When you experience it, it changes everything. How you feel, how you perform, the effect you have on others around you.
Dan Cable, Professor of Organizational Behavior, shares his research about it in Alive at Work. Martin Seligman, who founded positive psychology and the formal study of what makes us thrive, calls it “zest, a positive trait reflecting a person’s approach to life with anticipation, energy, and excitement.”
“Companies need the contributing vitality of all the individuals who work for them to stay alive in the sea of changeability in which they find themselves.”
I like that phrase: “contributing vitality.” For me, it captures the positive exchanges, relationships, and mindsets that are required for a healthy workplace and a healthy life.
Recently, thousands of women in Working Out Loud Circles (“WOL Frauenstärken”) all had their final meeting, and my feeds and inboxes were filled with “contributing vitality.” Self-confidence. Self-determination. Gratitude. Camaraderie. Joy.
Companies need people to be their best selves. The giving and receiving, the connection and meaning, make us feel a part of something, make us feel alive. How we accomplish this may be different for each of us. But we all deserve the opportunity to experience it.
Studs Terkel describes it as a “search” in Working, which he wrote fifty years ago and is still apt today.
“Work is about a search for daily meaning as much as daily bread, for recognition as well as cash, for astonishment rather than torpor; in short, for a sort of life rather than a Monday through Friday sort of dying.”
How is work for you? How could you create more “contributing vitality” for yourself and others?
A few of the thousands of people experiencing “contributing vitality” in a WOL Circle.
