Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris

Finding meaning and happiness in your career boils down to how you align your work with your values and passions. When we work on something that feels purposeful, it gives a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond a paycheck. How can we find a career that resonates with who we are? In this episode, I chat with Debbie Morris, the founder of Live, Learn, Serve, a career transition coaching service. We talk about how to create a happier, more meaningful work life by focusing on things like employee engagement, career growth, and aligning your values with your work. Debbie breaks down why so many people feel disconnected at work and shares tips on finding purpose, practicing self-reflection, and adopting a positive mindset. Don’t miss this conversation—it’s packed with insight! --- Listen to the podcast here: Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really new to me as I’ve experienced it myself, I know a lot of other people have experienced it, which is how do we make work a better place to be, a happier place to be, a place that you really want to be? And I often comment that hating work is kind of built into our culture, if you think about Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God it’s Friday, and I’ve often said to people that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can live a life where work is just one of the things we do along with weekends and you enjoy your weekend, you go, you dance, you party, and then you come to work on Monday and you also get to do something you love doing. To talk about how we can maybe help make that world a little bit more of a reality for more people, I would like to bring to you my guest today, Debbie Morris, the founder of Live Learn Serve career transition coaching service. --- Debbie, welcome to the program. Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Thank you. I’m excited, Well, I’m excited to talk to you about this because you’ve brought up the Gallup surveys that seem to be pretty consistently stuck with only about a third of the people in this country actually being engaged in their work, and then, globally, that number is even worse than the United States. So let’s start there. What leads to this result and this kind of stagnant result that, despite the fact that we’ve understood for so long that results in our organizations would be better if more people enjoy their job, why is it still that only a third of Americans are actually engaged in and what keeps it stagnant? Well, I think first we have to sort of deconstruct the word and the intent of engagement. So, as organizations grow and they bring folks in, they want people to be committed to their work and to find alignment with the organization’s values. So, intrinsically, they want that level of commitment and they know that if you are intrinsically motivated, that you are more likely to stay and be high performing. So, the goal is to have that level of engagement. In order to do that, though, there has to be some level of alignment so there has to be alignment to what I believe in, what that organization believes in, and I think, first and foremost, what we’ve seen lately is that, oftentimes, there is a misalignment. So, people don’t necessarily feel like they are connected and believe in the same things their organization does. So, number one, there’s misalignment. Number two, I think people have said over and over again, we hear this all the time, is that they want opportunities to grow. So, career growth, that is a type of growth, but then as we look across generations, we see growth as meaning different things. So, growth could be vertical movement within an organization, but it could just also mean I want to expand as an individual or I want to expand as a global citizen or I want to contribute to something larger. So, growth can mean a lot of different things but people depend on organizations to help them with that growth. And so when you talk about misalignment, okay, I always think of misalignment as having a couple of different or many different dimensions, actually, and so I think of misalignment of like, okay, this organization has a mission that I just don’t care about, versus this organization is a culture that just isn’t really a good fit for me or, sometimes, it’s just what your role is and that there’s a different role out there that could theoretically be better fit. And, of course, the third scenario is probably the best one or easiest one for any organization to deal with because that means that there’s a way to keep them with the company, it’s just a matter of coaching them through a transition to a new role where, hopefully, they can thrive and contribute a lot better because, as you mentioned, no one really contributes well when they don’t like their job and I feel like that two thirds or whatever number it is, depending on how you measure engagement versus commitment, people are not exactly giving the best results for their organizations. Yeah. I mean, misalignment, like you said, can mean a lot of different things. I think when we’re interviewing and we’re kind of doing that dance of determining this is the organization I’m going to be with, do you like me, do I like you, there’s a very surface level information that we’re using to make that type of decision. When people get a role and they get into an organization, you do the best that you can with the information that you have at the time. But then when you get in an organization, I think what happens is the organization then really shows you who they are. And so like any relationship, what you see and what you experience is more impactful. You hold on to that more than what is said. So, regardless of what someone says, I see you acting in a certain way and I see that this has happened to myself and my peers or this is the experience that I’ve had, you then determine, okay, so that’s really the truth. Do I like this truth? Am I compatible with this? And so there’s different levels. Like you get in there, you say, “Okay, well, this is what I heard and this is what I think it is,” and then when you get there, you’re like, “This is what it actually is. Am I comfortable with that?” The vast majority of us, I’m not going to say everyone, but most of us have relationships that last a couple months or half a year before we actually form the one that’s really going to be the one that we stick with for a quasi indefinite period of time, and I don’t want to be unrealistic about certain things, and then the same thing can happen with every time people say younger people hop jobs more often because, oftentimes, younger people are just trying to figure out, okay, what is it that I want? Am I looking at –– do I want to be in a bigger organization? Do I want to be in a smaller organization? What are these things that I didn’t think of because you can only ask so many questions at the job interview, and it sounds like what you’re saying is that these things that trip people up after they start the job are often things that people don’t specifically ask in a job interview or the things that just pop up like, okay, this is how things really work, this is what’s really valued in this organization, this is the way they expect me to show up, and it’s not something that makes me happy, per se. Yeah. I mean, you can ask. I mean, there are things that we try to ask and try to get ahead of, but there are just some things that you’re not going to know until you actually get there. And I think organizations try with behavioral models, competency models, we’ve all worked and we’ve all seen these models of how we are supposed to behave at work. The behavioral models are intended to show the how, and I think they are created with the best of intentions but the key to those behavioral models are definitely adoption and active modeling. Again, it goes back to what do I actually experience? What do I actually see? And so you can say that these are the values, and, in an interview, we can talk about those values, but when I get to an organization, do I see those leaders modeling those behaviors, and, therefore, do I see broad adoption of them? That’s really what people are looking at. And, I mean, the parallels with relationships really continue because everyone’s been on, I won’t say everyone but the vast majority of people have been on a first date, second date where they’re like, “Oh, this person is saying they’re like this, they value that, they value that,” and then something happens and you look at them and you’re like, “Oh, you just ran over someone’s dog and peaced out without notifying the owner and I don’t want to start a relationship with you.” People hate the connection of the company is the family, like the company is not your family, but the organization that you work for and you, that is definitely a relationship. I remember having this conversation with one of my leaders during the pandemic and they were just really frustrated with the polarizing views of decisions that had been made within the organization, and we just had a real conversation and I was like, “Well, look, this is a relationship and you switched up on some people, so people that had been working here for many years and had not seen that you had really taken a stance on much but now you’re taking a stance on this and this feels very different.” So, in this relationship, you’re showing up differently than you have always shown up and that’s not true. That’s not true to who you were and people are expecting a certain relationship from you. And so you have to acknowledge that you’re showing up differently, just like you’re frustrated with the other side of not accepting what you’re doing, you have to acknowledge that you’re changing and that that’s an