Positive psychology expert Jodi Wellman spent 17 years as an executive leader when she realized that reaching the pinnacle of success wasn’t bringing her any happiness.
“I, like a lot of people, am achievement-oriented. I tied my sense of self-worth to what I was doing, how much I produced, the name on my business card, and I felt like I was stuck on the trappings of success, especially It was at the end of my corporate career,” Wellman told CNBC Make It.
Wellman recently founded wellness platform four thousand mondays and wrote this book “You only die once.” She previously held senior executive positions at companies such as Canadian Sports Club and Bally Total Fitness.
Despite being in an enviable position of success, she felt she had hit a dead end in her last corporate role as senior operating president of Bally Total Fitness.
“I’ve probably reached the end of what I can do in this company, my glass ceiling,” she said. “I didn’t get a chance to do anything more. I had reached such a peak by then.”
Wellman said feelings of hopelessness and fear were heightened as her entire identity depended on her career.
She realized that she had placed all her hopes on finding meaning through her work and had neglected other aspects of her life.
“What if work was just part of your wonderful life?”
One way to find meaning is to distract from work and prioritize life outside of work.
“What if work was just part of your wonderful life?” Wellman said. “That’s what we need, we need to make more of an effort to build lives outside of work that make us happy and deliver meaning.”
She explains that people don’t have much agency at work, with most tasks and responsibilities falling on them.
Instead, they can use this power in their lives outside of work, where they can intentionally choose and curate the activities they do to lead to “a stronger sense of well-being.”
This might include starting a new hobby, taking a fitness class, volunteering, or signing up for a class.
This relieves the pressure to find meaning and happiness solely through work life.
“The world is not big enough for all of us to change it”
There is a cultural expectation that work is a “universal delivery system” for achieving purpose and meaning in life, but that’s not the case, Wellman said.
“Many of us are chasing the impossible. So we embark on this journey to try to find a job that lights us up, uses all our talents, makes us feel like we’re contributing to the world, and can Get paid to work.
She explains that the pressure most people face to achieve “big, ambitious, world-changing” goals through their careers causes them to neglect their lives outside of work.
“The world isn’t big enough for all of us to change it,” Wellman said, adding that people need to focus on changing their own world and extract meaning from the lives around them.
Wellman said she interviewed a highly successful woman while writing her book who discovered that her purpose in life was to lift people’s spirits when they talked to her.
Another person she spoke to said he wanted to be the best uncle there because he didn’t have children of his own and his job was ordinary.
“This is a more localized version that is more accessible to most of us and dare I even say more impactful?” she added.
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