The Mattering Effect | How to Create a Life of Meaning with John Miles

24:47Do you think we need to start making? And it kind of gets into that Ted Lasso. When Ted is initially talking to the kit person, you need to start taking some of the ideas from the lowest people in the organization and implementing them so that they see that you're going to take their ideas and put them into practice. Because once you start doing that, they believe in you more. And then as often as I possibly could, I got in front of them and I talked to them about the difference that they were making, the changes that we were doing, the impact that they were making. And I started telling them stories.

25:25Like the fact that you were able to catch this issue on lowes.com enabled us to fulfill orders for a thousand people who would not have been able to receive that order had it not been for you. And I talked about their grandmother visiting the store and family members and this and that. And I related it so that they could see the actual impact that they were making. And that was the start of it. And then that allowed me to implement a lot of the strategic initiatives that we wanted to because they believed in me. And then from there, 18 months later to 20 months later, we went from the lowest on the engagement survey to the second highest in the entire company.

26:10Heather Monahan:How long did it take you to build that trust with them? Man, the thing is, is that the trust seems like it happens so slowly, but it really happened much quicker than I even expected. That initial getting the signal back took about six months. The first weeks were really hard because they kind of look at you and think you're just the next person that the company is bringing in. But when you start sending the signals back to people that they matter, that they're valued, and that they could say something to you, even very critical. I had an open door policy and it was a true open door policy. I would let people come in and tell me if I screwed up or give me advice if I said something that they didn't agree with.

26:57And when they saw that not only would I listen, but I would get in front of hundreds of people and tell them that, you know, Giles came into my office the other day and told me this fact about what I'm doing. and he was completely right. And so I'm not going to do that anymore. It showed them that I wasn't this person on their high horse. I was actually human like they were. And it really got them to believe in me. And then they also saw me, and this is something I learned from one of my favorite military leaders, that I would defend them, even if sometimes they were wrong. It didn't matter. If I were talking to my boss, one of my peers, and I had their backs and I would defend them to the end of the day.

27:44That might meant I would close the door on them and say, what the hell were you thinking? Don't ever do this again. But out in public, they knew I had their back. And so it made them have the confidence that even if they screwed up, that someone believed in them and would defend them.

28:04Heather Monahan:I love that. And that's such a sign of a great leader. Okay. So you brought up something interesting for that I want to address. I actually currently I'm coaching a COO of a six billion dollar organization, thousands of employees. And like you, he prides himself on having an open door. However, John, one of the things that we've been talking a lot about working on is he's so accessible, his calendar gets away from him and he's not able to manage things that are really important, bigger objectives, huge things that need to be handled. How can you find a balance of having that open door because you want people to know you're there to listen, but still being able to deliver on the work that you have?

28:44Well, there are two things that have really guided me for years. One of them is Stephen Covey's principle of keeping the main thing, the main thing. And to me, the main thing in my life is God. So ultimately, that is the main thing. But when it comes to a work environment, I use it in conjunction with the Eisenhower quadrant. So I am very much Eisenhower quadrant for people who aren't familiar with it is he had two accesses, important versus urgent, and then you have to prioritize against them. So is what's happening to you both important and urgent? If it's not, it goes into a lower quadrant.

29:29So what I set my calendar up to do is I put it in blocks where I needed to keep the main thing, the main thing. And I put those blocks first thing in my day. And I put blocks for time that people could do office hours with me later in the day, where my energy was a little bit lower, where I had gotten the most important things I needed to get done during the day. So I freed up my schedule to allow that to happen. But it also, I would change it if I would get some kind of free word on why the person was coming to talk to me, which often before someone shows up, you get it anonymously or someone will tell you, hey, I think Jim's going to or Heather's going to come and talk to you.

30:15So that also gives you an inkling of what they're going to talk about and its importance. But if you don't set that up, you do put yourself in a situation where you're going to have a lot of people talking to you about things that, while they may be important, aren't necessarily the most important thing that you need to be focused on and they're not the most urgent thing that you need to be focused on. So that's what I used as a way to manage my time throughout my career.

