3. Mike Kearney on connecting to purpose

Show Notes

Our constantly connected society gives us greater access to what we want, when we want it. But it also comes with a price—the stronger our wifi connection, the less connected we become to ourselves and our purpose. On this episode, Jen Fisher discusses purpose and intention with Jonathan Fields, award winning writer and founder of the Good Life Project and colleague Mike Kearney, Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory partner, and host of the Resilient podcast series.

What is WorkWell?

On the WorkWell Podcast, Jen Fisher — Human Sustainability Leader at Deloitte and Editor-at-Large, Human Sustainability at Thrive Global — sits down with inspiring individuals for wide-ranging conversations about how we can develop a way of living and working built on human sustainability, starting with ourselves.

Connecting to purpose

Jen Fisher (Jen): We live in an always on, constantly connected, on-demand society. And of course, there’s some benefits to that, like having knowledge at your fingertips and greater access to what you want and when you want it, like your ability to download and listen to this podcast at any time, but it seems the stronger our Wi-Fi connection, the less connected we become to ourselves, to others, and to our purpose.
Hi, I’m Jen Fisher, Well-Being Leader for Deloitte US and your host for the WorkWell podcast series, and I’m so pleased to be here with you today to talk about all things well- being.
I’m pleased to be joined today by a friend and fellow podcast host, Mike Kearney. Mike is a Deloitte Risk and Financial Advisory Partner and host of the podcast series, Resilient.
Mike Kearney (Mike): I ended up coming to Deloitte in 1994, and I remember the first couple of years I was in our Audit practice. I am a CPA by background. So I was in our Audit practice, and I even spent time in our national office, and it wasn’t until probably about seven or eight years here where I began to figure out that there are things that I truly am aligned to for my purpose, and I didn’t talk about it like, ‘oh, this is my bigger purpose,’ but I just knew that it was really important for me to do things that made me feel good.
Jen: Mike and I are both very big fans of our other guest today. So it goes without saying that we’re both really excited to be joined by Jonathan Fields. Jonathan is an award-winning writer.
Jonathan Fields (Jonathan): People are like, I don’t know what to say yes or no to.
That’s a lie. The problem is not an inability to make decisions. The problem is we don’t know ourselves well enough to understand what to say yes or no to in a way that would actually let us invest ourselves in something that matters. It’s not inability to choose. It’s an ignorance of who we are and what matters to us.
Jen: So Jonathan, how do you define a good life?
Jonathan: Ah, such a great question, and it’s funny, so two things. One, I have learned that there is no really granular or universal answer that is right for everybody, but I look at

it as sort of a framework, and if I zoom the lens out, I look at life in general as essentially having three buckets. One, I call Vitality—that’s about optimizing your state of mind and body. The second is Connection—that’s about cultivating deep and meaningful relationships. And the third one is Contribution—that’s about doing meaningful work in the world. It may be the work you get paid for or it may not be. So for me, living a good life is being intentional about filling all three of those buckets on a persistent basis to keep them as topped off as they can possibly be, because what I’ve learned is that if anyone runs dry,
you’re busted and then there’s flow-through between those three buckets. If your Vitality bucket runs dry, your connections are going to struggle and your ability to contribute in a meaningful way is going to struggle. So it’s kind of like they will play with each other. So that’s kind of the lens that I bring to these days.
Jen: I mean you said an interesting word there “intentional.” I think so much of this is about intention because as I was listening to you and three buckets and thinking about myself, that’s hard, especially if you’re not. You have to be intentional about it in order to do that. You can’t just leave it to chance.
Jonathan: You can’t, especially these days. So I think we’re all walking around, living largely reactive lives. I coined a phrase “Reactive Life Syndrome” and I think most of us are affected by it, and I am raising my hand too. And a huge part of the reason is because a pace of life has quickened dramatically. Technology has led us to become hyper-addicted to what other people feel is important for us to pay attention to, which creates less and less room in our own lives to be intentional and to choose where to focus our energy rather than just constantly react to other people’s agendas, other people’s photo streams on Instagram or whatever app you may be using. And when you bundle through a really high rate of input and stimulation with effectively addiction to technology, if you think about it, our brain gets the same dopamine hit that it gets through drugs as it does when you feel a vibration in your pocket, and in fact, it’s not even that, simply having a phone in your pocket, research now tells us, that alone, knowing that it is in your pocket, actually pretty much massively distract you from a conversation that goes on around you, having it on a table is even worse.
Jen: I am going to say I’ve read the one about having a phone even if it’s turned over, having it on a table, the distraction that happens…
Jonathan: Yeah, because we know it’s there and our brain is constantly being like, well, it’s been almost 90 seconds, something good must be happening on my phone right now. So it’s constantly other people were feeding us what they feel is important in their lives and what they want us to see, so we react to that and react and react and react. And very often, the first action that somebody takes when we wake up is to pick up that device, and from that moment forward, the rest of the day becomes largely reactive unless you have some sort of trigger or circuit breaker to stop yourself and say, ‘okay, what a minute, does this matter to me, like what’s genuinely important in my life, and am I using my time right now to move the needle forward and something that actually matters?’ And who do you know who actually does that. I don’t do it. I tried to do it, but the reality of life is it moves really fast. Also if I think back to the very first time I got a Blackberry, the first thing I did was I called my friend who worked at a large firm and said how do I turn off the little thing on the bottom that says like reply to on Blackberry because I didn’t want anyone to know that I was accessible on a real-time basis. This is before it was just…
Jen: Yeah, so it said like sent from my Blackberry smartphone.

