A Life – And Career – Well Lived, With Jodi Wellman

Junior Lowry talks with Jodi Wellman, a keynote speaker, author, and coach, about how to live life fully by embracing our mortality and using it as a motivator. Jodi, the founder of 4000 Mondays, shares insights on living with intention and urgency, balancing life’s pleasures with deep meaning, and avoiding the regret of a life half-lived. Tune in for a fresh perspective on how to prioritize what matters most and find a deeper sense of purpose. This conversation will inspire you to reflect on your life and make every Monday count.

Check out the full series of “Career Sessions, Career Lessons” podcasts here or visit pathwise.io/podcast/. A full written transcript of this episode is also available at https://pathwise.io/podcasts/jodi-wellman

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A Life – And Career – Well Lived, With Jodi Wellman

Author of You Only Die Once And Founder Of Four Thousand Mondays

My guest is Jodi Wellman. She is a keynote speaker, the author of You Only Die Once, and the Founder of Four Thousand Mondays. She’s also a professional certified coach with the International Coaching Federation and a certified professional coactive coach. She’s an assistant instructor and trainer in the resilience program at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she also has a Master’s degree. Prior to her move into coaching, Jodi was an executive-level leader in the fitness industry. She and her husband split their time between Palm Springs and Chicago with their orange cat, Andy. Jodi, welcome. Thank you for joining me on the show.

Thank you for having me here. I’m excited to chat with you.

Let’s start talking about your current work. What is keeping you busy these days?

My first answer should be living if I’m going to practice what I preach about this whole idea of living before we die. Fitting some living in and around launching the book, which is exciting because my first book has launched, You Only Die Once. I am out there trying to get the word out and having fun with it. I’m living in and around this whole idea of You Only Die Once.

Tell us more about the book and what prompted it.

Using Mortality As A Motivator

The book is an encapsulation of how we can counterintuitively use our mortality as a motivator to live with more of a sense of urgency, intention, passion, and priority, even though most people would think, “Please, thanks anyway. I’d rather talk about anything else other than the fact that we are temporary.” I’ve been fascinated by this topic for as long as I can remember and working corporately. I never knew how to talk about it that wouldn’t turn people off.

I went and studied it in grad school for my Master’s of Applied Positive Psychology at the University of Pennsylvania. That was all I needed. I needed to do my thesis on something that made me feel like it was empirically based and check that box. Science says this stuff is for real. It gave me the ability and the confidence to go forward and make this admittedly my direction in terms of what I work with people on and how I do my workshops and keynotes. That’s the short bit of it.

As you say in your TED Talk, “No one is getting out of your life.” What’s funny is you’ll sometimes have somebody say, “If you knew you were going to die tomorrow, what would you do now? If you were going to die in a few months, what would you do? The thing is, you’re extending the timeline. Somewhere in between, if you were dying tomorrow and if you’re dying in a few decades, the whole idea of actively living your life gives way for a lot of people to passivity.

Your point about even asking the question of dying tomorrow, in a few months or even a year, those questions to me are not very helpful because they’re only ever going to elicit these fancy film notions. No one is ever going to drain their bank account or not go on this like a balls-to-wall party. It sounds like a lot of fun. If you could invite me, that’d be great.

For most of us, it’s not indicative of showing up to live in a life that may last another several years. That is why I do the countdown. I get us counting how many Mondays we have left. We can take it seriously without it being hyperbolic about dying tomorrow. All I’m going to do is eat between now and tomorrow. That’s not going to help me with living like I mean it between now and when I do die.

What Is 4000 Mondays?

You made a passing reference to Mondays. You call your company Four Thousand Mondays. At the risk of maybe stating the obvious to our audience, give us a sense of what Four Thousand Mondays is about.

That is roughly the average of what we get to work with. Most people reading were middle-aged in our careers. I always say I’m on the downward slope to the morgue. I have 1,814 Mondays left as of this week.

You’ve got more than I do.

Men don’t live as long. You were already at a disadvantage.

I’m older. I’ve got about 1,200.

When you do the math, does it make you feel anything?

I’ve confronted this question personally already. I’m thinking about those things, but I appreciate that a lot of people get caught up in the day to day.

Confronting Mortality To Live Better

Even your words that you’ve confronted, I get literal with words. That confrontation with death is what a lot of existential psychologists will recommend. It’s more of a true, deeper reflection rather than dabbling because we are good at denying it. Nobody wants to talk about it. It’s morbid. That’s why I don’t linger there for long. It’s all in the spirit of shifting it so that we can live better. It is a confrontation.