30:43Heather Monahan:I love that strategy and I was not familiar with it. So thank you for explaining it. I'd love learning something new. Okay, so I want to get into your new book, The Mattering Effect. And for someone who's had such a disciplined career, military background, massive businesses in corporate America, it seems almost a little off brand to be writing The Mattering Effect. Why did you go this route instead of doing, I don't know, a next how to improve company culture or drive bottom line results? What was that change for you to focus so much on mattering? Heather, I know you're a spiritual person. And as you can tell, I am too.

31:23Many of our friends, familiar friends are as well. Well, I grew up Catholic, and when I was in my early to mid-30s, I took this course at a Methodist church called Discipleship One, and it is one of the most challenging courses I've ever taken. It's 36 weeks long. We met with our pastor twice a week for three to four hours in the evening, and it was brutal, and we went through the entire Bible in 36 weeks in detail. Well, during that time, I started to get this mission that the subliminal message at first, and then it got louder, that the path that I was on doing all the wonderful things I was in corporate America was not the path that I was destined to do in God's eye.

32:10And the words I was given is that you were supposed to help the lonely, broken, disengaged, battered, helpless, hopeless of the world. And I have to tell you, Heather, I had no idea what to do with this. At the time, I'm leading application development, and you asked what a CDO is, chief data officer. They now call it the chief data and AI officer. So I'm doing those types of things. I have no idea what I'm supposed to do to help someone who's lonely or helpless or hopeless. But it started to get me to ask questions. And the question I came up with was, all these things seem to be so far removed from one each other.

32:52What does loneliness and being burned out and employee disengagement have to do with one another? And so I started asking the harder question, you know, what is sitting underneath all of this? And I recently was having a conversation with social scientist Arthur Brooks, if your audience is familiar with him. And he told me that the happiest people feel needed, not merely successful, meaning achievement can satisfy ambition while doing remarkably little to satisfy our own need for significance. And I started to wonder, like, I'm big on this whole idea that's a John Gordon thing, that you have to find the one word problem that you're called to solve.

33:38And so I'm like, there has to be a one word problem that's driving all these different things. And I discovered that it's unmattering. And I've added systemic unmattering. But what I discovered is that all of these things that are these epidemics that are plaguing so many of us are rooted, they're really symptoms of something larger, and that's this unmattering. And what I found is that so many of us are living in what I call the mattering gap, which is the distance between what you're giving to the world and the degree to which you feel valued. And when you live inside that gap too long, you start paying the mattering tax, meaning you're trying to close that gap.

34:29But what you feel instead is anxiety, exhaustion, overwork, self-editing, loneliness, because you're not connecting in the way that you feel like you should, that come from constantly trying to prove you deserve, you matter. And so all of that connects to something larger, which is what I call the mattering market. We've created environments, whether that's our family environment, our school environments, our work environments, the communities that we're in, even consumerism, that are very good at asking people to add value while giving them very little evidence that they themselves are valued.

35:11And that, to me, was the foundation of doing all the work that I'm doing because it plays a direct role in creating a culture where people feel like they matter at work, at joining a community where they feel like they belong, etc. So the gap is what you feel. The tax is what you spend your time trying to compensate for it.

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38:34Heather Monahan:If meetings are eating up your day, Granola is a no-brainer. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash confidence. that's granola.ai slash confidence to get your time back try it for free at granola.ai slash confidence i ask you to try to find your passion john while you're explaining that what pops into my head is this when i was back in corporate america chief revenue officer and on the outside it looked like this girl's killing it you know she's making a lot of money she's getting all these accolades. But I remember I, as a single mother and I had a little boy, I would volunteer for a charity at nights and on the weekends because I didn't feel like, I didn't feel like I was getting that, that sense of significance that you're talking about right now.