Jonathan: Right, exactly. I was like I don’t want anyone to know that. Now, that’s like long gone. Now, just the assumption is you will be accessible within less than 60 seconds for any interaction on a 24/7 basis.
Jen: Regardless of where you are and what device you’re on.
Jonathan: Right. So the expectation of you being reactive to somebody else’s demands has gone up dramatically too. It’s hard.
Jen: So Mike, I know he’s speaking your language here.
Mike: Alright, I am liking this.
Jen: You and I have ever had several conversations about this, and I think we talk quite often about email.
Mike: Well, it is not my favorite topic, but is definitely up there. Jonathan, you said something I totally agree with, which is basically we’re succumbing to other people’s priorities, and that’s what I look at email as. And I’m pretty thoughtful about what I do every day, like I’ve got a ritual right now that I pretty much stick too where before I go to bed, I try to think about what are the things that I really need to get done tomorrow, how does it align with that, which is important to me. And so the first thing just a couple of hacks, I actually put in my signature basically that, listen, I am human and I may not get back to you, and if you actually want to get something done with me, call me because if you call me, I will pick up, or if you text me, I will get back to you today. And I think that email has become a surrogate for like human conversation, and we were talking about even just kind of when you send a message, are there kind of things that people read into it when they receive it, and I think there absolutely is. I can tell you probably all of the biggest confrontations I’ve had invariably led back to an email that I sent where I was jumping on a plane, I needed to just get it out and somebody is like, why did you say it that way?’ It is like, that was not the intent behind it. I am constantly running experiments with that to try and find because I truly believe there is no email system, there is no productivity system, there’s no task management system that is like right for everybody. Our brains work differently, like our internal workflows. Our cognitive processes are different. So you got to find what works for you and the only way to do that is like treat yourself as N of 1. That said, I also do try and keep my inbox to one page on a pretty persistent basis, which is really hard to do, but what I found is I am a fan of simplicity and just the way the state of my working environment is the state of my internal environment, but I found is the state of my inbox also pretty much represents the state of my brain.
Jen: It is so interesting that you say that because I’m one of those people that always chasing the elusive and never attainable ‘Inbox Zero.’ And so I’ve moved off of Inbox Zero, but I have a hard time sleeping at night if there’s like more than 10 emails in my inbox.
Even if they’re opened and I know what they are and I know exactly how I am going to deal with them, the fact that they’re still sitting in my inbox, and like really I need to get those out, I need to get those out. So that’s probably some form of my own addiction to technology.
Mike: I wish I could do that. Now I am really feeling like the loser here, but how do you align that then with your priorities because one of the things I found is that I oftentimes spent so much time doing email, that then I am like, oh my gosh, that one thing or those two or three things that really matter aren’t getting done to the extent that they should. That’s my big…

