your job seem dull and meaningless? Morten Hansen and Dacher Keltner point the way out. Do you experience meaning at work—or just emptiness? In the United States people spend on average 35-40 hours working every week. That’s some 80,000 hours during a career—more time than you will spend with your kids, probably. Beyond the paycheck, what does work give you? Few questions could be more important. It is sad to walk through life and experience work as empty, dreadful, a chore—sapping energy out of your body and soul. Yet many employees do, as evidenced by one large-scale study showing that only 31 percent of employees felt engaged with their work. ... posted on Dec 30 2013 (38,125 reads)

following is the audio and transcript of an onbeing.org interview between Krista Tippett and Ellen Langer. ELLEN LANGER: We have these categories, work, life, and we have brains, brawn, so on. All the different distinctions that we make. We make them mindfully, and then we start to use them mindlessly, forgetting that when we’re at work, we’re people. We have the same needs we had when we were on vacation. And you should get to the point where you’re treating yourself whether you’re at work or at play in basically the same way. [music: “Seven League Boots” by Zoe Keating] KRISTA TIPPETT, HOST: Ellen Langer is a social psychologist wh... posted on Mar 28 2016 (26,608 reads)

Program, helping those released from the criminal justice system re-integrate back to society and succeed at furthering their education. The Transitions program won The John G. Rice Award for Diversity and Equity in 2012. Leyva is the author of “From Corrections to College: The Value of a Convict’s Voice.” He has spoken at universities and criminal justice conferences throughout California. I met Leyva at a fundraiser for AHA! and was struck by how much he loved his work. I asked him if he would talk to The MOON about “The Best Job in the World.”                              ... posted on Sep 3 2016 (13,961 reads)

trick to being happy with your job doesn’t necessarily lie in earning more money. We all spend a large part of our lives at our jobs. Yet how many of us are bored or frustrated at work, whether unhappy with our company’s goals, stressed from overwork, or dealing with toxic coworkers? Don’t we deserve better than that? The new book How to Be Happy at Work makes the case that, yes, we do, and happiness at work should be our ultimate goal. Written by Annie McKee—an international business advisor and senior fellow at the University of Pennsylvania’s Graduate School of Education—the book provides ideas for how to turn your job into a source ... posted on Apr 28 2018 (59,879 reads)

I was 6 years old, I began to go for an hour every day, before school had started, to work with a speech therapist who taught me to put my hand on her throat, and my throat, and then focus on matching her vibration as she would make a sound, because I had to learn how to talk. One of the things I noted right away was that when we matched vibration, I became really connected with her. It was a feeling of connection in my heart, a feeling of love that I would feel for her in those moments." Myron Eshowsky is a shamanic healer, mediator, consultant and author who was born with congenital severe hearing loss that he learnt to adapt into a skill for deep listening. He serves curre... posted on Oct 8 2018 (9,963 reads)

this year, we had the privilege of hosting a beautiful Awakin Call with Maya Soetoro-Ng, where we heard about her speak about a wide range of topics: from her expansive view of the role each of us can play in building peace, to how the Presidency of her brother, Barack Obama, as well as the divisive aftermath of the past several years, both transformed and reinforced her vision of the work of building peace. By way of brief background, Dr. Maya Soetoro-Ng, a peace educator consulting for the Obama Foundation, was director of the Institute for Peace and Conflict Resolution at the University of Hawaii. Her brother is former US President and Nobel Peace Prize winner Barack Obama... posted on Feb 24 2019 (6,090 reads)

so much knowledge there that we’ve ignored." In this in-depth interview, Dr. Suzanne Simard—the renowned scientist who discovered the “wood-wide web”—speaks about mother trees, kin recognition, and how to heal our separation from the living world. Transcript Emergence Magazine You’ve described your work as an exploration of how we can regain our respect for the wisdom and intelligence of the forest and, through that, help to heal our relationship with nature. And over the course of your career, ... posted on Aug 16 2021 (7,492 reads)

the realms of both conventional medicine, and what we might call alternative healing, and in ancient wisdom traditions, and modern spiritual practices. I first met Lissa about 10 years ago in the living room of a mutual and very dear mentor and friend, Dr. Rachel Naomi Remen, who has been a true pioneer and inspiration for an integrative health movement, someone who has widened the path that Lissa and I have walked. I just wanna take this moment to recognize her and all those who have done work in healing the earth, healing ourselves, expanding science, spreading wisdom and love on all sides of the bedside, so to speak, because we're really all learning and growing and healing toget... posted on Aug 28 2023 (3,815 reads)

Means Relying on Everyone's Creativity Leader to Leader, Spring 2001 Innovation has always been a primary challenge of leadership. Today we live in an era of such rapid change and evolution that leaders must work constantly to develop the capacity for continuous change and frequent adaptation, while ensuring that identity and values remain constant. They must recognize people's innate capacity to adapt and create-to innovate. In my own work I am always constantly and happily surprised by how impossible it is to extinguish the human spirit. People who had been given up for dead in their organizations, once conditions change and they ... posted on Feb 26 2018 (12,379 reads)

louder. This new voice urged him to connect with the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation, where he became intimately acquainted with the Native American inhabitants. What happened next, was a deep relationship with a community silenced by injustice. This caused Kevin to evolve a new voice that changed his life and his style of leadership forever.   “Strengthen the voices of others; practice restraint; learn the ways of shared leadership through nature; take care of your employees; work should enhance the evolution of the soul.” Kevin shares these principles and more in this interview. He offers us ways to illuminate the authentic voices in all beings, as we create wor... posted on Nov 6 2018 (6,056 reads)

