Jennifer is an accomplished journalist and a best-selling author. Jennifer’s first book, Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic, sounded the alarm about a troubling trend in our society. She has followed up with a new book entitled Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose, which offers an alternative to precarious, achievement-based identities, and shows how to construct more meaningful lives. Jennifer joins the podcast today to discuss the concept of “mattering” and our core human needs.

Do you feel exhausted by the hyper-competitive nature of our society? Job applications, college admissions, extracurriculars, even enrolling children in the right summer camp? If you haven’t heard it yet, check out our first Templeton Ideas episode with Jennifer Wallace on Breaking the Cycle of Toxic Achievement Culture.

Transcripts of our episodes are made available as soon as possible. They are not fully edited for grammar or spelling.

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Thomas Burnett: Jenny, welcome to the show.

Jennifer Wallace: So great to be back.

Thomas Burnett: So you wrote in your new book that you spent six years researching mattering, and you interviewed hundreds of people all over the world, and you asked them the same question. Do you feel like you matter? Which it’s very blunt, very straightforward. Very direct.

What kind of response did you get?

Jennifer Wallace: Well, I was surprised by the response. Many times I heard, “not anymore. No, I don’t feel like I matter”. And these were people across demographics, across professions. I interviewed hundreds of people and surveyed over 2000 across the world talking about, again, do they feel like they matter in specific domains of their life?

You know, it didn’t matter if they were doctors at major medical centers or caregivers or educators or college students. Many people told me they felt like they only mattered when they hit target goals, or others told me they felt like they mattered too much, that they were so critical to everyone else’s needs, but their needs were never prioritized.

And that’s not true Mattering. True mattering is balancing feeling valued ourselves and adding value to others.

Thomas Burnett: I wanna add another quote from your previous book that, that I appreciate and I think really sets the stage for our conversation. So you wrote, “Beneath the fear and anxiety and envy and status seeking, we’re all striving for the same basic human needs to feel valued, to belong, to be known and loved for who we are at our core”.

And to me that sentence just sort of encapsulates of like this universal need. And two, it kinda sets this foundation for your book that is exploring, “Why don’t we have it?” and “Why are we struggling?” Like we do all this other stuff with our life. And often we’re just not addressing this most fundamental, most shared quality.

So that’s what I really wanna explore with you today. How do we attend to what matters?

Jennifer Wallace: Well, I would say in a nutshell, we’ve been treating it as a nice-to-have feeling over the last several decades and not a universal human need, and that’s why it’s going unmet.

Thomas Burnett: You mentioned a moment ago that there’s kind of an equation of like mattering is, “This plus this”.

Can you say that again and, and let’s look at each component of that really basic equation.

Jennifer Wallace: Researchers define it in different ways, but the definition that resonates most with me was one I got from researcher Isaac Prosky, and it is mattering is, “Feeling valued and adding value”. Feeling valued by our family, by our friends, by our colleagues, society, even ourselves, and having an opportunity to add value back across those domains.

So the more we feel valued, the more we wanna add value. The more we add value, the more we feel valued, it becomes this positive upward spiral.

Thomas Burnett: I have spent a lot of time reflecting on that because it made such an impression on me and looking at those two terms I noticed some elements about it that stood out.

So feeling value and adding value. So feeling valued is psychological. It’s in my head and only I can tell you if I feel valued, but adding value is something outside of myself, and I think to me, a really profound takeaway from that equation is that mattering connects us. It can’t be done in a vacuum, it can’t be done by myself.

Jennifer Wallace: What I think you’re bringing up is also another point, which is that mattering is a meta need. So an umbrella term that captures so many of the other needs that we all know about as humans, the feeling for connection, belonging, self-determination, mastery, purpose, meaning, all of these things can be captured under the umbrella of mattering.

