Andrew Soren Discusses How Eudaimonia Transforms the Workplace

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An Extraordinary Figure in Well-being Science

Andrew co-authored a paper with Carol Ryff called "Well-Being and Health: Enhancing a Eudaimonic Vision." Carol Ryff, a psychologist, has greatly contributed to the concept of eudaimonia. Andrew shares Carol’s work on positive psychology.

Psychologist, Carol Ryff’s impact on positive psychology

Nick: This is a paper you co-authored with Carol Ryff. Do you want to touch on Carol's impact on positive psychology and her contribution to the paper?

Andrew: Absolutely. Carol Ryff is an extraordinary psychologist. Absolutely my hero in so many ways, in terms of her research on the idea of eudaimonia, which is an idea that I'm sure that we will get into in a little bit.

Her contribution to the field, in the mid 80s, when she was doing her graduate work, she was looking back over the history of the 20th century, and in a lot of the psychological contributions of humanists and existential psychologists, who are doing a lot of work, trying to understand what well-being might mean in different kinds of contexts.

This was before anybody was talking about positive psychology or that movement really started to emerge in the 21st century. So she was predating a lot of that and came up with a model called Psychological Well-being, which she published in 1989, I believe.

That model has six categorical dimensions that she really built up from the literature of all of these extraordinary humanists and existentialists, folks like Maslow and Viktor Frankl, and so many others, who were asking these questions about what well-being might mean and psychological functioning might look like, and not just what psychological illness might be.

So that's a little bit about Carol. Since then, she's done amazing work, predominantly at the University of Wisconsin in Madison, and runs their Institute on Aging, and specifically this study that we'll probably talk a little bit about as well called MIDUS.

And she invited me to co-edit a whole entire special issue of the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, all about meaning in life, meaning and purpose in life and its relationship to our psychological and physical health. As part of that special issue, we wrote this specific article about meaningful work and its impact on our health and well-being.

Nick: There you go. When I stumbled upon it, I was kind of pleasantly surprised. And I thought, wow, she predates this, I guess what we call the positive literature boom of the early 2000s or the late 1990s.

And as I mentioned to you, she doesn't seem to get as much recognition as some of the more popular names we hear like Martin Seligman or Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. So I'm glad we get to talk about her briefly on this episode.

Andrew: She’s the real deal. For anybody interested in the science of well-being, she's an extraordinary figure.

The Pursuit of Meaning: Finding Fulfillment in Work

What is meaningful work? Andrew suggests that meaningful work can emerge from various facets of our professional lives, including our tasks, roles within organizations, and interactions with others.

Having work that is personally significant and worthwhile

Nick: Let's start with the title. I do forget that a lot of people might not have heard the word eudaimonia before. So how would you define meaningful work? And what is your eudaimonic vision?

Andrew: So maybe I'll start with meaningful work because it's easy, relative eudaimonia which is hard. Meaningful work in the literature, there's, first of all, there are lots of definitions of what meaningful work is, if you actually peel back the academic literature and look at it.

There's one study that looks at just the definitions alone. I think it was published in 2018, and at that point, there were 36 different definitions of what meaningful work could be. So there isn't necessarily consensus on this one.

But most people tend to default to a definition that Pratt and Ashforth came up with in 2003, that says that meaningful work is simply work that is personally significant and worthwhile. Work that is personally significant and worth my while.

Meaningful work tends to show up in various ways in the work that we do. So it can be in the tasks that we do, in the roles that we play in our organizations, in our interactions with other colleagues or with managers or with customers or with the community, and as part of organizations in and of themselves. Meaningful work shows up in all of those different places.

Now, you might ask, where does meaningful work come from? That requires the much more complex answer that at least Carol and I start way back 2400 years ago with Aristotle. I'll try not to completely derail this entire podcast.

But basically, if you ask Aristotle what's the meaning of life, he would probably have waxed poetically and took you for a long walk. And we'd say, well, you know, no one agrees on what the meaning of life is. But as far as I'm concerned, it's virtuous action moderated by reason, or what he would shorthand that as eudaimonia.