Let’s flip to the positive. What makes for a well-lived life?

You’re talking to the person who comes from the school of positive psychology. That’s the scientific study of what makes life worth living. There are quite a few well-being models out there. They all tend to come back to some of the similar aspects around having positive emotion, engagement with life and your career or whatever you’re up to, good relationships, or having a sense of meaning and accomplishment. Those are the highlights.

Martin Seligman is the Creator of Positive Psychology. PERMA is his well being model. That’s a shortcut. I take a lot of that and work with it with people. We figure out like, “Let’s be honest. It’s individual.” There isn’t a prescription or a one-size-fits-all. I talk about living astonishingly alive lives, which sounds intimidating. I want to debunk that right away.

Your version of an astonishingly alive life may be different from your neighbor’s or wife’s. That’s okay. It doesn’t need to look a certain way on social media. It doesn’t need to cost a certain amount of money. It could be sweet and simple. It could be all fiz and flare. Go for it if that’s your style. It’s dependent. Your version of a good life could be that you want to spend all your time with your family in a nice, quiet existence. Let’s make sure you’re getting to do that to the extent that makes you feel alive.

It’s individual. It’s the journey. It’s the process of thinking it through and understanding what is important. Clay Christensen wrote about that and how you will measure your life. Similar thesis of stepping back and asking yourself what matters and what doesn’t.

That’s the thing that we are going about our days usually in a state of lack of self-awareness. We’re busy. We’re not trained unless you have a coach who sat with you and got you to do a bunch of reflective exercises that might or may not have stumped you. Most of us are not pausing to think about those kinds of things in life. Here we are. We may get one go. We get more than one go.

In my book, You Only Die Once, you can reincarnate, but you only have one go with this life. Do we not owe it to ourselves to do some of that thought and go, “Wait.” That’s why I call it a pre-mortem in my book. I get us thinking, “How is your life going? How do you want it to be? Where are the dead zones? Where might you want to spruce things up a bit?” It’s a giant way of assessing how you want this precious time to be.

In between, thinking about movies like The Bucket List, where they’re off doing crazy stuff every day and living life like they’re going to die soon. The people who are on the other end are like, “Where did that day go? I squandered another day.” The whole YOLO thing feels grounded in social media. It’s showing off all the exciting, cool things you’re doing. Most people can’t live like that every day. There is a balance that needs to be struck here.

We’re getting in on the typical psychology personality traits. Some people happen to have different ranges and needs for experience. Openness to experience is what it’s called. One of the big five personality traits. Some people are like, “No, I do not want you to mess with everything. I want everything the same as it was yesterday.” If someone has more of a tendency and desire to do more things and experience more, their range on the continuum will be higher than someone else. Respecting where all that flows.

The most beautiful thing I found through research about living the good life, or living your version of an astonishingly lived life, is that it is often made up of simple things. It’s the things that we’re doing every day taking life for granted. Most of us already know this, but we have to stop and say, “That’s right.” Old life is what happens when you’re busy making plans.

Life is happening when you are on the way to the concert. If you happen to fit a concert into your life, for some of us, that’s a big deal. Life is the silly little banter in the car when you’re laughing and singing along to a song. Life is the fact that you decided to cook a different dish and that you ruined it. You got to laugh about it because we’ll never forget that smell of charred saffron.

I don’t know where this is coming from, but these are the tiny moments where we often overlook that life’s getting lived. Sometimes, we do need to be the ones to stop and say, “Do we want to cook something interesting or different tonight? Do we want to take a different route home or at work? Do I want to apply myself in a different way that lets me leverage some different strengths? That’s an area where I could feel like I’m coming a little more alive.” It doesn’t mean that you’re taking a sabbatical to Tuscany for three months necessarily to come alive.

We talked earlier about confronting mortality. There’s also that element of regret. As Mark Twain said, “It’s the things that you don’t do that you regret more than the things that you do.” At some point, the regrets start to become meaningful enough that you hopefully start to trigger the way that you live your life day-to-day.

The Power Of Regret

The regret research is fascinating because many people think that it’s the mistakes we’ve made that will eat away at us over the years. For most of us, it’s not. It’s the notion of these paths not being taken. We do get fixated on the life we could be living. Could I have been happier in Denver? Could we have made a go of it in that job? That’s the stuff that can eat away at us.

Live Life Fully: The regret we carry: it’s not the mistakes, it’s the paths not taken.

