Timestamps

00:00:00: Introduction
00:01:42: Purpose at work
00:05:37: Resilience
00:08:22: Job crafting…
00:09:27: … process
00:10:08: … people
00:11:45: … purpose
00:12:09: "The four whys"
00:15:49: Top-down and bottom-up approach
00:18:07: Where to start if you feel really stuck
00:20:00: Arm your mind with a story
00:22:45: Dan's career advice
00:25:12: Final thoughts

Interview Transcription

Sarah Ellis: Hi, I'm Sarah Ellis and this is the Squiggly Careers podcast.  Each week we chat about a different topic to do with work and share practical ideas and actions that we hope will help you to navigate your Squiggly Career with a bit more confidence and clarity.

This week is one of our Ask the Expert interviews.  Shortly, you will hear me chatting to London Business School Professor of Organisational Behaviour and author, Dan Cable, and we're going to be focusing this interview on purpose.  What is purpose; why does it matter; and most importantly, what does it mean to have more purpose in the work that we do?

Dan is brilliant, he is such a joy to have a conversation with; he's so full of energy and enthusiasm, and it was exactly the kind of conversation I was hoping for: practical, realistic and really useful.  Well, certainly that was kind of my takeaway from the conversation.  Dan has loads of great resources that I'm always recommending to people who come on our workshops and you can find them all in one place at dan-cable.com, of course we will link to them in the show notes. 

In particular, if you are looking for an article to read on things like job crafting, he wrote something for Harvard Business Review called "How to turn your boring job into a job you'll love".  Quite a dramatic title but actually some really helpful content in there that I'm pretty sure everyone will benefit from.  I hope you enjoy the episode and I'll be back at the end just to let you know what's coming up next.

Dan, thank you so much for joining me today on the Squiggly Careers podcast.

Dan Cable: It's great, thanks for letting me contribute.

Sarah Ellis: I'm really looking forward to our conversation today because we're going to be talking about a topic that comes up a lot but I think people still really struggle with.  That's this idea of purpose at work, discovering your purpose, finding your purpose and I think it feels like a really big and quite an overwhelming area to grapple with; the pressure and the expectation to discover this purpose that we put on ourselves.  

I read some really interesting research actually how going through the process of thinking about your purpose and almost, "Am I getting enough purpose?" actually can make people genuinely feel really anxious and can do the opposite of what we're trying to do.  I'm just interested to start, from your perspective, when you're thinking about people finding more purpose at work, what does success look like here?

Dan Cable: Yeah, and the first thing I'll do is just respond to that insight, or that intuition that you have.  Purpose goes to a self-definition it seems, and that means that people get a little nervous about it because if I can't state it clearly, then who am I?  That question of, "Who am I?" just runs so deep for humans, it kind of rips right to the core, and that's why this seems really different from saying, "Do you enjoy your job?" 

I would say it's a superficial question because it says, "Does my job make me happier?  Do I find it interesting?"  That's a more approachable way to ask things but just  to say, "Does my job fulfil my purpose?" or, "Does it move me toward my calling?", that's almost like I said, it's a religious question almost and I think that that's unfortunate.

Sarah Ellis: Maybe it's a newer question as well.  It's like when I've read about this before, the role that work plays in our lives has changed, I think, in terms of our expectation of what we want from our work and I think that's a double-edged sword, isn't it; because we spend a lot of time at work, so the fact that that can be a source of fulfilment and meaning for us is a brilliant upside, because it's how we spend most of our time; but equally that thing about just the expectations of what we can get from it, what we need from it, seem to be so much higher. 

I think probably even when I started my career, I don't think people had that -- people didn't even use the word "purpose" I don't think when I first started working.

Dan Cable: That's right, we weren't to where we needed that yet.  I think about how, for instance, my father, who was born in 1929, it seemed like for him, as a depression era child, the big deal was that he had a job.  Then it seemed like by the time I came along it was like, "I want to be able to learn stuff though, keep developing", and then this new generation is like, "Well, yeah, of course I want to learn and grow but it also has to have impact that matters.  It has to have meaning to me personally". 