Eudaimonia, let's just break that down. In ancient Greek ‘eu’ is good, and ‘daimon’ is spirit or demon, or God. So if you think about eudaimonia as this good spirit that lives within each of us, that has the potential to be manifested in some way to do something worthy of you, and you is going to be different for every single one of us.

You know, what, what you're here and capable of doing in this world is going to be different from from me and from every person that you encounter. But in some ways, the work of life, is to try to figure out what that purpose is that you are here to be manifesting and potentiating in this world, and to try to figure out how do you bring the best of yourself to do it, and that's probably going to be really hard work, it's definitely not going to be easy work.

You're probably going to fail a lot of the time, it's going to require an understanding of virtue, which in and of itself, is an incredibly complicated things. And, in fact, Aristotle was writing mostly about Eudaimonia in the context of ethics and trying to understand what's the ethical life.

And so you're going to constantly be having to figure out, you know, every strength has its weaknesses. So how do I figure out how to kind of go my own swim lane towards my purpose, and moderate my virtue and do stuff, so that I can try to ultimately reach my full potential.

Aristotle would say, a life of doing that would be a life well lived. And you'd probably only understand it, if you kind of look backwards at the end of it. And again, it might not feel very good. So it'd be lots of other people around that period of time would be like, ‘No, Aristotle, you're wrong. You know, sex, drugs, rock and roll—that's the answer to a good life.’

And he was like, ‘No.’ So in many ways, meaningful work has its origins, at least in the Western tradition, in some of that kind of thinking, a virtuous action moderated by reason. And of course, many people have taken that and translated it into all sorts of different ways.

If you asked Thomas Aquinas, he would have said that it's like a classical calling, you'd have taken that Eudaimonic ideal and said, ‘Let's like apply that duty and orientation to the church. And it's not the good demon inside of you, suppress that good demon, and focus on God.’

That very much grows out of this Eudaimonic orientation that a calling—a classical calling to the church is part of it. And then of course, you have the Protestant Revolution, and folks like Martin Luther, and were like, ‘No, it's not just about God, secular work can be a divine calling, too.’

So that very much takes us into kind of throughout the Industrial Revolution and Protestant work ethic, and into the 20th century. Then you have a whole bunch of existentialists like Viktor Frankl who might say that we actually have a psychological need for meaning and purpose that's really core to who we are as human beings.

And then a whole bunch of organizational psychologists taking that kind of, you know, championing it, and saying, ‘Hey, work should be significant and worthwhile.’ All the way up to the Simon Sinek’s of our day, who have to say, ‘You know, start with why, if you're not doing meaningful work, you're doing something wrong.’ Which is maybe an unfair characteristic of Simon Sinek.

But nonetheless, I think that all of that kind of takes us to where we get to today. And where I started with it said, people say Eudaimonic work is work that is personally significant and worthwhile. And I think what we tried to do in this article is say that actually is missing a whole lot of so many other things that Aristotle was trying to get at that are much more virtuous, that are much more ethical, that are much more about the broader world, and not just about ‘the I’ feeling that my work is significant and worthwhile.

Navigating Cruel Optimism: Understanding its Real Impact

In today's world, many focus on being their absolute best and chasing big goals. For Andrew, this could mean 'cruel optimism'—where giving your all is the only thing, and if you fail, you blame yourself. It's important to look beyond just yourself and think about other things that make work meaningful.

Being part of something bigger

Nick: I think it's a nice alternative to what we often hear in the modern literature, or from a lot of coaches, this idea of ‘be the best version of yourself’, which I'm quite sick of hearing. What are your thoughts on that phrase? And would you associate that to eudaimonia? Or do you think it's a sort of a corrupt interpretation?

Andrew: I think it's absolutely a component of eudaimonia. Aristotle sometimes used this metaphor of like, the acorn and the oak tree. The premise that if you find an acorn in the woods, and at least here in Canada, it is the fall and there are lots of acorns in the woods, every single one of those acorns contains the possibility of a mighty oak tree. Or any other kind of tree that acorn might be, but let's let's say it's an oak tree.