It’s the beauty of regrets because the research is clear that most of us are aware that regrets can be instructive. We can use them to our advantage. An exercise that I get fanatical about is getting us to imagine what will be the things small, medium, and large that you might kick yourself if you were on your proverbial deathbed. You’d think, “I always said I wanted to do that thing.” It could also be a way of being. For a lot of people, it’s like, “I wish I was bolder. I wish I’d maybe taken more risks. I wish that I had been more patient.”

Some of it is literal character styles. Some of it is, “I wish we went to Prague, I wish I’d learned how to speak a certain language, or I wish I’d spent more time on the floor with my dog and child instead of on my laptop.” You insert here. There’s no shortage of things. The productive part of all this is that when you sit, think about this, and write a list, you now have an opportunity to look at that page to say, “Some of these are goofy. It’s no big deal.”

Some of these matter to me, and they make me feel something. I know it would feel like a pang. I know we want pang. We want no pangs now or on our deathbeds. That’s your opportunity. I call them pre-regrets. I know it’s a little cheesy, but you’re not on your deathbed. Now is your chance to say, “If that was on your list and you want to be bolder and make sure you go to see the Northern Lights, we know how to book trips. We can book a trip for the Northern Lights even if it isn’t until the fall of 2027. Do it.” What about the boldness thing? What is the one thing you could do now to demonstrate to yourself that you’re willing to be courageous even if it makes you feel wooed and queasy because it’s worth it?

Dan Pink built that fantastic database of his big regret study that he based his book on, and he’s continued to work on it. It’s fascinating how it boils down to four regret types that he talks about in his book.

I love all that stuff. I ate it right up. He’s a good leader in this field.

It’s easy to get caught up in the things that don’t matter so much. How do we avoid that?

Other than hard drugs, which we’re not recommending here, here’s the spirit of this. Number one is to let ourselves acknowledge with a bit of self-compassion. We’re wired to get caught up in stuff because we care. It’s a branch of a value that we have. If we’re annoyed that the email wasn’t accurate or Janice didn’t submit her thing on time, and now it’s going to contribute to you screwing up the PowerPoint, this is an indication that it’s either your reputation, your quality of work or the team, something matters and that’s good. For the rest of us, we do acknowledge. We don’t want to sweat the small stuff as much.

The best way that I have found, and this all roads with me lead back to mortality, is the research about people who’ve had brushes with death. There’s a whole chapter in my book called about wake-up calls. There is clarity there with those people who’ve had some experience, whether it’s remission from a pretty crappy diagnosis or the motorcycle crash. They made it out alive or coming out of a coma. These people are more aware of the priorities in life that matter. They are also clear on the trivial stuff that doesn’t matter anymore.

It boils down to a couple of different categories. I don’t need to worry anymore about the optics. I share in the book an example of a guy with a work team. We were at a retreat. He’s like, “You may all have noticed that I’m no longer engaged in the evenings and weekends.” They used to compete with one another. The culture is what it’s like.

I responded first on a Saturday morning. I responded first. He’s like, “I’m not playing that game anymore.” He had a brush with death. He’s like, “I’ve seen the light. I know now that I’m going to do a great job, and you guys can trust me. I am a team player here. I also don’t care about the FaceTime game of engaging at 8:30 at night. That’s not going to matter to me anymore.” The rest of the team is looking around like, “Why didn’t I have a near-death experience? I want that purity of vision and freedom. Yet, it’s all available to us.”

I play the game with people in a retreat if they need it or want it. You got home from the hospital. High five to you, honey bunny. You’re alive, but you almost weren’t. What doesn’t matter anymore? We go through an exercise that is based on research about eliminating things and tracking. How do you make this more action-oriented rather than a passive idea? One of the tricks is to pretend you almost died.

There’s an objective here, this idea of optimizing your sense of well-being. You talk about the hedonic and the monic aspects of well-being. Do you want to cover that in the idea of how it all comes together?

Living An Astonishingly Alive Life

I look at life as not about living longer. Longer might be nice, but most of us are concerned about the quality rather than quantity of life. It tracks nicely to the dimensions of well-being. I talk about living wider with vitality. That’s about all the fun stuff we do. The pleasure, the cool tasting menus, the rollercoasters, and the cool stuff.

Typical happiness aligns with the hedonic brand of well-being. It’s important for a life worth living. In contrast, sometimes they overlap. They play nicely together. There is the dimension that I look at about deepening life with meaning. That’s the stuff like having a sense of purpose in life and having good quality, meaningful connections with people. It involves spirituality, if that matters to you, but more of the character-based stuff. That aligns with the branch of well-being called eudaimonia. It has to do with Aristotle’s more time spent doing good rather than feeling good. They come together nicely.