And what I love about mattering in particular is that it’s so sticky. It’s so simple. People are responding to it in a way that is energizing to me. As someone who’s been studying this now, actually seven years, really on a daily basis, this concept has changed my life and I wanna spend the rest of my career really diving into it because it is so rich, as you point out.

To me it is the entire reason we are here, and that is to matter. To matter to the people who matter to us, to matter to the world around us, to enjoy that sense of feeling valued and that psychological security that we are not going through this world alone. That to me is the purpose of life.

Thomas Burnett: Explain to me, how do you add value to people’s lives in a way that relates here to this topic?

Jennifer Wallace: So I will say adding value starts with ourselves, mattering to ourselves, which can be very hard for people in caring professions or parents who often feel like others’ needs are more important than their own.

And what I will say is that when we don’t tend to our own mattering, when we don’t fill our own needs, it’s impossible over time to show up as our best selves. So it begins with mattering to ourselves. And then I’ve done lots of qualitative interviews and I discovered this kind of formula for adding value, which is finding a genuine need in the world or in your community or neighborhood, or even your household, and using your time, your talent, or your treasure to meet that need. That is how we add value.

And it’s not as complicated as people sometimes feel. I mean, I, I so often hear from people that they don’t have a purpose. They can’t find their purpose with a capital P. And what I say to them is, it’s actually in the work of living purposefully.

On a daily basis on being attuned to genuine needs around us, not what we think is a need, but what is actually a genuine need from the person who is asking for it, centering them in that question, and then using whatever we have to meet that need if we do that day in and day out. That is your pathway to purpose with a capital P.

I tell this story about the Repair Cafe, which is a movement that started in Amsterdam in 2009, and it was founded to help prevent waste in landfills. So people throwing out microwaves toasters and someone had the idea, why don’t we find people who are handy and match them with people who have broken appliances, lamps, things like that.

And so it started, and it is now a, an international movement. The idea that people have these pop-up repair cafes in their communities. And so not only are they helping prevent landfill, so filling that need, they’re also filling the need of each other. So it is this wonderful sort of 360 degree, three dimensional mattering to each other and to the environment.

Thomas Burnett: I’m gonna turn next to this topic of feeling valued. I think we have an intuition of when we feel valued, but getting under the hood and some of the components. Talk to me about that.

Jennifer Wallace: So, researchers, as I mentioned, have been studying mattering since the 1980s. It was first conceptualized by Mars Rosenberg, who is famously known for the Rosenberg self-esteem scale that’s still used today.

So they have been finding these ingredients to what makes someone feel like they matter and what makes others feel like they matter? Right? And so I’ve put these into what I call the SAID framework, just so it’s easy to remember. The four main ingredients to mattering is feeling significant or important, feeling appreciated.

Feeling invested in and feeling depended on. So I’ll just quickly go through them feeling significant and important. I was struck in my interviews when I asked people to name a time they felt like they mattered. It was never the big moments of life. It wasn’t getting an award at work. It wasn’t a toast at a milestone birthday.

It was small moments. It was a neighbor bringing over a pot of soup when they’ve been sick. It’s a colleague checking in after a particularly rough day at the office. It’s someone saving them a seat at the table. We as humans crave that social proof that we matter. In our day to day, I think about it as mattering in the mundane.

That’s how we feel significant and important. Appreciated, i’ve come to think of as appreciating the doer behind the deed. So let’s say you have a colleague who’s so great at planning team events like dinners or happy hours, instead of thanking them the next day with, thank you for planning such a wonderful event.

A way to feed their sense of mattering could be to say something like, you are really a community builder. You bring us so much closer, and I just want you to know how lucky I feel to have you in our department because of you. We are a much stronger and cohesive team. So feeling invested in is having people who are invested in our goals, who are there to support us, to push us, to hold us accountable, and to be there when we struggle and we when we stumble.

And also to have people in our lives who we are invested in. There’s a concept that the researchers of mattering called Ego Extension, which is this idea that we can extend our ego to include the egos of others so that their successes begin to feel like our successes. And the last component is D, feeling dependent on or relied on.