Jen: I think for me sometimes it’s also an illusion because my actual inbox has 10 or less emails in it. That doesn’t account for like all the folders under my inbox that have thousands and thousands of emails, and so I just have a very intricate, probably crazy way of like filing things that still need to get done and/or responded to. They’re just not actually sitting in my actual inbox.
Jonathan: It really comes down to in small way expectation setting, and it’s funny because people sometimes… I have a somewhat public profile, so that means I also maintain certain social media profiles, but I’m pretty inactive on them and I’m pretty uninteractive on them and people often ask me why. And part of the reason is just when I make my this-is-what- matters list, that’s not real high at the top, but the other part of the reason is I learned years ago as a blogger, and so like the early days of me being online and in that world, that if I wrote something, I put something out into the world, and people started commenting on it and I felt my job was to jump in as soon as I can and respond to those comments. I immediately set the expectation that I would always be there to do that, and I couldn’t maintain that because it doesn’t scale. Once I start to get bigger and the demands got bigger, it is not scalable. And so I had to start to pull away from that and then people got upset. So now I’m sort of more intentional, going back to that word, about setting expectations about my availability for interaction, and I would rather set them pretty low and actually exceed them on occasion than set them really high and constantly let people down.
Jen: But also I think there’s… I guess do you consider and I think you answered the question, but this is probably more of a universal question, is connecting with people on social media a true connection or is true connection getting lost in that, which is kind of my fear right. We spent so much time on that believing that it’s true connection and it’s great to kind of keep up with friends or family members that you haven’t talked to on a long time to know when somebody’s birthday is if you forgot. All of those things are great, but is it really a tool for true connection or is that kind of a mistake that we’re making, kind of a false expectation.
Jonathan: I am fascinated by the work of Sherry Turkle on this, and she does a lot of psychology around screens and social interaction and empathy in particular, and what the research is showing is that empathy is actually kind of plummeting. As screen time goes up, empathy has an inverse relationship with that. So there’s no… can we show causation at this point. I haven’t seen a research that actually shows that, but they’re showing pretty robust correlation with that right now. so one of the theories is that because two things: one, you lose so much nuance with the screen and we try and approximate that through emojis and stuff like that, but we still lose so much, but also screen time is asynchronous, so how do you actually develop empathy and genuine relationships in those like split-second moments where you are face to face with somebody and you see like somebody recoil or you see something in the face or in their body, somebody gets vulnerable, but also it happens in a moment. If somebody says to you, how did it go last night on your date,
you’re not going to sit there and say, okay, what’s the best way for me to formulate a response to this… like how do I construct a sentence and which three emojis am I going to add to this, then 3 minutes later have it nailed and dialed in because it destroys the conversation, but that’s what you do. When conversations become asynchronous, all the sudden we lose those moments of vulnerability and revelation that make genuine connection so worthwhile. So I am not a luddite, none of us are. Technology is here to stay, and I think it plays a really beautiful role if you are in a region of the country or the world where you can’t find your people really easily, it’s a great way to at least get some of what you need, it’s a great way to start relationships or find groups of people who you think would be your people and start to build relationships. I’m a huge fan of even when we’ve

