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The picture was coming into focus. The majority of us believe that feeling worthy matters, but about half of us sometimes, often, or always struggle to feel worthy. I am among that half. We believe that we are seen as a person by our bosses, but want more value placed on our intrinsic human worth. We want to bring our authentic selves to work but many of us feel the need to check parts of ourselves at the door. And finally, we want to be safe to be vulnerable at work, but many of us do not currently feel safe to do so. Maybe, my research team and I realized, we really did have a worthiness gap in the workplace, an experience that is in need of elevating.
How to Elevate the Human Experience
This book begins with Foundations, in which I introduce the four topics that are foundational to the journey of elevating the human experience through love and worth. We start with Chapter 1, “Work.” I begin by sharing my own personal journey at work so that you might understand my lived experience as a White woman, which may be different from your own. I explore the beginnings of what we have understood work to be as a way of making ourselves while we make our work. I then lay out the five ways in which work has become distorted—lacking love and intrinsic worth. Chapter 1 ends with a discussion of the rise of efforts of diversity, equity, inclusion, wellness, and purpose to restore love and worth to work. In Chapter 2 I define love and explore the reasons why we need to be willing to learn to feel if we want to experience love. In Chapter 3 I define the differences between extrinsic worth and intrinsic worth, and share the data on what we learned about worth at work. introduce the idea of the worthiness gap—the gap between how much it matters to feel worthy and how much we struggle to do so. Chapter 3 ends with an exploration of the connection between worth and success, as well as worth and self-care. In the final foundational chapter, Chapter 4, I discuss the ways in which all humans suffer, and therefore all humans are in need of having their experience elevated.
Next I introduce the First Path, the self. The first path of the journey is a deeply personal one. The path is inward, where we learn to love ourself and recognize our own fundamental human worth. It is important for two reasons: First of all, learning to love ourselves and recognize our worth is fundamental to our being. Full Stop. Secondly, at work, we may encounter obstacles that will regularly challenge our intrinsic worthiness. And if we show up feeling unworthy at work, we act out of it to the detriment of ourselves and others. In Chapter 5, I define self-love and self-worth and share some of the history of self-love, as well as how I discovered to love myself. I then investigate some of the surprising things we learned in our research about how different people of different backgrounds and identities learn to experience self-love in the face of an inhospitable society. In Chapter 6, I explore the ways in which we can cultivate self-love and self-worth by accepting ourselves “in our being,” with our words and with our actions. Chapter 7 acknowledges all of the obstacles we will face on the path, including the obstacles from ourselves, from another in our lives, and from the communities of which we are a part.
The Second Path is about the journey to loving and recognizing the worthiness of “Another” in our lives. We shift the lens from cultivating love and worth for ourselves to focusing on how we can cultivate love and worth for another person in our lives. Chapter 8 begins by exploring the connections we seek to other individuals, and how these connections bring us meaning. I then introduce the idea of “mirrored worth,” which is when another person perceives in us worth that is as high or higher than how we perceive our own worth.
Chapter 8 ends with a discussion of the four types of allies we can be for each other in our journey to growing in love and worth: a friend, a mentor, a sponsor, and a benefactor. We become a better ally when we consciously and intentionally give our support, our voice, our power, or all three to another. We reach out. We speak up. We show up. Chapter 9 introduces the ways we can cultivate love and worth for another by accepting them “in their being,” with our words and in our actions. Chapter 10 concludes the second path with a discussion of the obstacles we may face on the journey.
The Third Path is the path of learning to love and recognize the worth of others whom we meet at work every day. It is about challenging and changing the systems that would tell us—and have told us for a very long time—that there are those who are not worthy or loveable. It is the path of becoming better at loving those in our communities of work who find themselves systematically marginalized, unseen, and unrepresented just for being. For being female. For being Black, Brown, or Asian. For being gay or transgender. For being too old or too young. For being a person with a disability. For being any of these intersections. For those of us wrestling with what it means to be privileged White, privileged male, or both, at a time when the systems that were designed to serve Whiteness and maleness are badly in need of redesigning to recognize love and worth. This third path is of critical importance if we are going to create places of work where we can all show up as our whole worthy selves, recognizing what we value as humans, acknowledging the need for emotional connection, and building trust. On this path, I draw on my specific lived experiences as a management consultant first at the Monitor Group and then as a partner in Deloitte. In Chapter 11 I explain how we do the work collectively of elevating the human experience for each other at work. Chapter 12 is about cultivating love and worth at work. I introduce the research and work we did to learn to see and acknowledge our colleagues' worth at work. Chapter 13, similar to the earlier paths, ends with a discussion of the obstacles we may face on the journey.
I then end with Resources, which you can find in Chapters 14 and 15, where I introduce the tools and the capabilities we may need on the journey of each of these three paths. The tools include ways of better understanding the role of values, emotions, and trust, all central to elevating the human experience. The capabilities include empathy, courage, integrity, and grace.
I offer this book as an inspiration and as a guide on the path of your journey to making your experience of being human just a little bit better, to feel more loved and more worthy at work. The three paths are very much a personal journey. Please use this book as a guide to refer to the foundations, the paths, and the resources that might help you along the way. My own journey is far from done. But like a guide who has been up and down a mountain before, I hope to point out an easier path for you to get to the summit faster and with greater ease than I ever did. And then to do it again.
Chapter 1 Work
Your work is to discover your work and then with all your heart to give yourself to it.
—Buddha
A Personal History of Work
As a single parent, my mother worked as a teacher at the Catholic school my brother and I attended so that she could keep the same schedule as we did. She taught me sixth-grade science and math. I remember thinking how ironic it was that she would help me with my science terrarium at night