It’s all about diagnosis with people. Sometimes, you have that sense like, “I might want more out of life. Something is missing, and I don’t know what it is.” High achievers always want more. This is the dimension and way to go. When you think about your life, on a scale of 1 to 10, on vitality, the widening, where would you be? When you think about your life with that deepening meaning and purpose, where would you be? We instinctively know we have a way to subjectively evaluate our lives. That’s the starting point. There’s time and a place for both.

Live Life Fully: Balancing vitality and meaning is the key to a well-lived life.

Balancing Fun And Meaning In Life

I like the way you put it around, widening your life of vitality and deepening it with meaning. It’s thinking of it as a two by two. They both matter for different reasons. If you can find a way to achieve both with the same thing, that’s even better.

You already got ahead two by two. You’ve seen a matrix before. This is the world I live in, where we’re looking for that zone called astonishingly alive, which is where you’re anywhere positive on the meaning side and anywhere positive on the vitality side. Most people don’t identify there. In my research, less than 10% say, “I squarely find myself here now.” It is sad. It’s all about the opportunity to do this work and try to spark more life in life.

Most people will identify with the category called meaningfully bored, which is where they’ll say, “I have enough meaning.” They have a job that does something good in the world. In some way, they’re part of a team where they feel like they contribute whatever it is. They’re looking after kids or pets, and they feel like they’re bored. It’s like, “I need more fun happening around here.” It is cool to diagnose that dead zone and be like, “We can work with this.”

How does this play out for you in terms of how you make sure you live a well-lived life?

I’m always working on it. There’s this notion some people will think, for some reason, because I have this framework, and I love all this stuff. I’ve got all the ideas, and I like living like I mean it on fire. I’m my number one client daily. I am a homebody and introvert. I love nothing more than being under a warm blanket with a cat and a glass of wine, and my husband is good. My life will be happy in that cocoon, except it’s not happy for long. I know I need more in the right little doses of fun. We went to the aforementioned concert, or this trip.

I consistently do the pulse check and consistently do the thing where I map it out on my calendar. It’s nerdy, but it’s necessary because life will pass me by. I need to have my recommendation for myself, but for everybody else is to have something to look forward to in your calendar, one week in advance, one month in advance, and one year in advance.

They don’t need to be flashy. This isn’t about impressing anybody with whatever size yacht you are renting to go to whatever island in Greece. Not to stop you, but this is about the little things like the suite. Often simple life pleasures, but sometimes it can be a cool trip or a class we’ve been waiting to start. Whatever it is that floats your boat, make sure that you’ve got boats in the water waiting to be floated and sent off to sea.

A Career Worth Living

We’ve been talking about a life worth living. I would imagine that most people, when they’re confronted with death, think about what they would want to do with the time they’ve got left. You also make the point that we spend 20% or more of our adult lives working, and only about 30% of us feel engaged at work. What do the rest of us need to do to live a career worth living?

The first thing I will say will be controversial, but I can’t not say it. We might want to relax the pressure in a working society about how work needs to deliver so much. I have spent years working with people to work more. I’m not here to say that it’s okay to languish in a job that makes you feel like it’s stabbing your soul from the inside out. It’s not good.

Leave a job that is terrible in an instant. However, we might need to reframe what it takes to live fully. For many of us, we’ve become a bit 1 or 2-dimensional, where we’re looking at work. I do this all the time because I love work. If work for some reason takes a turn or it’s not delivering, we lament that work is the problem. We’re not engaged, and our life satisfaction dips. There’s an antidote, which is to infuse our life outside of work with more life.

A funny thing happens. The tide that lifts all boats. If you start engaging in hobbies again in a different way and you start organizing your evenings to feel there’s a variety or something different going on, the way you show up at work is different because work doesn’t have to be the almighty be all, end all to give you your purpose and pleasure.

I couldn’t get on that soapbox for a quick second. Back to the real question, when you’re at work, and you’re not engaged, it’s going back to the roots of, like, is it because you have not been challenged enough? Do you need to ask for a bigger challenge? Flow, the psychological state, is being swept up in something, and you lose track of time. It’s lovely. It’s that relationship between skill and challenge.