ran year-long programs with what we do, but what we would always try and do is we would try and get people together on the ground for two- or three-day retreat program first and fairly early in that experience because what we found and I’m curious because you guys do something sort of similar, I am really curious what your observations on this are, we found that if we get people together for a couple of days first and then even for the next year, the majority of their conversation happens virtually, the tone and the depth of that connection is profoundly changed by simply having some face-to-face time first.
Mike: You know what we did at Deloitte, which you may have heard about. We have almost the same thing called Deloitte University, we do a lot of training obviously every year, but the reason why I’m happy we did it is because people were split on this. but it’s all about creating that culture, which you cannot replace through videoconference or conference calls and you’re right because I will see people I haven’t seen in years, I will see them and that propels that relationship again to the next time that I see them.
Jen: There is actually some really intentional design in Deloitte University too. I think they call like spontaneous connection, and so it’s a long building. We didn’t build up. The guestrooms are up on floors, but the learning and all of the kind of social activities, they all take place on this, the long building, so you constantly have to walk back and forth. I think it’s a quarter of a mile, the length of the building, but it was designed that way so that everybody was kind of walking the same thoroughfare so that you would running into people that you didn’t know where they are, you hadn’t seen them in weeks or months or whenever, and you kind of get that excitement of look, , I haven’t seen you, and like hugs and excitement and whatever, but if you do learning on kind of multiple floors, you dilute some of that ability for this spontaneous connection. I always loved that language
“spontaneous connection”
Mike: And that’s a workout because that is so long that you have to walk a quarter mile to
go anywhere.
Jonathan: But that makes so much sense also. I think it sounds like you guys really pay attention to social design rather than let’s just throw people together in a place and see what happens. Let’s actually construct something and engineer interaction, engineer the physical structure even so that we make it as easy as possible for people to form those kinds of…
Jen: For me as managing director at Deloitte, whenever I go to Deloitte University, and I’ve been there hundreds of times, but walking through the door, I feel so proud because it’s like a living, breathing example of what is so amazing about our culture and the people.
Jen: So, so how did you go from law to inspiring millions of people to live their best lives.
Jonathan: Well, there are a couple of steps in the middle. Law was really the aberration for me, to be honest. I was the lemonade stand kid, I was the entrepreneur from the youngest times, and I was also deeply fascinated really by the mind-body connection and wellness and how we live our best lives.
Jen: Yet you chose to go into law.
Jonathan: Yeah, and that’s a whole different story. Nobody who knew me at that point can understand it and they’re like you’re doing what. I want to law school and I had my first business in college and I built a small business and I sold it. Then, I went to law school and I came out and I was very fortunate. I did very well, so I had a lot of opportunities. So I

spent my time in the law, but it became really clear to me that it wasn’t right for me. I literally ended up in the hospital after having a huge abscess in the middle of my body and perforating an intestine. It was a wake-up call, and I told not law in any way, shape, or form, it wasn’t my path, but that really had me reconsidering what I want to do. And that sent me back to the world of entrepreneurship and wellness. My first move was actually making $12 an hour as a personal trainer, which was probably a bigger hit to my ego than to my bank account. At that point, I was working for one of the biggest firms in midtown New York, power job, great salary, but it was killing me inside. So I wanted to go into an industry, I learned it from the ground up, which I did it. I then opened my own facility, grew that for a couple of years, sold that to an investor group, and then got fascinated by the world of yoga and ended up actually opening a yoga center in Manhattan, signed a six-year lease for floor in the building with a new home, a three-month-old baby, married the day before 9/11. That was quite an experience, and of course, my first thing as a longtime New Yorker is who do I know because we all lost people that day. And then our second thing was, am I really going to do this, am I really going to move ahead with this.
And a series of things sort of made realize I needed to do it. Thankfully, we had to change a lot of plans, but we move forward with it. We opened about eight weeks later and there was never a bigger need for health and healing in community in New York than there was then. So we flourished, and to this day, it feels weird to know that our company in some way benefited by what was happening, but at the same time, it’s deeply fulfilling to know that we served a profound need at the point of greatest pain. We were able to do that, so the business grew nicely, and seven years later, I sold the company as well and I started writing and I got interested in the online world and then I got interested in other stuff, the entrepreneurial ADD kicked in and I have kind of been dancing around the world. In 2012, we started out as a video series actually and trainings for what I would call conscious entrepreneurs and founders. And it just have grown slowly every year and every year from there until now we’re a media and education venture and we have a sizable global community, we have a podcast that is listened to by a plenty of people, and we produce all sorts of trainings, and on the side, I get to write books and speak, which is pretty cool.
Jen: And so Mike, you have a very inspiring story too. You’ve made some significant changes in your life and your career. I think Jonathan chose to leave law because he realized that wasn’t his path. I think you realized this was still your path, but you needed to make some changes in order for it to be sustainable and to live the life that you wanted to live.
Mike: I almost have a similar story because I went to college and I always thought I was going to be an Air Force pilot back to the day, Top Gun, although that was Navy, but I always thought I was going to be an Air Force pilot. And when I was a sophomore, my mom died, and I think this is where maybe I got off of kind of being driven by a purposeful life quite frankly. And so my mom passed away, and my dad was a Irish San Francisco cop, which was not the easiest person and I love them to death, but not the easiest person to deal with. And so I remember almost literally the day she died, I said I’ve got two years to get out of here and find a good job and take care of myself. And I ended up paying for a lot of my college, but I ended up coming to Deloitte in 1994, and I remember the first couple of years I was in our Audit practice. I am a CPA by background. So I was in the Audit practice and I even spent time in our national office. And it wasn’t until probably about seven or eight years here where I began to figure out that there are things that I truly am aligned to for my purpose, and I didn’t talk about it like, ‘oh, this is my bigger purpose,’ but I just knew that it was really important for me to do things that made me feel good. And if I was going to stay at the firm, I had to find things where I felt like I was making an impact, where I was valued, I was able to use my strengths, and for whatever reason, over the last