It’s the idea that you would be missed if you were not here, that you are adding something, that the world is better because you are here, but also having people in your life that you can depend on so that you can enjoy that psychological security that you are not going through this world alone.

Thomas Burnett: Yeah, that’s a great acronym.

So SAID. Significance, appreciation, invested and depended on. What I like about that too is that for each of those things, there’s something that we can give to others. It’s not a one way track. There’s this outflow and then there’s an intake, and they’re actually the same things. It’s just which end of it are we on?

Jennifer Wallace: To build on what you were saying, I often think when people say to me, well, I don’t feel like I matter, what can I do? And I say to them, you are one decision, one action away from setting yourself back on the path and that often the fastest way. To feel like you matter is to remind someone else that they do.

It’s as simple as you were on my mind. You’re a priority. It could be sending a text to someone saying, if it weren’t for you, I wouldn’t have had the courage to go for that grant or that job interview. Thank you for believing in me. Even sometimes when I can’t even believe in myself, I’m so lucky to have you in my life.

So really feeding a sense of mattering in someone else, it comes back to us

Thomas Burnett: I wanna pivot next to the topic that we roach a bit beginning the idea of a crisis in mattering. And the anecdote that struck me the most is that you interviewed firemen who told you that they didn’t feel like their lives mattered. I just really couldn’t believe it. But suicide is a leading cause of firefighter death.

Jenny, how can firemen feel like their lives don’t matter?

Jennifer Wallace: So I was beginning the book, I was thinking, what are the jobs where the, it is just so obvious that you matter. And I thought, firefighters, they risk their lives to save our lives. Like, how could you not know you matter? And then as I was digging in deeper, I was looking at the high rates of burnout and disengagement.

You mentioned the suicide rate, that’s often because of the repeated trauma that firefighters are exposed to. So I didn’t know this until I started researching it, but firefighters are often the first to arrive at the scene of a car accident or a medical emergency after they stabilize the person. The EMS takes over and whisks that person to the hospital, and firefighters never know what happened next.

Did their actions save a life or ease somebody suffering? And so what I took from that story was the idea that we are all disconnected from our impact today, right? What the firefighters are experiencing is an extreme version, but boy, almost everyone I know feels like they are disconnected from their impact.

Whether they’re working in academia, whether they are working as caregivers, whether they’re working in an accounting department or just as a friend. Right? How often do you give a piece of advice to someone and they do not circle back to say, I took the advice, or Here’s what happened. So the fire chief.

In that fire station in North Charleston, South Carolina, where I had spent a bunch of time, created a system to change that. He tracked the outcomes of rescues so that his firefighters would know when their actions saved a life or ease someone’s suffering because he knew it’s not enough to do meaningful and purposeful work.

We need to know our actions make a difference that we matter. We’re adding value. And so I’ve come to realize in our everyday lives, one of the reasons why people feel like they don’t matter is because they are disconnected from their impact. Because we don’t circle back. We don’t close the loop. We can do that.

It does not take long. For us to close the loop. And I argue in the book, if we don’t have people in our lives who are connecting us to our own impact, we can take initiative and connect ourselves to our impact. I’m not a great journaler. I think it’s ’cause I write all day long, but I do ask myself a simple thirty second prompt.

At the end of every night I say, where today did I feel valued? And where today did I add value even in a small way. Was it offering advice to my daughter who was going through a friendship struggle? Was it mentoring a colleague who’s about to launch a book and meeting them on Zoom and giving them encouragement and telling them here was what worked for me?

What are these small ways that we are adding value? We can connect to our own impact?

Thomas Burnett: I wanna talk next about pursuing mattering. You mentioned in your book there are certain like counterfeit forms of mattering, things that look. Good on the surface, maybe bright and shiny. You pursue it long enough and is empty at the bottom. Tell me, what are some of these illusory forms of mattering that perhaps are far too common and really entrapping?