It's not like every acorn just automatically turns into that oak tree. There's actually a ton of stuff that needs to happen to be able to potentiate ourselves. I mean, there's the obvious things like, there needs to be water, there needs to be air, there needs to be oxygen, and there needs to be those environmental conditions.

That acorn also has to be protected; other things can eat that acorn before it's ready—it needs to be buried in the right place. There has to be all these environmental conditions and ecological conditions and systemic conditions. Let alone whatever the DNA of that actual acorn, that are going to govern whether or not that acorn makes it into a mighty oak tree.

So I think that the challenge of this work, if you're actually going to get into it, is that it's really complex, try to figure out how we go about potentiating ourselves. And there aren't simple answers, there's no silver bullet to what that looks like. And anybody who's preaching that to you, quite frankly is gaslighting you into believing that it's just up to you.

I think that especially in the world of positive psychology, there can be this what one person calls ‘cruel optimism’, which is to a certain extent, the American Dream, which is if you just work hard enough, everything can potentially be yours. And if that's not happening for you, it's your fault, because you're not working hard enough.

I think that’s certainly the literature that we're going to talk about and meaningful work; as just one micro example would suggest that there's absolutely personal resources at stake that you need to bring to bear. And there's always going to be enabling conditions. Those two things have to play together. We have to think about those things in systemic ways. That's just complex, and it's hard.

Nick: Yeah, it's complicated, but it's worthwhile pursuing, I think—a meaningful life, a challenging life. I guess we just got to be careful that it's not too self-centric. That's sometimes the impression I get from some of the literature, the modern literature. I always go back to the Japanese word for self, which is jibun, and it has you and part of self, sort of indicating that you are a part of something bigger.

Rather than thinking you're independent, you're actually very much interdependent. You wouldn't be who you are without the influence of others, and you wouldn't be able to do what you want to do without the help of others. I don't know if we hear enough of that in the current modern literature.

How Can Work Offer Us Freedom

For Andrew, experiencing freedom while working is possible. There are two ways in which people can experience freedom at work: freedom from physical harm and the freedom to have autonomy.

Work offering freedom

Nick: Let's move on to a really interesting word, a word I think all of us want to experience. And this is freedom. You mentioned in your paper that work must offer us freedom. Do you want to expand on that?

Andrew: This is a way of framing work that actually comes out of the United Nations, originally the Industrial Labor Organization, which kind of got subsumed by the UN over the last couple of decades.

You know, work is really important in our lives. Again, the UN says that it's so crucial that it's like necessary to our dignity, well-being, and development as a human being. I mean, we spend more time, at least most of us who are probably listening to this, most of us spend more time working than doing just about anything else than sleeping in our lives.

So again, the UN through the Industrial Labor Organization would say that, that means that work needs to be fundamentally decent. And they describe decent work as having four major attributes: equity, security, dignity, and freedom.

So what's the freedom part? Well, the freedom part is really, you can think about it in two ways: freedom from and freedom to. For work to be decent, work has to be free from things like physical or psychological harm, or interference or domination. You know, all the human rights aspects that you would expect the UN to be thinking about.

But work also should offer us freedom to—things like personal dignity, freedom to having autonomy in the choices that we make, freedom to choose ethics, right over wrong, freedom to self realize—all that kind of wonderful eudaimonic stuff that we were talking about. Freedom to develop your best self, freedom to pursue what you think is valuable and purposeful in life.

So when we talk about work offering freedom, we’re talking about both freedom from and freedom to.

Nick: It's an interesting word and concept, freedom. And to offer a perspective that might also tie in to this, by a research pioneer on the concept of ikigai. Her name was Mieko Kamiya. She discovered the seven ikigai needs and one was freedom.