25 years, I’ve been able to find opportunities and do stuff that’s been fairly significant. That’s where we then kind of went down into purpose and I was really able to start to articulate what my purpose was, and actually now going back to just routines, I look at my purpose all the time and I really evaluate, am I doing the things that are aligned with me. If I am not, I better figure that out quickly because I am going to be miserable and I’m not going to do a good job. There’s only one other thing I want to say. I’m actually king of going through, when I told you the story earlier today, a refresh, and one of the things I believe a lot in is that if I live to 85, that’s a good life, that means I only got 40 years left, less than 40, and I remember when I was five like yesterday, and so now on the backside of my life. And so I’ve been very thoughtful about the amount of time that I have left on this earth and what does that mean, but we were in Costa Rica over the holidays, and my son and I, and I am not going to go into all the details, but we almost drowned. And for me, it was more hard because my son was involved, but it really made me think about where I am taking my life now. And one of the things I’m, not even struggling with, grappling with because I don’t want to lose it is when something like that happens, the weight of everything comes off, and I think in that 48 hours afterwards, I’ve never seen so clearly in my life like what really doesn’t matter, and quite frankly, it was most of all the crap I actually cared about or worried about. The thing I’m struggling with now though is how do I integrate that into the way that I make decisions and the things I do now because I don’t want all the weight to come back, which has slowly crept back, and so now all of the things that filter my decisions that I don’t want filtering my decisions is back. And so I guess my 2018 is going to be to figure out how I can inculcate that… I want to forget the feel in one hand, but I don’t want to forget it on the other hand because I’ve never thought so clearly, and so I think I’m going to this pivot, if you will, on what my purpose is going to be going forward, which I think is a healthy thing.
Jen: I would love to know your perspective, Jonathan, because I know that you spend a lot of time in this place of purpose and talking about purpose and researching the power of purpose, but I think the beauty of purpose is that you don’t have to decide purpose when you’re 22 and it doesn’t have to stay the same. In my own story, I had the wake-up call a few years ago that like I’m doing all these things and I’m doing really well, but I don’t know why I’m doing this. So I’d love your perspective.
Jonathan: As you mentioned, I will sort of going deep down the purpose rabbit hole for a couple of years these days and doing a lot of work, there is a lot of new stuff that will be happening over the course of this year built around that. My lens has probably evolved pretty significantly on it also. I looked for what I would call your purpose-through line, and I have surprised myself by this, and increasingly, I probably do believe that that stays consistent for pretty much your whole life. What changes is the expression of that through line is the application of it, is the way that you interact with it. So if I look a couple of years back, I had the chance to sit down with Milton Glaser who is the most iconic living designer and everybody knows his work, but a lot of people unless you’re in the field wouldn’t necessarily know who he is. And he said to me something, which really startled me at the time, which is, ‘I knew my purpose when I was five years old.’ He said, ‘I didn’t know I was going to be a designer or an illustrator or this or that,’ he said, ‘but underneath it, I knew that I wanted to make things that moved people.’ And I was like, ah, and it really started me thinking about the concept and this idea. I completely agree that very often we don’t really get a good beat on what that thing might be until we’re in our 30s or 40s because for it to reveal itself to us, we need to live enough of life, we need to bump up against enough struggle and challenge, we need to have enough experiences that reveal piece of it along the way. It’s the classic Steve Jobs’ line. You need enough dots to be able to look back and see like what is the through line that we see through them to understand. If you don’t have enough dots, it’s really hard to piece them together into some sort of articulable through

