, the outcome that, you know, the book is focused on is engagement and one of

the pillars is self determination theory. And one of the pillars is meaningfulness. And so I go through like some of the science and then some practical advice on how do we do this? How do we and the book is focused on like law firm lawyers of how can partners in law firms be more supportive of engagement. But the practices in the science apply outside of law and outside of the partner associate relationship.

It's really kind of any leader follower relationships. How do we do this? So that's another resource about the connection between self determination theory and meaningfulness and engagement. Is there anything else that you want listeners to know about you, Anne, or how to access you or find you if they want to connect with you and learn more about about the work that you're doing. I have a website, Aspire Legal, that is one way to connect with me and otherwise they can connect with

me through you. But I do my practice is I focus primarily in the legal profession, so especially anyone who is interested in working on these ideas within the legal profession, I'm always happy to talk to and anyone ever interested in self determination theory and meaningfulness, I'm always happy to talk to as well. My favorite topic well, thank you for. Sharing your wisdom with us. Thank you for enlightening us for making sense of a lot of very complicated

things. So thank you so much Anne for your time, your generosity, your wisdom, your expertise and the good work that you are doing for the field and for the rest of us as well. Thank you. Thanks again for having me. Andrew. 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 WWD.ca to learn more about Eudaimonic by Design. Finally, if what you heard today spoke to you, tell your colleagues and people in your community about our podcast. We really appreciate your support in making Meaningful Work matter. See you next time.