She described freedom as, obviously, you have freedom of choice. But with those choices, she said, there's two sort of significant ones that people run away from. And one was basically delayed gratification—that you put aside an immediate freedom for a better freedom in the future.

But perhaps more significantly, this one's really interesting, is you put aside your personal freedom for a freedom that serves a greater good. So I'm sure many people do that in their work. And she described it as you’re freely choosing inconvenience to serve a greater good, but that's an expression of freedom in and of itself.

So would you relate that to work? That some people do put aside their personal freedom to do work that's meaningful, challenging, but they are sacrificing a part of their personal freedom at the same time?

Andrew: It's a beautiful way of articulating it. I think that there's a lot of people that we can talk a little bit about that in a bit, in terms of the challenges, the dark sides of meaningful work. But I think you've foreshadowed that really, really nicely that people who choose to engage in deeply meaningful work are often making pretty extraordinary personal sacrifices.

And I think that MIDUS literature maybe suggests some of that. Although frankly, I'm not sure that MIDUS actually looks necessarily at the degree of meaning of the work. It brings me back to this notion of eudaimonic well-being versus hedonic well-being, those were the two kinds of ancient Greek perspectives. And both of those words can translate into happiness. So it's interesting to think about it, like freedom versus happiness.

But you can think about happiness is just as much good things with as few bad things as possible, which is really the hedonic way of thinking about, we want comfort, we want pleasure, we want to just feel good. And that's what it is.

Which was just very different than this eudaimonic orientation, which is hard work, and you're like struggling with virtue, and you're trying to figure out how to screw up a little less tomorrow than you did today. That's just going to be a lifelong pursuit, it's about the journey, and not really any kind of destination. And in some ways, it sucks. And in some ways, it's hard.

And to think that that's actually what a perspective of happiness is, and I think, hurt a lot of people's brains. And yet, I think anybody who's actually tried to do that work, knows that it's immensely, it has the potential to be immensely fulfilling and satisfying, in a way that just surrounding yourself with future comforts.

Balancing Act: Achieving Work-Life Harmony

Andrew discusses the framework released by the United States Surgeon General, which promotes mental health and well-being in the workplace.

Satisfying the needs for dignity and meaning in work

Nick: So let's flip it now. Let's go away from the dark side and move on to mental health and well-being. Recently in the United States, you noted that the Surgeon General released a framework for mental health and well-being in the workplace. It’s a five pillar framework. So do you want to run through that framework?

Andrew: Sure. So this just came out probably about a year ago. Vivek Murthy, the United States Surgeon General, basically being the top doctor of the United States, came up with this really wonderful evidence-based framework that really places the worker voice and equity at the center of of what organizations ultimately should be focusing on.

This framework does a really good job of getting both that freedom from and freedom to element. It starts with just protection from harm—that work should fundamentally allow us a sense of safety and security. And that is an essential element of what work can be.

From there, we have community and connection, recognizing that we have these human needs of social support and belonging, and that work is a great place for that to happen. That we need work-life harmony, which is really all about those needs of autonomy and self determination that we talked about earlier and flexibility.

Something that I think many people are especially realizing on this side of the pandemic, especially in hybrid and flexible work contexts, that we need opportunities to grow on the job, because we all have this desire and need for mastery and learning and also a real want for accomplishment and achievement in our lives and mattering at work.

In this framework, mattering at work is defined as satisfying the needs for dignity and meaning. So, first and foremost in there, it has provide us with a living wage. And we need to be able to make sure that workers have some say in the decisions that they get to make in an organizational context.

Then we need to think about, how do we build cultures of gratitude and recognition in our organizations? How do we ultimately connect individuals to organizational missions and purposes and values and see those things is kind of intimately connected? How do we help people ultimately feel valued and valuable within their organization?

Nick: That's a good question. The term work-life harmony’s a bit different to the more common term work-life balance. And actually one of my past podcast guests, and a good friend of mine, Steve Beauchamp on episode 46, he writes a lot about this idea of harmony as opposed to balance.

So do you think there is a difference between work-life harmony and work-life balance?