line. So to me, my lens has shifted and my sense is it’s less that sense of purpose changes over time, it’s more that we get closer and closer to discovering what the sustain through line is through experience, and it’s really hard to accelerate that process. I mentioned the word expression. A lot of the work that we’re doing now is sort of I look at as a Venn diagram with three circles. In my mind, the aspiration is I want to work in a world that lets me feel my word for it is sparked, and my definition of that is just the intersection between purpose, flow, and expression, so like identifying that understanding of what truly matters on a sustained basis, doing work that in some way allows me to go into a place where I become absorbed in the expression of that purpose of what matters, and then understanding what are the key elements of expression that allow me to go to that place where I feel fully express, so can I do work in the world that is on purpose, that drops me into this place of flow where I become absorbed in it, and I would literally pay to do the thing, and the thought of somebody paying me to do it is I feel like I am almost stealing, and then, can I do it in a way where I feel fully expressed on the level of both craft and ability and identity, and finding that sweet spot is where a lot of my focus is, and this has surprised me because I have always resisted the idea of a consistent purpose to life, but maybe the older I get and maybe the deeper I go and maybe having spent years now sitting down with hundreds of astonishingly accomplished people who are not just accomplished with their end purpose, and I think that’s probably something is important to talk about also is that a lot of people confuse accomplishment with purpose. They’re not the same. You can have both, but you can be incredibly accomplished, all that means to me is you’re really effective at going from point A to point B and checking things off of list. The purpose is why you’re going from point A to point B. Accomplishment is just a process of going from point A to point B, and we focus so much on the accomplishment side. That’s why you see so many people ending up with a stellar resume and the highest levels of industry and they hate the life that they’ve created for themselves because they are devoid of that deeper sense of purpose.
Jen: Where does self-awareness fall into purpose?
Jonathan: It’s everything. To me, that is maybe one of the biggest gaps in traditional education. I can’t understand why there isn’t a course in every MBA program and in every undergraduate degree which is a semester long, if not a year-long, on self-inquiry and self- knowledge. If you look at classics, if you look at the Greeks, everything was rooted in self- knowledge, so how do you know… so there’s decision fatigue in the world these days.
People are like I don’t know what to say yes or no. That is a lie. The problem is not an inability to make decisions. The problem is we don’t know ourselves well enough to understand what to say yes or no to in a way that would actually lead us invest ourselves in something that matters. It is not inability to choose. It is an ignorance of who we are and what matters to us. And so that’s where so much of our work has been also… my work over the last five years is developing process around that. What was so interesting is so we run a lot of founders through programming over the years and we’re certainly broadening this just to anybody in careers now, but what we’ve seen is that without fail, like we will put somebody through a program and step one is always a deep dive into the self. And somebody will come in and say my goal, I am VC-backed founder and my goal is to 10x my company. We will spend two months or so purely on self-discovery and they will emerge from that process and they will come to me and they will say I want to sell my company, but I don’t want 10x, I want to get out of it or I want to rebuild the culture in a way that’s nourishing to me and meaningful to me because what they realize for the first time is they had been so focused on product market fit and zero focused on product maker fit and they’re building something which is outwardly successful, but is simultaneously a gel of their own creation, and this started my awareness because I’m an entrepreneur is applied to