39:23Heather Monahan:I was making rich people richer with our shareholders and that was great. And I was proud of the job I did, but I wanted to have more of a purpose somehow. Then cut to now as my son just left to go to college, now I'm having the same kind of reinvention moment again, where do I really matter? And am I fulfilling a purpose? Because one of the things that I focused on so much, so, you know, has gone to a different phase. What are some of the advice and or what the frameworks from the book that you work with people going through these moments where they are disconnected or not feeling like they matter?

40:04Yeah. So the first thing is, is I, I spend a short period of time in the whole book on outlining the problem because I think more people, I think a lot of, a lot of people now are kind of starting to understand what the problem is. What I haven't seen anyone really do is give the solution to it. So the first three chapters really outline, how did we get here? The rest of the book goes into something that I call the Matter Framework. And the Matter Framework consists of six conditions. And I spent really a decade studying this. So I've talked to everyone from the Dalai Lama to Jon Kabat-Zinn to Nobel Prize winners to professional athletes.

40:48I tried to get a full circumference of what was happening to come up with this answer. And what I found was that there are these six conditions that happen to match the word matter, that when they're there, we feel valued and we receive value. And when they're not there, we lose it. So M stands for meaning. A is autonomy. T is time. The other T is trust. E is energy and R is reciprocity. So let me just go through this and how they build on each other. Meaning is, is my life really connected to something that matters to me? Autonomy, and this really plays an important role, especially with the advent of AI.

41:39Do I feel like I have authorship over my life, or do I feel conditional in it where other people are driving my life? Trust really gets into the work of Amy Edmondson in psychological safety. can I myself be honest and unfinished? Can I live my life as I actually am? Or do I feel like I have to pretend in the rooms that I'm showing up in? Time really gets into do I have enough unhurried space kind of gets back to that importance urgent matrix to actually experience my life and the relationships that matter to me. Energy gets into this concept of return on energy is my life replenishing me or only extracting from me?

42:26And then reciprocity, I like to get people to think of a metaphor of a seesaw. Does care flow both ways on that seesaw, or is it rising in one direction and the other is not receiving it? So I introduced the matter framework, and then I then go into how do you build this back first using yourself as the compass, because I think mattering is really the foundation, our human operating system. And then once you do it for yourself personally, then how do you build it back into your family situations? How do you build it back into your intimate relationships or your relationships with friends, into your work environments and into your community?

43:11Heather Monahan:Are there elements of the framework that you see universally across these thousands of interviews that you've done in all of this research? Is there one thing that matters more than the other? or is it a function of how they work together? It's really a function of how they work together, but there is an important point. Like if you don't have meaning, if you don't understand what matters most, then it's gonna be very difficult to have autonomy over figuring out how to move that if you don't have meaning in your life. So there is an element to them being united, but there are certain components of this that you just have to have or the rest of it's going to topple down.

43:57Heather Monahan:Don't you think that so many people, I mean, I guess I'll probably even put my younger self in this base camp. I would have never even picked my head up long enough to think about finding meaning. I was just trying to find my next paycheck, get through that next day, find a way to get back in a routine that made sense and find some happiness. Yes. So often people are in, when you're in the rut, when you're in it, it's hard to pick your head up and say, I need to be smart about this and take a look at bigger things. Yeah, I talked earlier about the questions that I ask myself, and I think there are some important ones that your audience needs to ask.

44:34Like in the book, I define something that I call the mattering needs pyramid, and it has four different levels, but they all revolve around different questions that I think are fundamental to any of us. The first question, which really gets to the meaning element is, who am I? The second question is, where do I fit? What do I want now? And how do I want to feel that come back to me? And then what happens when my old identity no longer fits based on where my life is? And so what I'm really trying to help people understand is why achievement doesn't answer those questions and why we need to come back to ourself and that human operating system to really understand that internal belief that you're not going to matter to someone else and feel it come back to you if you don't feel like you matter to yourself.