I think you're onto something there as well.  It's almost like there's like a kind of inflation of what jobs are supposed to do for us.  What an interesting thought and insight, and also I wonder if that kind of creates a heaviness for those of us that aren't able to point to something and say, "That's my purpose and that's my calling", maybe we feel little less than.

Sarah Ellis: I was reading Alive at Work again, but there's one part I remember underlining that said around just because your work has meaning, doesn't mean that it's easy or that every day is brilliant or full of happy smiles.  Actually meaningful work can be hard and very effortful, but it becomes more worth it because you have that sense of, "I know maybe why I'm doing this and I know, yeah, this bit's hard, but it's in the pursuit of something that I care about".  Is that what you find in your research that when perhaps people do feel more of a sense of a purpose, that it doesn't make life easier, but maybe it makes it easier to find your way through the squiggliness?

Dan Cable: It's a really nice way to think of it, though the fancy word is "resilience".  It is true that for tasks and activities that we think match our purpose are meaningful to us, they have a strong "why" for us; the sort of "how" becomes less important.  The day in and day out grind of it becomes less aversive because we're in pursuit of something that matters.  I think that that is the sharpest way that we can think about the power of purpose, for a human being.

It's so interesting to think that we might be one of the only animals that needs that.  I mean I've never been a dog so I can't say, but other animals just seem to get on with it, they don't seem to need these stories about what matters; we really seem to need that.  As a species, it almost seems like that's our first order of business, is to figure out what's this for and why do I act this way and why are we here?  I mean they're just such metaphysical questions and if we don't come to answers, it seems to wear us out. 

There's now been, I guess -- I know of four different studies that show that when we can feel that our lives and our work -- it's found independently.  If, when our lives and our work seem to have meaning to us, seem to have a role in our bigger picture, we live longer and we're more resilient in the face of adversity and we're less likely to suffer these depressive incidents when we get knocked down by life.  As near as I can tell, those are kind of facts and I find that to be a really important domain.

There's some other things I wanted to tell you about that idea of the Squiggly; some people for whatever reason feel like they have found it, a purpose in life and in work and they know what they're trying to be pursuing.  Others are more like seekers, where they bounce around learning what isn't it for a long time, but then it dawns on them what it is for them.  There's more than one way to find your purpose, and it may not hit you like a flash of light when you're 16 and it's time to start thinking about, "What's next for me?"  There may be efficiency advantages to knowing up front.

In the research some people at age 7 and 6 years old already know they're going to be a doctor and they literally just work towards that like a missile; every day is another step closer to being the doctor.  Then there's other people at age 40, they're still trying different things out and they're still trying to see what isn't it.

Sarah Ellis: I'd love to come back to this job crafting idea because actually I'm going to ask you a bit about an article you wrote on job crafting, which is something that we've talked about on the Podcast before and people are always really interested in; because it starts from where you are, it feels I think like an accessible opportunity to make your work better and the title for the article was, Turn Your Boring Job into a Job You Love. 

Help us and our listeners to understand, I think firstly maybe just a little brief explanation, like remind people what job crafting is, because I don't think it's an everyday term in every organisation; and then maybe what that looks like and some of these practical actions we have hinted at so far.

Dan Cable: One thing that I really agree strongly with, it's still not broken through job crafting, because I think that so many of us still start with the assumption that the organisation gets to say what our job is.  I think it's really quite interesting to flip it on its head and say, "The organisation may really benefit from us being more lit up", if we're able to personalise our work; if we're able to take the job in terms of the results that make it our own in terms of how we get there and what the job means.

The three different types of approaches you could say, the first "P" has to do with the process of the work.  There's so many things to say about that but it means, in terms of the tasks themselves, you often can find one or two of the tasks that either they're not asked for or there's not much of it asked for, but you find that doing it lights you up; because it uses your strengths and it makes you feel more alive.  What I've been helping in the A students and executive student is bring in tasks, not because they're asked for, not because you get paid to do that exact thing, but because it generates energy that helps you do the rest of your job better.

"P" number two is people.  We often think you can't choose who you work with and if you're passive, then you don't, but the evidence is against it.  You actually have a lot of choices to make, for example, there's lots of little examples, if you're a client-facing consultant, it may be the case that you're much more lit up by some industries or some particular clients due to cultural fit or value congruence, whatever it might be.  If you just start talking with your boss and say, "I would rather work on that than that", yeah they may indifferent.  It may be the same to them but really change how life feels to you; that's one.