This happens a lot with executives. It’s like, “This is what happens when mastery has occurred. I no longer have anything cool or new to feel challenged.” The challenge is the thing that makes us feel. Most people feel alive in some way. They’re like, “I’m learning. I’m growing. I’m getting a little bit better day by day. Sometimes, the issue is to take the initiative. Even when you feel like you’re in a slump and you don’t have the energy to do it, find a way.

Use your strengths. Research is abundantly clear that when we’re aware of our strengths, we’re ten times likelier to flourish. When we use our strengths in new and different ways, we’re seventeen times more likely to flourish. Those are facts that I do not mess with. Let’s use our strengths more. Finding a way to craft a job and say, “I’m a strategic one. Let me be more strategic on this team, please.” Reverse could be true. Let me be more tactical or creative. Let me be the one to interact with clients in a different way. Those are low-hanging fruit.

There are times when you should never let work consume your life. I was having a conversation with a former work colleague who had had a couple of kids. She felt like she’d dialed back while they were little, but now they’re in school, and she wants to reignite her career a bit. You go through those periods. Your desired pace ebbs and flows depending on what’s going on in your personal life. All of that is okay.

If you’re one of those 70% that’s not engaged and your answer is, It’s their fault. You’ve dug yourself a 20% of your adult life whole because you’ve given up. It’s crazy to me how many people tolerate the fact that they don’t like what they’re doing, they don’t feel engaged at work, and they’re not doing anything about it. It’s crazy to me.

It was my experience in many ways. I worked corporately for many years in leadership. I reached my end point, but I didn’t know what to do about it. I’m not proud of this, but I needed to go through this lesson because it helped me relate to 70% of the humans, where I kept waiting for someone to save me. I wanted to be headhunted out of my corporate gig. That’s passive. That is not the way towards living a life worth living in an optimal way.

I was languishing. Nobody knew I was faking it brilliantly that I was so engaged. I call it my stapler story. It’s silly. I remember being at my office one day, stapling pages together. My stapler ran out. I refill the stapler with a new row of staples. I said to myself as I loaded it, “I better not be here by the time this row of staples is done. I counted. I’m like, “On the box are 200 staples. I’m going to be out of here.” I didn’t do anything.

A year later, my stapler ran out, and I felt horrible about myself because I was the one who was doing nothing. I loaded it again, and I’m suspicious of myself. I’m like, “I better not be here by the time this row of staples runs out.” It was several years of the staple situation. This part was part of my fuel for this idea. Life is short to have several years of Mondays, and my life is to be in a job where it is fine.

The more insidious thing is when it’s okay enough not to irk you to move. Sometimes, you need an abusive boss that you will thank in your head later. You’re like, “Thank you, jerk of all jerks because at least you kicked me out in a way. You got me moving.” Just okay is more harmful because we will settle and tolerate it. That is like being buried alive. There’s so much more out there on the other side.

For anybody reading this who’s in this situation, we can summon courage. It is possible to give it a go even. If the next thing isn’t the right thing, the courage and the confidence that gets built from knowing that you initiated some change in the service of living a life worth living will now be a muscle that you have strengthened, and you can use it again. It feels great.

You do a lot of coaching. You coach people at all levels, particularly C-level leaders. Take our audience behind the curtain. What are the main topics that they’re coming to you for help with?

Early days amused me because people were scared to bring up a topic that was more about their life and work because work and life are inextricably linked. There’d be this weird thing like, “I’m not supposed to talk about this. This is a holistic situation. Your difficulty and lack of engagement outside of work or inside of work correlate.

I’ve always found it amusing. There is no such thing as a work problem, or it’s rare, or a life coachee-type of problem like it’s a cocktail together. People bring to the table ideas about maybe being a bit bored or feeling this elusive idea about balance. Let’s, once and for all, rename it some harmony and accept that there are trade-offs and ebbs and flows. Those would be a broad theme. This is life. Work is part of life, and life is part of work until the day we die. That was a big thing. This cracks me up with other coach friends that the notion of that imposter phenomenon is rampant at all levels. People think, “The higher I go, I’m going to gain confidence. I won’t have to feel this way.” It’s a bunch of baloney. We’re all human. We’re all trying.

None of us are perfect.

We somehow think we’re supposed to be. It’s weird.

That’s changed a lot in the last several years. The idea of the infallible leader, Brené Brown, and all the talking she did on vulnerability and shame resonated with a massive audience. Leaders are a lot more human today than they were a generation ago, and that’s a good thing.