45:29And that's where this starts and ends is in personal mattering. There can be no relational mattering and no emotional mattering until personal mattering is felt. And I think for so many of us, myself included, that's where it started for me. Because when God gave me that mission, the hardest thing that I had to come to the realization was that I was one of the very people that he was asking to serve. I myself was broken. I myself had become burned out. At one point, I was so numb that it took my son, who was probably eight or nine years old at the time, to say to me, Dad, why do you never laugh anymore?

46:16To really come to the realization, the wake-up call, that at the time I was at Dell and I would come off these 100-hour weeks, half of which was spent overseas dealing with issues. and I'd walk into that conference room. And as I told you, when you and I were, when I was interviewing you, I had this president who just made my life miserable. So I was doing all this work and I felt half the time, like what mattered more, the chair that I'm sitting in or me? And then to have my son, who I cared the most for, told me, dad, you're not even showing up in the house. Like, where are you? I think that is happening to so many people.

47:01And it was a huge wake-up call for me. So it really showed me that this is something that is huge, that is plaguing, I think, hundreds of millions of people and has become one of the largest epidemics that is plaguing humanity, regardless of where you may be sitting today, listening to this.

47:20Heather Monahan:So for people listening right now, who did you write the book for? Because I'm seeing it right now as so many versions of myself along my own life, different versions of myself, different challenges, different moments of burnout, whether it could be you're going through divorce and questioning things, whether you're in a job that isn't bringing you joy, whether you're not creating time for things that truly matter to you, relationship with God, your children, your health, yourself. Who did you really write this book for? I'm glad you asked that. One of these is the person who feels like success is the thing that is finally going to bring him fulfillment, because I can guarantee you it never will.

48:02And one of these is the burned out people. This could be the doctor who keeps giving and giving and giving and never gets anything in return. But this is also for the spouse who gives to their children, gives to the family, gives to the husband, asks for very little in return, but is not getting that reciprocity back to them. It's also for the older generation who, I write an example where a person is coming up to a person that I interviewed in a crosswalk, and she's in her late 70s, and she feels like an object that people barely see because of where she is in her life state. And so she feels very lonely because they don't see the previous 70 years in the life.

48:55All they're seeing is this obstacle that needs to be avoided, not the person who they were. And it's for the youngsters today who are spending so much time with these filters and other things that social media is telling them that they have to use because they're not enough. And they feel like they have to be perfect. And they're swimming around like ducks. so rampant with so much anxiety underneath the water, feeling that they have to be a different person to survive in the world today. So it's for all of those people. And that's why I tell people to their blue in the face. This impacts so many people in so many different roles.

49:34It's not just for the high achievers.

49:36Heather Monahan:John, I'm so grateful you wrote this book. Did all of the due diligence and research that you did to bring this forward was such an incredible framework. How do people find the book and where can they get it? It is available everywhere for pre-order. The most simple place to go is matteringeffect.com or you can go to my podcast website, Passion Struck, and right at the top of the header, it has places that you can pre-order. John, thank you so much for writing this book. Guys, get this book. As he just described, this book is for everybody, no matter where you are in your life. You matter. Get the mattering Effect.

50:15Heather Monahan:John has spent years creating this for you and let it change your life because you matter. And John, you matter to us so much. Thank you so much for being here today. Heather, it was one of the biggest honors I've had in a long time coming on your show. So thank you so much for having me. Well, that means the world to me. Get the Mattering Effect by John Miles and we will link it in the show notes for you. You can get a pre-order copy right now, one week before it comes out, October 6th. Head over, get your copy. You matter. Until next week, keep creating your confidence. You know I will be. I'm on this journey with me.

50:51Heather Monahan:I'm going to make a little over again. I decided to change that dynamic. I couldn't be more excited for what you're going to hear. Start learning and growing. Inevitably, something will happen. No one succeeds alone. You don't stop and look around once in a Well, you could miss it. I'm on this journey with me.