Over the past 18 years, she's coached over 1,800 leaders and delivered talks to over 115,000 people across 45 countries. Her unique strategies for career fulfillment were born from her own misery at work, imposter syndrome, people pleasing, and overdosing on Nutella.
Even though technology is making some things easier, life seems harder. With escalating environmental disasters, economic and political instability, social injustice, mass shootings, extremism, hate crimes, and loneliness, it’s challenging to focus on what’s right when everything feels so wrong. Even if you’re lucky and your small patch on this earth is safe, the people in your life are healthy, and your needs are covered, it’s still tough to escape existential worry. That’s because we’re all interconnected. We mourn when others mourn, even if they’re thousands of miles away, even when they are strangers, even when they are different. We know this on a cellular level. But just enough stress, distance, and busyness causes us to forget how together we are.
If we can be brought down by the unraveling of the world, we can also be lifted up, even by just one person. That’s why this inner work building your inner skills is vital. It’s not just about you or me but about all of us. The beauty of our humanness is that we’re designed to share. Without conscious effort, our nervous systems automatically know to work together, to co-regulate, and help us arrive at homeostasis, a balanced state. We need each other’s care, not only to cope but also to live and be happy. The quality of our relationships is the biggest predictor of our happiness. In the face of artificial intelligence, our connection to ourselves and each other becomes the authentic knowingness we can harness and further develop. Our human beingness is a sacred asset. When we do this work, we uplift each other.
If you’ve been feeling squashed by the weight of the world, check your posture. When you get into alignment with yourself—by using your values, striving for your vision, maintaining healthy boundaries, staying light in the midst of uncertainty, exploring possibilities rather than contracting, opening to understand rather than judging—you automatically relieve your load. Because we’re interlocked, we naturally shoulder things together. Someone makes pizzas, someone sells stationery, someone fixes dishwashers, someone cares for babies, someone organizes volunteers to build a playground, someone invents biodegradable plastic, someone heals wounds, someone grows cucumbers, someone writes laws. We’re designed to work happier and live better together.
When you practice your inner skills and feel more fulfilled, it transcends your experience and cascades to those around you. It spontaneously affects how you greet a stranger in the elevator, how you phrase an email to your client, how you show interest in a child’s story, how you have compassion for a friend, and how you forgive a loved one. When we we have strong inner skills, it’s easier to participate in the abundance of all the good things that matter. I once heard someone say, “When you find your piece in the puzzle, you enable ten thousand others to find theirs.” The by-product of enhancing your inner skills is actually the end product you’ve been seeking all along: true fulfillment.
Fulfillment, or meaningful success, comes from contributing beyond ourselves and belonging to something bigger. It’s not about us feeling better alone. Yes, the Work Happiness Method is about elevating yourself, but for the sake of us all. We can’t help the world and be on purpose by abandoning ourselves; we each have to dip into our own aliveness first and let that source the rest. How wonderful that we’re entrenched in a system of abundant flourishing . . . if we choose it. If we take responsibility for it.
This was republished with permission from the author. For more on her book, The Work Happiness Method: Master the 8 Skills to Career Fulfillment, click here: http://stellagrizont.com/.