Andrew: Absolutely. I mean, literally nobody that I know, I don't think feels like there is seeking equilibrium between work and life. I mean, even when you say that, it almost sounds absurd. I mean, that it needs to be 50/50. Like as balancing.

So I love the choice of harmony, because harmony is about how things play together. Does it play the harmonica in a dissonant way. Does work and life work together in a way that ultimately creates beautiful music? I think that trying to figure out, and especially for those who are engaged in deeply meaningful work, the likelihood that they even want a pure 40-hour work week where they just step away.

I mean, some of the things that I think we are trying to impose on work are not actually necessarily even things that people who are engaged in meaningful work want, because they actually love what they do. And they don't necessarily want to step away from it. But they still need to find harmony.

Nick: Yes. Now, I do like that term. So I'll do another shout out to Steve. So there you go, Steve, work-life harmony. It's a real term now, used by the Surgeon General. So that's interesting.

Embracing Meaning in Professional Life

Andrew discusses how individuals can find meaning in their work by having decent work—work that embodies justice, equity, diversity, and inclusion.

There’s no wellness without fairness

Nick: This podcast is about the ikigai concept. But there's also another word, or gai is a suffix that can be added to other verbs. So the verb for work is hataraku. So hatarakigai is another concept related to meaningful work. I think it was quite a common term in Japan in the 70s and 80s, when their economy was booming.

Basically, it's this balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators. So obviously meaningful work, good relations that work, but also probably good pay, good opportunity, and maybe a disbelief and a positive future with the work that you do.

So I usually ask what is your ikigai? But do you find hatarakigai? Do you have a good balance of intrinsic and extrinsic motivators in the work that you do?

Andrew: I do. I feel like I'm, again, I'll use the term lucky. But I guess it's one of those situations where I do believe that we make our own luck to a certain extent. But in the context of the work that I get to do now, it is extremely intrinsically rewarding.

To a certain extent, I feel like in the world right now, this is changing. There's an increased interest in these topics. Over the course of my career over the last couple of decades, it has definitely shifted in terms of people being much more interested and willing to talk about well-being and meaningful work and the conditions that enable success.

I mean, all of these things that we're talking about right now, I don't think people would have paid much attention to—not even just before the pandemic. I mean, I think that one of the things that the pandemic has given us, to a certain extent is, at least a curiosity and an understanding that meaning and well-being and decency are all things that are actually really important in our lives.

And that work should be and can be an opportunity and a source for them in a different way than I think I would have necessarily believed that the world would have been as open to even just four or five years ago. And I think the other thing that has really happened over the last few years as well, is in some ways, questions of social justice, questions of equity, questions of fairness, have also risen to the surface.

And I think, a wonderful outcome of all of the work that so many of us have practiced around justice and equity, diversity and inclusion, or an understanding that those questions and questions of well-being are kind of two questions, are two sides of the same coin. As Isaac Prilleltensky, a community psychologist who I'm a huge fan of would say, there's no wellness without fairness.

I think that so much of what we've talked about today is a reflection of the fact that there is no wellness without fairness, you can't talk about meaningful work without talking about decent work. And I guess I feel pretty lucky to be able to do both on a daily basis.

Nick: Actually, it sounds like your work is also your ikigai. So that's a good thing, but outside of work, what is something that would be an ikigai source for you that is meaningful and fulfilling?

Andrew: The arts is my short answer to that question. I am somebody who literally grew up breathing the arts and valuing the capacity that the arts has for creating transcendent moments in our lives.

So definitely my ikigai beyond just the work that I get to practice on a daily basis is also trying to find these moments of beauty and excellence and transcendence in the world, and I think the arts is absolutely a beautiful pathway to that.

Nick: So do I. I can see just behind you the word flow. So that's very relatable to all that and I love the arts as you can see, with my scrolls. The beauty and simplicity in Japanese calligraphy is astonishing.

For the full podcast conversation, go to: Eudaimonia in the Workplace: Cultivating Meaning and Health