Jennifer Wallace: Yeah, I mean, to me it really boils down to intrinsic values and goals and extrinsic values and goals. So intrinsic values are things like wanting to be pro-social kind to your neighbor, wanting to invest in yourself and grow spiritually. Wanting to add value to the world in ways that lift up others.

Intrinsic values. Extrinsic values are the fool’s gold of battering. Those are the job for the status sake. It is wanting any of the status markers, the big house, the brand name, this or that, wanting a certain image or popularity. Those are the fool’s gold of mattering. They may make you feel like you matter for a minute, but that’s not a nourishing type of mattering.

And in fact, Tim Casser has done amazing research on how our values impact our wellbeing. His argument is that values operate like a zero sum game. So the more time and energy we spend in our lives pursuing those extrinsic values, the less room we have in our life for pursuing the intrinsic ones, and here’s why this matters.

Extrinsic values, those false gold of mattering are linked with negative mental health and substance abuse disorder. Whereas intrinsic values are linked with the wellbeing we want for ourselves. And that is because those intrinsic values lead us to a nourishing form of mattering. To being a good neighbor, to being a supportive colleague, to being kind to our environment, good to our environment, to wanting to be a steward of the world and be better for the generations after us.

And also to appreciate the generations that came before us. So all of these intrinsic values are what lead us to that nourishing type of mattering.

Thomas Burnett: Mm-hmm. Yeah. That’s great. I’m gonna turn next to what you described as like the dynamics of mattering. It’s not something that you have or you don’t. It’s constantly moving.

It’s ebbing and it’s flowing. So help me understand, how do we navigate these life’s transitions when we feel like we matter less?

Jennifer Wallace: Yeah. I mean, I wish I had known. About the concept of mattering and how to foster it in myself when I was going through major life transitions, I remember moving to London as a newlywed with my husband.

I write about this in the book and how overnight this sense of loneliness crept in. I left New York where I had family and friendships that had been decades in the making. I left my full-time job at 60 Minutes where I knew I was valued and added value and moved to London where I was freelancing and all of a sudden overnight my mattering collapsed.

I wish I had known then that there are things you can do preemptively and also while you’re going through this hard time, and I’ll just outline a couple of things that I have found in research finds useful. It’s the idea of having role models. In our lives, people who have gone through similar transitions and found their way on through the other side.

So role models not only offer us this feeling that we’re not the only one going through this, they can also offer a kind of blueprint for how to go through this. It also, by the way, feeds their mattering that their lived experience actually has value, that their pain can actually help someone else. And then the second step is to harness the power of invitation, both accepting invitations.

And also issuing invitations. So I have research in the book called The Beautiful Mess Effect because often when we are going through a hard time, we are reluctant to accept invitations because we believe we need to be perfect, to be loved. These are the lies that society likes to tell us. And so accepting an invitation is letting people in a little bit into our messy lives.

And the Beautiful Mess Effect supports this, the idea that we often underestimate how much authenticity letting people in actually brings people closer to us. So the very thing we worry will make someone not wanna be our friend, that we don’t have our act together actually is the thing that attracts them to us because they believe that we are authentic.

The issuing invitation is that I interviewed a woman who was going through a terrible divorce. She was complaining to her therapist that she was not getting invitations, and when she was, she felt like a fifth wheel with the couples, and her therapist said, you have agency, you can invite people into your kitchen, invite your girlfriends, and jumpstart your social life again.

And I love this idea because we do have agency. We don’t have to wait for permission for people to tell us that we matter. We can issue invitations on our own. So role models and invitations are two ways of going through life transitions in a way that kind of helps to buffer against the sharpness of those turns.

Thomas Burnett: You mentioned kitchens. I wanna explore that more. Talk to me about spaces and places that particularly facilitate mattering.