following is a transcript of an interview between Krista Tippett and Maira Kalman syndicated from On Being. Krista Tippett, host:“The subject of my work,” Maira Kalman says, is “the normal, daily things that people fall in love with.” She is a visual storyteller, and to be in conversation with her is a little like wandering into one of the cartoons you might see in The New Yorker and which she might have drawn. Millions of us have been prompted to smile and think by Maira Kalman’s work in a museum or the recent illustrated revision of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style or a New York Times blog or her lovel... posted on Feb 14 2019 (6,794 reads)

left her career as a nurse practitioner she went on to become an ordained priest in the Episcopal Church. Her ministry was in the sub-arctic region of northern Manitoba where she served three villages of the Cree people. She had gone there newly married to a Roman Catholic priest who had given up his orders and had been received as a priest in the Episcopal Church. Woven into the fabric of all this, besides her nursing credentials, Sullivan earned two Masters degrees and even did some work toward an MFA. Her education thus spans medicine, theology, cultural anthropology and art. Besides having done university teaching, she is the coauthor, with Sam Gill, of the Dictionary of Native... posted on Mar 17 2016 (13,664 reads)

Oliver on Time, Concentration, the Artist’s Task, and the Central Commitment of the Creative Life. “The most regretful people on earth are those who felt the call to creative work, who felt their own creative power restive and uprising, and gave to it neither power nor time.” “In the wholeheartedness of concentration,” the poet Jane Hirshfield wrote in her beautiful inquiry into the effortless effort of creativity, “world and self begin to cohere. With that state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty... posted on Apr 23 2018 (14,131 reads)

with refugee communities both here in the United States as well as in some of the most ravaged pockets of our world.  For many years she directed programs for refugees and immigrants, including the resettlement of the Lost Boys of Sudan at Catholic Charities in San Jose. She describes her leap into the refugee universe in her breathtaking book, This Flowing Towards Me:  A Story of God Arriving in Strangers. The heart of the Scripture come glowingly to life in the words, works, and the world of Sister Marilyn. She and her team have grappled with the question of what it means to welcome the stranger, to see the Divine in the displaced, and to walk beside and witness th... posted on May 6 2021 (3,663 reads)

has now become the largest plant-based environmental advocacy organization in the world. This came out of an experience Milo had when he was young, growing up in rural Ohio, where a teacher brought in a baby piglet for dissection. That baby piglet was not fully dead and he saw it recklessly thrown against the floor in standard factory farming practices to kill it. He wanted to press charges around that treatment of the animal.  Seeing that the legal system would not support him and that work, he resolved to do something, and that became Mercy for Animals. Over the last 20 years, that organization has become an important group to assist in the move away from factory farming and the wo... posted on Dec 5 2019 (5,132 reads)

they? DG: Emotions are the brains way of making us pay attention to and act quickly on something that the brains radar for threat thinks is extremely important. Or the brains circuitry for motivation thinks is extremely important. So, our worst emotions, the ones that make us do things we might regret later, like anger or panic are signs that the brain’s radar for threat, which is called the amygdala has detected something that it thinks is going to harm us in some way. This design worked very well when the brain was being designed by nature, in human prehistory when we lived on the savanna, the jungle, and really sucks now that we live in a complex social reality. So, we have t... posted on Jun 28 2021 (5,794 reads)

do Michelle Obama, Bruce Springsteen and Sheryl Sandberg have in common? According to a new book by Stewart D. Friedman, founding director of the Wharton Work/Life Integration Project and a practice professor of management, each has developed the skills to integrate their life and work successfully. In Leading the Life You Want, Friedman profiles six people who he says embody these necessary skills – being real, being whole, and being innovative – and helps readers to begin to apply these skills and strategies in their own lives. Recently, Jeffrey Klein, executive director of the Wharton Leadership Program, sat down with Friedman to discuss why the phrase “work-life... posted on Dec 23 2014 (25,412 reads)

of the first chapter in The Courage to Teach: Exploring the Inner Landscape of a Teacher’s Life (Jossey-Bass, 2007) by Parker J. Palmer. We Teach Who We Are I am a teacher at heart, and there are moments in the classroom when I can hardly hold the joy. When my students and I discover uncharted territory to explore, when the pathway out of a thicket opens up before us, when our experience is illumined by the lightning-life of the mind—then teaching is the finest work I know. But at other moments, the classroom is so lifeless or painful or confused—and I am so powerless to do anything about it that my claim to be a teacher seems a transparent sham. Then... posted on Oct 3 2016 (37,087 reads)

state comes an enlarging: of what may be known, what may be felt, what may be done.” But concentration is indeed a difficult art, art’s art, and its difficulty lies in the constant conciliation of the dissonance between self and world — a difficulty hardly singular to the particular conditions of our time. Two hundred years before social media, the great French artist Eugène Delacroix lamented the necessary torment of avoiding social distractions in creative work; a century and a half later, Agnes Martin admonished aspiring artists to exercise discernment in the interruptions they allow, or else corrupt the mental, emotional, and spiritual privacy wh... posted on Oct 23 2016 (19,157 reads)

the impact of unwanted effects rather than the planned results that didn't materialize. Instead of enjoying the fruits of a redesigned production unit, the leader must manage the hostility and broken relationships created by the redesign. Instead of glorying in the new efficiencies produced by restructuring, the leader must face a burned out and demoralized group of survivors. Instead of basking in a soaring stock price after a merger, leaders must scramble frantically to get people to work together peaceably, let alone effectively. In the search to understand so much failure, a lot of blame gets assigned. One healthcare executive recently commented that: "We're under... posted on Apr 11 2018 (14,271 reads)