Another one is it's possible to get trapped into relationships where it may feel productive and efficient; it may feel like because it used to work well -- for instance in my own world, I'll say publishing with certain other professors, other colleagues who were, "They're really good at statistics, and I'm really good at the writing", so we'd team up and we'd start having some good publications.  That may sound great and complimentary, but if we don't get along interpersonally, for a while I found myself sticking with the relationship; even though it was not much fun, it was productive.  It's just, life's too short. 

If you had indefinite time maybe, but you just don't and so the idea of finding more time with the people that inspire you, it's something that we can do.  It's almost like you can trim your relationships and just overinvest in the relationships that give more back.

Sarah Ellis: So that's interesting, so yeah, process, people; last "P"?

Dan Cable: What do you guess the third one is?  What's the topic of our conversation?

Sarah Ellis: Is it just purpose?

Dan Cable: Let's talk just briefly about this one because purpose is construed by ourselves.  I mean it's a story that we tell ourselves.  I think about editing that story and one of the ways, I have created a little digital tool and I work with MBA students and it's on personalising that story of why we do the tasks in our job. 

What I do is I took this research on construal level theory which is quite a mouthful and just created an exercise called The Four Whys.  I'm sure everybody does this at one point in their lives but it's the idea of saying, "Let me take a given task", like let's say you're a manager and you have to do these dreaded performance evaluation meetings at the end of whatever the quarter or the year and pretty much everybody hates them. 

You could ask yourself, "Well, why do I do this?"  You listen really hard for the real story that your mind is telling you and a lot of the times the story is, "Because you have to".  You say, "Okay, I wonder if there's not a more inspirational story though?"  Okay, that may be an answer, but is it the most inspiring answer for me.  What if I thought, "It might help people to do these?"  How would it help people to do these?  "Okay, well it gives them feedback".  Okay, well then that's slightly better.  Why do you do those; because I have to.  I feel a little sick inside.  Why do I do that; because it helps give people feedback.

Let's follow that through; what's the second why?  "Why do you care if you give people feedback?"  You think about that for one minute, you say, "Well, I guess I want them to move forward in their career", or you say, "Well I guess I want them to know where they stand", but you listen to what your own brain tells you might be meaningful.

Then okay, say it's because I want to move them forward in their career, then you say to the third one, "Why do you care about their career?  Why do you care if they move on in their career?"  Then you just listen.  What does your brain say?  It might say like, "Well, because you want to help people", "Okay, well listen maybe we're getting somewhere here".  If you want to help people that's meaningful for you, this becomes a path to helping people. 

So, all of a sudden you have recrafted that away from a necessity and towards something meaningful and purposeful.  I've done that with every task in my own job, including grading papers, including why I teach, including why I write papers, why I argue with reviewers, why I do podcasts.  I really have tried to do the four whys to just listen to what my brain tells me and then ask, "Is that good enough?"

Sarah Ellis: If I've understood that right, just listening to you each why is then connected to the previous answer.  We often call it like your diving deeper each time, until you get to the point where you feel, actually that's something that I've really connected with.

Dan Cable: That's exactly right, let's just take grading, and work it through one more time.  It's sort of like saying, "Now, why do I grade these papers?"  You say, "It is because I want to give them feedback".  "Why do you want to give them feedback?"  "I want to help them improve?"  "Why do you care if they improve?"  "Because I want to help them understand", this is for my own one, "I want to help them understand how to put more living in other people's lives".  Now, we're getting really close to that's what I try to do.

I kind of feel like what I do is try to help put more living into other people's lives.  All of a sudden I'm able to connect my written comments to my larger order purpose, but it just feels like given that I have to do these anyway, let me try to understand how I can connect to it in a meaningful, personal way.

Sarah Ellis: So, just listening to you there talking about job crafting and then kind of connecting that back to this idea of purpose, do you think in the kind of work that you've done, almost rather than worrying about this sort of higher order discovery of a purpose or a direction that you find really motivating, would you almost recommend that actually people's time is better spent almost focusing on where you are today and how you can get more meaning and purpose from where you are now?