I agree with the humanity part. There’s also a funny other little thing I’m noticing that I’m going to start researching more of. I notice it more with female leaders. It’s the idea that the higher they go, the shakier the ground they feel like they’re on. They’re faking it. You would not know. They are successful outside looking in, but it feels a little bit like you’d think that we’ve earned your stripes. Look at all this credibility behind you all these years. Look how many rungs up the ladder you’ve climbed.

For some reason, for many, it creates an almost more precarious position, a higher place from which to fall. That is an interesting note. I like this for the rest of the people around me like, “All the people I’m looking up to who quite frankly are scary.” We’re all human. We’re all trying our best to get through our days and our lives and be successful.

How often do these C-level leaders come to you of their own volition? How often is it because their boss, board, investors, or somebody else told them that they needed to go work with a coach?

Nowadays, I don’t take assignments. Early days, that was what I was doing. It was working with leaders or the HR in this organization. It was often a remedial action plan. That was the case at all levels. We’re having a problem. It was admittedly a bit of a glaring way of looking at how that organization didn’t have a mechanism to give feedback. Sometimes, that was the case. Oftentimes, it was that there was an issue that we would love to get support on or a developmental area that he or she would need help with. That would make sense.

I don’t do as much one-on-one coaching. When I do, it is for people who self-select. There’s an entirely different energy in that rather than being assigned a coach for something. This is for people who are wanting more. It’s not to say that they’ve already got it, and they want an 11 out of 10 life because it’s already a 10 out of 10. No, it has a different energy to the level of motivation.

You don’t have to go over that, convincing them that there’s value in this for them. Historically, it felt like when people were sent to the coach, it was like, “Fix this or else.” It didn’t do the coaching industry any service. If you were working with a coach, it meant you were one step away from being let go. The irony is that the companies are missing a big opportunity to take their good leaders and turn them into great leaders by having them work with a coach.

The most evolved organizations I find are ones where you have a coach because this is about development and getting even more effective. There’s no shame in it because that’s the remedial plan. This is about elevating, not fixing.

The more normal people, as you called them, some of the background stuff that I read on you, who aren’t at the C-level, what’s similar and what’s different about the kinds of problems or situations that they would come to you with when you were doing your one-on-one coaching?

It’s similar. It’s a confidence requirement there that edge about needing to believe in their own abilities to advocate for themselves or females. We don’t need to gender it. I have an idea about where I want to go. You started to talk about the spirit of even around engagement. Waiting for others, permission, feedback from your leader, and opportunity, there is no time for that. Life is too short. It’s not coming, or it’s coming at a slow pace. You could be retired by then.

Create the job and the cool process that you’re going to organize. Do and organize the thing that showcases your talent so that it is undeniable that you are an incredible force to be reckoned with and you are invaluable. You are coming alive in ways that were maybe even unimaginable because you’re getting to use your strengths. It’s a win-win all around.

I also find that people in the mid-levels, you also have people who feel stuck and frustrated. They don’t understand the rules of the game. They don’t understand why other people are getting promoted, and they’re not. They’re getting the best projects. That’s a piece that often forces them to confront. What are their limiting behaviors? That’s a hard thing. A lot of people struggle to see their limiting behaviors.

They’re not getting the feedback because leaders are unprepared to have the conversation, or they don’t make time for it. No one is taking the blinders off for the blind spots. There’s our desire for comfort, whether it’s staying in jobs that don’t service because it’s the devil we know. Don’t even get us started on the devil we know. It is not better than the devil we don’t know. The devil we don’t know could be fabulous, or you’ve already dealt with the devil. You’re equipped. Handle another devil on the way to getting to a better job.

This idea about homeostasis is at least comfortable. I’ll stay here. I hope for the best. That’s not even true because most people have lost hope. They go home and complain about it. If you add it up with a little fancy transcript timer, the number of minutes you spend talking about or texting about, you’re lamenting the situation you’re in. It’s better to make a move.

I’m not an advocate by the way of job hopping your way through life and looking for something elusive. Go try the hobby first and come back. It’s an inside job. You are working on you to start to see where you can contribute differently. If it’s still not landing and you don’t feel like you’re getting traction, give something else a go.

You teach at the University of Pennsylvania. You’re an assistant instructor and a trainer in the resilience program there. Tell us about that work.

In the master’s program that I came from originally, there’s one particular class, positive psychology, and the individuals who work in it. The Penn Resilience program works around the world, helping to train groups, teams, organizations, and law enforcement, particularly people who work in roles where resilience is a requirement. Helping people figure out ways to protect themselves in advance and ways to handle and work at the best levels amidst volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.