Jennifer Wallace: When I was growing up in the seventies, mattering was baked into everyday life. My neighbors depended on me. I depended on them. I would forget my key and I’d go over and they’d have a spare key.

There were places where I felt seen and known there was a penny candy store that I would go to after school with my money from babysitting and buy myself candy, and they knew what my favorite treats were. So there were everyday places where we felt seen and known and valued. Researchers have been calling them third places.

So the first place is home, the second place is the workplace, and the third place are places like that, penny candy or libraries or cafes or places where people would know us. So many third places have dissolved because of overhead or tech. And so what I argue in the book is that we can create these third places, these mattering spaces ourselves.

I interviewed a couple in the book who ordered. Pink La Flamingos on Amazon and created in their neighborhood a place where people would gather. And so anytime someone in the neighborhood saw the pink flamingos, they would know that people in the neighborhood were gathering in the backyard over a barbecue or having a hot chocolate in the house.

So we have agency in creating these mattering spaces. It doesn’t require any money. It could be the park bench at the dog run. You could deem that your mattering space where you sit and you strike up conversation with people that you see every day. It requires intentionality.

Thomas Burnett: Let’s talk about, with a time we have remaining, some concrete actionable steps. I think two kinds. One short term, immediate individual. Then we’ll talk longer term, bigger picture. Tell me first, I’m looking to do something today and tomorrow that’s going to boost my mattering and that of others.

Jennifer Wallace: I would say to start with mattering to ourselves.

A quick practice is that waking up every morning and thinking about what is one small need that I have today that I need to fill so that I could show up as my best self for the people who rely on me. So that requires tuning into ourselves. What is it that I need? Some days it’s a 30 minute conversation with my sister.

Other days it’s a walk in the park with a friend. Other days it’s just a. Quiet corner in my house to read my book in peace with my tea. So what is it? Identify what you need so that you can show up as your best self for yourself and for others. Another thing I would say is to just send that text to somebody, as we talked about earlier, and really help to connect people to their impact.

When I think about the longer term ways of fostering mattering. One, I think it is committing to a third place that feeds your sense of mattering. My dad did this when he was retiring. He committed to a local restaurant casual where he would go every week for a burrito, his beloved burrito. He got to know the staff and he got to know who was going back to college, who had children, how were things going, and he would really check in.

And I remember he stopped going for a few weeks to help care for my grandmother as she was dying. And when he went back to the restaurant, the staff greeted him with a sympathy card that each person had written a personal condolence. That’s a mattering space, a place. Where you are making such an impact that you are missed when you are no longer there.

So commit to a space. I would also say foster spaces of mattering at work. You know, we as adults spend the majority of our waking hours in the workplace. So if you don’t have a leader who is making you feel like you matter, you can be a mattering agent, you can help to create that space for the people that you work with.

How do you do that? I think about it as connecting the dots. It is saying what you appreciate about your colleague, connecting them to how they are making a positive impact to the rest of the team and to the world around them. So really making an effort to connect people deliberately to their impact and reminding ourselves of the impact that we make every day.

I’ll say one other challenge that I’ve given myself. I try to imagine everyone I meet wearing an invisible sign that says, tell me do I matter, and we can answer that with strangers, with our colleagues, with our family members, and our friends with warmth, with a smile radiating positive energy, even if we’re not stopping to say something.

We are living in a world where we are so distracted. We have so much incoming and so much output demanded of us that often we just go through life on autopilot. What mattering does is it forces us to turn our self-focused lens out and to notice really the best in ourselves and the best in others. If anyone out there is wondering what their sense of purpose is, or if it has shifted through a life transition in the world we are living in now, I think there is no greater purpose than to be a mattering agent, to be that person in the world, in your corner of the world that really lets people know that they matter.

Thomas Burnett: Thank you for joining me on the show, and I’m excited about this chapter of life and where it’s taken you.

Jennifer Wallace: Thank you so much, Tom.