I feel like there's maybe, whether it's attention or not, but about a kind of nowness versus a, should people kind of be thinking more about where they'd like -- the direction.  We often talk about purpose being about a direction that you find motivating.  How do you consider that?  Almost where do you think people should put their energy and efforts?

Dan Cable: That's a great question.  The first thing that jumped in my mind as you were speaking is there's a top down and a bottom up, and so top down would be this approach of saying, "Forget about what I'm doing now, what I do care about in this world?  What makes me really curious about the world?  What kind of draws me in and I don't even know why.  I don't even care why it just does".  I feel like we don't want to ignore those.  I would want to listen to that top down of you don't have to say why it makes you mad or why it makes you excited or why it makes you curious, those are emotions that you could read as information.

So, I never would want to look away from that and always want to be listening to that but at the same time, there's a bottom-up approach of saying, "Right now, you probably have a job" and that's really where the job crafting comes in.

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

Dan Cable: You have a job and you're maybe not going to be able to leave this week or this month or maybe even this year.  So, in the meantime, how can we use our job as a learning platform?  How can we personalise it as a way to help it feel more like ourselves and not just this robotic machine-like approach to work.  In the middle is probably the Squiggly Career; what is in the middle are six or eight tasks across three or four decades that we're able to refine what makes us feel most alive.

Sarah Ellis: I sort of read research that sometimes scares me about how much people don't enjoy their job still; so you know we sort of describe this world where we look for so much fulfilment and have that expectation and yet on the other hand, there are lots of people who probably go, "But that's not my experience.  I don't go to work --" and you see those kind of cliché offices sometimes that say, "Do what you love" and these kind of big career statements that put a lot of pressure on you. 

If you're thinking, "Gosh I feel so far away from some of what Sarah and Dan have talked about today", what would your advice be to those kinds of people who kind of need to do a bit more living.  I really like the way you were like, "I want to help people to kind of live their lives kind of even better".  Where do you start if you feel really stuck or that you're struggling a bit?

Dan Cable: One is a new thing, and one is one we already discussed.  The new thing is this, My Best Possible Life Exercise and I've done this, I actually did this 12 years ago now, but it is where you sit down and on four successive days, you spend 20 minutes each time, so it's not a nothing exercise, but you're sitting down and you're writing, I did mine on Word so I could edit and so on, but you can do it on paper and pencil.

The idea was you write down, "In ten years, if everything went perfectly, what would my life look like?"  That even is outside of work, but it would be who am I around; what am I doing; what strengths am I using; how am I creating an impact?  There's a lot of evidence that suggests that this helps you find the story, not as though you're going to get that perfect either, but you're able to get enough distance from it that you can say, "Based on the skills, the talents and strengths that I've seen in myself" and you've thought about the people that have inspired you and the activities that kind of brought you most alive.

The way that I did this and I think I would even recommend is, I even started by writing down specific memories of times that I have felt most alive, and I try to be real gritty about them and be like, "Who was I around?" and, "What was I doing?  Time kind of felt like it went away; what was I doing there?  And it just seems so natural to be acting that way, so authentic; what was I doing?"

I spent the time, I really put in the time and I wrote that and that's been validated, there's a lot of evidence that suggests that that helps get a story in our brain and our brains love stories.  It not only makes people more likely to move toward that trajectory but it makes them healthier physically; makes them more resilient.  So it's almost like by writing that out, we start to make it more real, so that would be like James Pennebaker's work.

Sarah Ellis: Yes.

Dan Cable: There's also like King, I forget her first name but there's a researcher and she has done this exercise a number of times and when her college students do it, they literally go to the infirmary less, they literally get head colds less often and less sore throats.  It's actually quite powerful to arm our mind with a story about where we're going.  That's one thing and that's sort of the far off thing, but the really immediate thing -- the other thing really is this job crafting thing.

It really is about whatever job you're in right now, think really hard about the moments that do seem like you're getting close to your strengths.  The moments it really seem like you are a little bit lit up inside and just saying, "Would there be a way to do more of that?"  Then think about, are there certain strengths that you might be able to bring to that job that just maybe -- not because they asked you to do it, but just because it felt kind of interesting.