entrepreneurs, and as I broadened and look at, this has nothing to do with entrepreneurship. This is pervasive in the world of work everywhere.
Jen: I wake up every day and I live into my purpose every single day. At the end of the day, I can see the fruits of that in so many different ways. The reality is a lot of people don’t have that or don’t feel like they have that. What’s your advice for somebody that says I hear you, all of this purpose is great, but I don’t know how to align with the job that I’m doing today.
Jonathan: Yeah, and that is a huge question, especially these days. So here’s my lens on that. One of the biggest fictions is that if you don’t feel that sense of fulfillment, aligned purpose in the actual job or the role that you have right now that you need to do something big and disruptive and leave and seek it outside. You may at some point need to make that move, but that’s the last step that you take. It’s not the first and most people don’t realize, your job first and foremost is if you don’t feel it is to look at your immediate surrounding, to look at the company you’re working with, to look at your role and your job and the task and responsibility and say, okay, let’s go back to self-knowledge. First, I need to really understand myself, what matters to me, what feels me up, what empties me out on the various different levels. Then I need to look at the work that I’m doing and the culture that I’m in and the people that I’m with and the tasks and processes I do every day and I need to identify where are the conflicts between who I am, what I need, what fills me up, what empties me out, and what am I’m doing on a day-to-day basis. What most people will find when they do that is there actually is a fairly high level of alignment, but there’s one or two things that are really off. So then, what you get to do is say, okay, I am not going to blow this up because especially the further we get into life, that hurts. If you get a mortgage and a family and you want security, you don’t want to do that unless you absolutely have to. It’s like how do I redo what I’m doing right now, how do I change the way that I’m investing myself in what I’m doing now to get what I need without leaving. There’s some really interesting research around this called job crafting and what they’re showing is that in fact very often you can make shifts in the way that you’re doing what you’re doing without leaving to get that sense of purpose and fulfillment and nourishment and flow and full expression without walking out the door, but most people don’t realize that, so they don’t even try and they don’t actually do the self-knowledge work to realize that actually there is a lot of really good stuff here and there’s a couple of things where if I do a little bit differently, Adam Grant did really interesting research, and Adam is the one of the most beloved professors at Wharton, and he took a group of call center employees at the university. They’re calling to try and get people to donate money for scholarships, huge burnout, huge turnover, poor performance. What he did with them was he did a really simple intervention, super simple, and he brought in a couple of grownups who had graduated the school who have been first-generation in college and they went because of the scholarships that were raised by these people in the call center. In the month that followed that, the people in the call center felt like it changed the way they experience their work. So much so that it wasn’t just more fulfilling and more purposeful for them, but they actually raise something like twice as much money by the effort that they put in and it wasn’t intentional. They didn’t intentionally say I am going to double my effort here. They’re just having a deeper understanding of the why, like getting a deeper sense of purpose for the work that they were doing allowed them to function completely differently and allowed them to get what they needed differently. I think a lot of it is Step 1, self-knowledge. It just it all goes back to that. Step 2 is contrast that with what you’re actually doing and conflict resolution. Very often you can make small changes and it may be actually doing more than what your job description requires, which some people are like but I don’t want to do that because I am not getting paid for that, but if that’s thing that actually gives you that sense of everything, do it, and what the job crafting research is showing that when you do that, it