Burnout and resilience are two sides of the same coin. Curious to get your view on the truths, the myths of burnout, and the linkage between burnout and resilience.

My observation is that people believe burnout is largely the result of a workload problem. That can be magnanimous for people. It can be a tipping point for people. There’s a perception there that it is about not having agency. I’m being assigned all this work. I can’t stay afloat. Sometimes, there’s an interesting definition.

There are multiple factors that come with burnout. Some of them are things that are more up to us to gain courage. Courage seems to be a theme here. It’s about being able to set some boundaries to be able to say no to some opportunities and doing it in a way that is confident and unapologetic but also refreshingly full of energy. It’s like, “The minute I’ve got this bandwidth, I want to help you with this.” It’s not about being a victim of how well I’ve got all these projects. There’s a different energy to the victim of an overload of work.

There’s the other aspect, which is about misaligned values. That could be one of the more insidious issues that causes burnout. You may have a value about the way you might want to interact with customers or the way that you work on a team. If you’re a leader or organization overall, there’s a fundamental compatibility there. Even if you’re not overworked or you can say no all day long, that is going to create that rift in terms of, like, “Am I at home here? Do I belong here?” That causes almost a psychological toll that creates the flames of burnout to send your eyebrows off more so than even having too much work on your plate this week.

Resilience And Burnout

Resilience is tied into your question. Much of it with resilience is about having self-awareness and self-regulation and being aware. What are your values? Most of us don’t actively know them. If I’ve identified my top ten and ranked them, I would know that integrity is number one. Every time my boss does something that seems a little bit shady, no wonder I’m feeling that undue stress and pressure. You can connect the dots. Having that self-regulation helps you understand how to handle yourself.

Those are ways that you can protect yourself against the fiery flames of burnout. Being able to have a team to reach out to people in your life that you can connect with is a good protective factor for being resilient. Being optimistic could be a trait or a stage, but having hope for the future that you believe something is going to be better. Sometimes, that does take a little bit of work for some people.

I came back earlier to this idea about doing what you do best. I’ll use an example. Let’s say you’re innovative. You’re a creative person, and you have a lot of work to do. For many of us, it’s not remarkable how much more work will get done. It’s like one of those garbage bags you buy in the grocery store. You can keep putting more in the bag. It’s like, “Look how much more I fit in.”

I’m not advocating for that to say, “Find your strengths. You can do seventeen times more things.” It’s not about that. It’s about if the work you’re getting to do for this example is innovative and you get to problem-solve in new and cool ways that get you to demonstrate your creativity, that extra workload will probably not feel as much like work. If you were assigned something that was not in your wheelhouse, like, “Do this pivot table,” You want to hurt someone or yourself. That could be your joy. I do not want to put any damper on the pivot table. Do you like pivot tables?

I know how to use them.

Do you get excited about putting a pivot table together?

Not anymore.

There was a time when that floated your boat.

There was a time when they were not a skill that everybody knew.

That was a trait that you did that made you special.

In the scheme of things, as it relates to resilience, part of it comes from pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, learning what you’re capable of, and realizing that you can get through it and it didn’t kill you. The next time, it’s not as scary or daunting. If you work at pushing yourself outside your comfort zone, you grow. Everybody says, “You have to get outside your comfort zone to grow.” You get outside your comfort zone to build your resilience.

You prove to yourself that I did that before. We forget. That’s why I’m encouraging people to track their tiny triumphs, their big wins, and all the sizes of things that you’re like, “I did that thing.” Go back to that spreadsheet, journal, or wherever you like to keep your notes, but say, “I handled this. That seemed daunting when this came up last time. I weathered the storm.” Evidence is crucial. We lose track of evidence when we’re overwhelmed, when there’s time pressure, and when we haven’t eaten enough. We need to go back and go, “It’s okay. I got this.”

Before we wrap up, I have a few questions. When you were growing up, what did you envision yourself being?

I had the combo of wanting to be a nurse and an artist. Those were the musings that were going on in my head. I drew the illustrations in my book, and I do it for my blog every Monday. I don’t identify as calling myself an artist, but I could technically call myself that to some extent. No, thanks to the nursing.

What were your early jobs? What did you learn about yourself from them?

My first job was telemarketing. Who wants to be a telemarketer? Nobody, but it was amazing. When you’re young and learning, especially in a commissioned environment, it is like, “I am the master of my destiny. I can help make this happen. I learned about some competitive spirit ringing the bell when you sold the thing and taking leads home. I could work on them. It could be this idea about extra work that pays off.” Some people might say that was illegal, but it was fun.