I'm going to give you a really quick example.  In my own life, one of the worst jobs I ever had was working in a supermarket, and I was only about 17 years old, and I was in New Kensington, Pennsylvania and I just did it to get some extra money and I had these parents that kind of treated work more like it was bad.  And I just remember -- even then I was quite social and I was a stocker, I stocked shelves, and it's not very social but I found that I could talk to the customers a little bit while I was doing it --

Sarah Ellis: Yeah.

Dan Cable: -- and that really helped.  Then I remember learning enough that I asked if I could start doing the cashier work, because I saw like they constantly are talking to the customers and I was able to get them to transfer me there.  You know it took about three months, but then I did and that really helped.  I got to tell you, not only did I get a raise because they thought that was like a promotion, it was also just non-financially gratifying, because every single person I got to talk with; and that just used a strength for me.

Now, I know that's not for everybody but the point is that's the beauty of it; it's a fit between finding the part of the work that might inspire you.  I went home feeling more energised than when I was just stocking shelves, so I'm just trying to tell that story because I'm not acting like now, I'm becoming a Nobel prize winner or now I'm sort of touching the lives of thousands; it's just a re-tweak but it made a big difference, and it had a lot of leverage for me.

Sarah Ellis: So Dan, just to finish our time together, ask you the same question that we ask all of our guests, which is to share your best or your favourite piece of career advice.  I'm sure you get asked actually by your students all the time, this question, and it's a hard one isn't it because I am going, "Distil all of your wisdom into a sentence or two".  But, what are the thoughts that you'd want to leave our listeners with today?

Dan Cable: I actually was going to bring up the little article, the little thing that I wrote about for your book.  I grew up in Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, but I spent a lot of time in my sort of medium adult in North Carolina; there are these mountains there.  In the same area, there were these bumper stickers I probably saw almost every time I went up there that would say, "Follow your bliss". 

My career advice is actually, "Follow your blisters", because a lot of times what's meaningful isn't fun.  It's not blissful and easy and you just click your heels and it's just laughable and joyous.  A lot of times the things that are most meaningful, you kind of have to work at and grind away at and it calls you back and then you grind away at it; and it hurts enough, you move away.  I'm thinking at this moment, even having kids and raising kids, you wouldn't always call that a blissful experience, but we keep coming back to it because it matters; it feels meaningful. 

That follow your blisters is a key slogan for me, because it reminds that it doesn't have to be a laugh a minute and joyous to be deeply important in terms of investing time and energy in pursuing improvement in it.  So for me, that's what I'm saying, is look for activities that keep drawing you back in like a magnet; even though they kind of annoy you, three days later you're back at it.

When I was a little kid, believe it or not, it was a guitar.  I never got very good at it, but I could never stay away from it for a day or two.  Just to show my friends, it felt fulfilling.  Then it became writing.  When I was about 19 or 20 years old, it became writing and I just never since, I've never been able to get away from writing; so I think that there's something that many of us can listen to that just, what calls you back even though it's sort of irritating at times.

Sarah Ellis: I hope you found that conversation useful and that it's prompted and sparked some new thoughts for you, or perhaps going to make you to reflect and think about your purpose differently or in a new way.  We're already thinking about our next Ask the Expert series, which will actually be series four, so let us know if there are people you particularly like to learn from and hear from and we'll do our very best.  I can at least promise that we'll ask even if someone says, "No". 

Probably the best place to let us know who you'd like to hear from is Instagram where we're @amazingif, and you can always connect with us on LinkedIn, let us know that you listen to the podcast and send us a message there too.

Of course, if you have time to do us a five-minute favour, rating and reviewing the podcast helps us loads, it means those algorithms that I don't quite understand work their magic as well as giving us a spark of joy during the week.  If you have bought our book The Squiggly Career, again leaving us a review on Amazon or wherever you bought your book makes a really massive difference to us.  It's one of those free things that you can do for small businesses, wherever you buy from a small business, that is really really helpful.

So that's everything for this week and we'll be back with you again, soon.  Bye for now.