actually allows you to accelerate your growth within an organization a lot faster too and have much more control.
Jen: And Mike, I would love your thoughts on this too, but I think one of the great things about Deloitte and the culture and the size of the organization is if you don’t like what you’re doing, you can quite often find something else to do and still stay in the organization, but even in my own role, in my own story, I created the job that I was in because I realized that is what I was passionate about and there was a need for it in the organization. So I often tell people, look if there’s something that you’re passionate about and is going to fulfill you, start doing it. I mean if it’s good for our people it’s going to help people, and it is going to make you feel you feel better about yourself and the work that you’re doing. So, yes, it might require a little bit more of your time or energy or whatever it is that you need to give, but what you’re going to get back because that’s what fulfills you is going to be worth it times a hundred. So I tell people that and I often get emails that people say you said this and I tried it and you were right. It is not that I’m looking to be right, but this is a place that allows you to do that regardless of what your job is.
Mike: I’m so excited now to answer this question. I think it’s almost kind of the way that I’ve evolved my career. First of all, I do think the self-awareness I love how you said that and I always talk about it as my purpose, but once I really understood what my purpose was, it was actually fairly easy for me to craft a career at Deloitte, quite frankly that I love, where I’ve gotten to do so many different things. I actually was meeting with a partner candidate earlier this week, and she’s like I went into your LinkedIn page, you don’t look like an Deloitte person. You look like you work in an innovation firm, and I am like, yes, but these are the things that we do. One of the things that I counsel a lot of people and I talk about is really getting clear on what matters to you. So like if you don’t like your job, it’s all in your control and it’s not even I would say, yes, do more than what you’re doing today. I would say that for any young kid that is out there working in a consulting or another organization, always do more than what you’re asked to do, because even if that’s aligned with what you enjoy doing it, it is your purpose, you are going to get so many more opportunities. But what I also tell people is you don’t understand how many opportunities are out there. Just step back and look at all of the things that you’ve done over the last 15 years. Spend some time and write down what you want to do, and I guarantee you that there is going to be a role that either exist today or that you could create in the future that matches up with a lot of those skills. I will just give one personal example, a couple of years ago, my podcast was started in the first place, or the Deloitte Resilient podcast was started, I had this interest in how do we elevate our brand to senior executive CEOs and I had this feeling that we were not getting their insights in a way that we ultimately could by having real authentic conversations. So I literally, on the weekend, put together a little plan that said Deloitte should create a podcast series that goes off and interviews senior executives, and I had no clue as to whether or not they would buy off on it, but I put together the plan. I brought it to our CEO. He said, what the hell, let’s try it out. And so I don’t think people recognize all of those opportunities whether their existing roles or things that you can create in a firm like Deloitte. There’s many other organizations that you can do the same thing with.
Jen: What are some rituals or routines for you that help you stay on track because I know for me, I live and work in the Well-Being space, but that doesn’t mean I always get it right.
Jonathan: A couple of things, one, I am a meditator and I didn’t come to all that voluntarily, which is kind of funny to hear from a guy who owned a yoga studio and taught yoga and meditation for years and easier to thousands of people and trained hundreds of teachers. I always found that space in my head through movement for most of my life, very

often through rock climbing and mountain biking or things like that. I struggled mightily sitting to do it. But in 2010, largely in response to like a health incident that brought me to my knees and me trying to find a way to be okay, I started mindfulness practice and it’s been pretty much daily ever since then. I came to it because I have tinnitus, which means I hear a loud high-pitched sound in my head 24x7, and I was one of the percentage of people who don’t deal with it well and it was bringing me to a very dark place in my life, and there’s no cure for it. It just is what it is and doctors are like deal with it, and something like 40 to 50 million people have it, but about two or three million people process it in a way where it’s devastating to their lives. I was in that group and I wasn’t getting answer, so I turned to mindfulness while I was actually writing a book on uncertainty and studying how mindfulness allows us to process uncertainly and I said, ah, maybe there’s a way to put this together, and I took that, built on my background, and created my own practice. So for me because I have a sound that’s in my head 24x7 every day of my life, I have a signal that reminds me on a daily basis of the importance of practice for me. You have to have mechanisms to keep reconnecting with your reason why, and sometimes that needs to change and evolve and keep moving out a little bit or else it drops away. It is the same thing in business. It is like, you work for years and years to hit partner or MD or whatever it is, and then you hit it, and then very often, there is this abyss.
Jen: You don’t have to have the title of Well-Being leader to bring well-being to life at your organization. I really hope that some of what you’ve heard today can help you make well- being a priority in your personal and professional life. Thank you so much to our producers and thank you to our listeners. You can follow along with the WorkWell podcast series on deloitte.com or you can visit various podcatchers using the keyword ‘well-being’ to hear more. If you’ve a topic you would like to hear on the WorkWell by Deloitte podcast series, or maybe a story you’d like to share, reach out to me on LinkedIn. My profile is under the name Jennifer Fisher or on Twitter @jenfish23. We are always open to recommendations and feedback, and of course, if you like what you hear, please share, post, and like this podcast.
Thanks and be well.