Working in food service early on, the power of the sweaty grind is crucial. I worked in the health club industry for a long time. I loved it for the energy that it created and that notion that is helping people. We would often describe it as the best part of their day. Not everybody wanted to go to the gym. When they left, they always felt better about themselves. That was always part of that notion of being a part of something around helping people live and feel better.

Layering on all the corporate leadership examples and lessons learned along the way of doing that for several years was fascinating. I am a big advocate of not being afraid to change your career as often as you like. You can look at it as a portfolio. There’s a common thing I’ve noticed back to your point about people, especially at different levels of organizations, but the more senior people are, there’s almost a stuckness of feeling like, “I’ve invested this much time in my career. It’s the sunk cost fallacy.”

Yes, and isn’t. What if it was yes, you did this, and you nailed it? You did a great job, and you get to go back to school and try something new. You’re going to lose. Your ego might feel bruised. We can handle that. We’ve done that before. You’re going to go back and be at a title that wasn’t as flashy. That’s fine. Is this about your happiness, or is this about how it looks on LinkedIn? Give it a go.

Helping people realize that there’s so much more out there. If you’re dreaming it, and you keep thinking about it, and you feel that sense of regret on your deathbed that you didn’t go and see what it was like to become an archeologist, I can’t handle that for you. Let’s get you figuring out what that would look like, even if it’s a couple of long extended vacations where you get to give digging a go.

The beauty of this world is that you can have multiple careers and different things that you’re potentially doing at the same time. That’s a different construct than several years ago when you went to a company and worked for the same company the entire time you worked. You got the gold watch and a pat on the back as you went out the door at age 60.

I’m going to say something that might inflame. There is some evidence that, back in the day, and I’ll pick my dad, he worked for the same company for many odd years, and he had a pension. He’s of the generation where he is still puzzled by the youth now, pursuing a job for passion or changing your job because this isn’t purposeful enough. The job is the thing.

Here’s where to go back to some of the data around the Gallup organization that checks for engagement. One of the existential angst out there, in addition to the fact that we’re all going to die, is this idea about freedom. When we have more choice, ability, and option in front of us, we don’t always handle that well psychologically because we’re always feeling like we should be doing something different, more, better, or the grass is a greener scenario, whereas in some ways the simplicity and the tighter constraints of different generations, it was like, “I’m happy to have the job.” That might be a little bit controversial.

The social contract was different. Back then, as long as you did a reasonably good job, you were guaranteed lifetime employment. Now, most people have at least some level of worry about, “Am I going to lose my job?” For most people, that is a non-zero probability. It completely changes the way that people think about work. I’ve worked in companies where people have been looking over their shoulders during times of layoffs. That is a threat that our parents’ generation didn’t have to go through so much.

I like the counterpoint. It’s helpful.

Last question, because I know you have to go. Anything you wish somebody had told you early in your career journey?

It would be more of a go for it. When I was working and climbing, I was going for it. It could not have been an internal voice because that was all about ascending where I was. Externally, a coach who was neutral agnostic would be like, “What are you waiting for? Take the risk, the plunge, and the metaphor, but jump in that deep end of the pool and go for it.”

There almost always is something fantastically better over there. Even if it’s not better, trust yourself. You can handle this. You can still land on your feet because the next thing you jump to that wasn’t spectacular can lead you to the next thing, which is going to be great for the next several years, and you’re going to do the next thing. Go for it. What are you waiting for? Life is too short.

We’ll stop there. Thank you for doing this with me.

Thank you. It’s time well spent.

It’s a fun conversation, and I appreciate it.

Yeah, I agree.

I will let you go, and have a good rest of your day. I want to thank Jodi for joining me in covering her new book, You Only Die Once, for coaching work with C-level leaders and others, for her teaching, and for her own career journey. If you’d like to make the most of your remaining Mondays, visit PathWise.io and become a member. Basic membership is free. You can also sign up on the website for our newsletter and follow us on LinkedIn, Facebook, YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Thanks.

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About Jodi Wellman

Jodi Wellman is a keynote speaker, the author of You Only Die Once, and the founder of Four Thousand Mondays. She is also a Professional Certified Coach (PCC) with the International Coaching Federation and a Certified Professional Co-Active Coach. She is an Assistant Instructor and trainer in the Resilience Program at the University of Pennsylvania, from which she also has a Master’s degree.