Why Success Can Leave You Feeling Like You Don't Matter | John R. Miles & Linda Hurtado – EP 834

In a live conversation with Emmy Award-winning journalist Linda Hurtado, John R. Miles explores why success can coexist with emptiness, burnout, and disconnection, sharing the experiences behind The Mattering Effect and a practical framework for rebuilding meaning, worth, and connection.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:42Speaker 00

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• 1:21John R. Miles?

  Coming up next on Passion Struck. As I was trying to understand why this is happening to so many of us, I found that the systems and the environments that surround all of us are very good at measuring what we produce, what we earn, what we give, what we prove, what we achieve, but they are very bad at reflecting back our worth. Hey, friends. Welcome back to episode 834 of Passion Struck. Today's episode is a special one. Last week, on Tuesday, October 6, I celebrated the launch of my new book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, at the St. Petersburg Museum of History here in Florida.

• 2:06John R. Miles?

  It was an evening I'll remember for a long time. We brought together friends, readers, and members of the community to talk about a subject that has become the central focus of my work: why so many people can look successful on the outside while feeling increasingly invisible on the inside. For those of you who couldn't join us in person, I wanted to bring part of that evening to you. At the event, I sat down with Emmy Award-winning Fox 13 news anchor Linda Hurtado for a conversation about the experiences that led me to write this book: the personal cost of pursuing success without a deeper sense of fulfillment, and what we can do to rebuild our sense of meaning, worth, and connection.

• 2:51John R. Miles?

  We talked about the moment my son asked me why I never laughed anymore, the experiences that forced me to reconsider the life I was building, and the realization that loneliness, burnout, and disengagement can share a deeper underlying cause. I also explained what I mean by the Great Erasure: the gradual process through which the systems and environments around us extract our value without reflecting our worth back to us. Linda brought her own perspective to the conversation, sharing what it felt like to work in an environment where her contributions seemed to matter less, and how she ultimately made the difficult decision to leave.

• 3:33John R. Miles?

  Her story illustrates how deeply our sense of worth can be affected by the places where we spend our time. We also explored practical ways to help people feel seen, from the way a parent welcomes a child home, to the questions a leader asks an employee who has spent decades doing their job. These are the conversations that inspired The Mattering Effect, and I'm glad I can share this one with you. Here is my book launch conversation with Linda Hurtado, recorded live at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin.

• 4:12Speaker 02

  Before we start our conversation, I would like to read the bio of the gentleman sitting next to me, because it's quite impressive. John R. Miles is a US Naval Academy graduate and Navy veteran, thank you for your service, who went on to become a Fortune 500 CIO, CISO, COO, four-time CEO—I'm not even sure what all those C-I-whatevers mean, but that's a lot—leading global transformations in technology and culture. He is also the host of the globally acclaimed Passion Struck podcast. Raise your hand if you've listened, and if you haven't, you have to find it as soon as we leave here tonight.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  The alternative health show with over 85 million downloads—wow—and the award-winning author of Passion Struck. In his groundbreaking new book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, he draws on over a decade of research and over 200 interviews with psychologists, leading thinkers, to name what he calls the Great Erasure, which we're going to talk about. And he offers a practical step-by-step framework to help us recover our sense of worth, significance, and presence. Please help me in welcoming John Miles. Maybe we should start with a question to the audience. Raise your hand if you have ever asked yourself, "Do I matter? Who do I matter to?

• 5:39Speaker 02

  Is what I'm doing in the world, does it matter?" Pretty universal thing, and I think it's even more of a crisis now. But you wrote a whole book on it and spent 10 years studying it. So let's start with the moment you realized that despite all your success, you were disengaged, maybe not happy. Am I saying that correctly? And why you decided you needed to study this whole idea of mattering?

• 6:08John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I'm going to do a different starting point. There are a couple of people in this room who—

• 6:14Speaker 02

  That mattered to you?

• 6:15John R. Miles?

  —who mattered to me, who this story will touch. There was an earlier moment when I was an executive where it first hit me, but around 2017, I had two things that happened in quick succession that kind of altered my life. So at the time, I was living in the Old Northeast, and I had taken my daughter to Shorcrest, where she was going at the time, and I went to Orange Theory that day, as I always did at that time, with Jay, who's sitting in the back. That day, we happened to have a fire in the electrical system, so I went home early and walked in on someone who had been canvassing my house and who was burglarizing it, and

• 7:00John R. Miles?

  I thought it was a person from my rental company doing some work at the time. Turned out, it was, but he ended up pointing my own gun at me, and so I was able to evade it. And then, three days later, Ed Copko and I were both in New York, about ready to start an interview, and my phone kept blowing up from all these people calling me from St. Pete. And finally, I saw my friend Tracy, who's here too, called me, and she told me unfortunately that one of our best friends took his life off the Skyway Bridge.

• 7:41John R. Miles?

  And those two moments really were an eye-opening experience for me, because I had felt this calling for so many years that I was supposed to help a group of people, and I had put it on the back burner for a long time. And kind of came out of those two things, saying, "What am I—what am I waiting for? Why do I keep postponing this thing that I feel so called to do?"

• 8:06Speaker 02

  Was it that you weren't enjoying your job anymore, or you weren't—the grind got to you? Or—I mean, I know the idea of you having this calling and you wanting to help others, but what else, other than that? Was it just it got to be too much?

• 8:22John R. Miles?

  Well, I think it—I think I just felt this—I had felt an emptiness inside, a hollowing that I couldn't put my finger on for a long time. And the things that I had been called to solve were, you know, help the lonely, help the broken, help the disengaged, help the battered, help the burned out. And I think the hardest thing for me to look at was, who were these people? Because when I was thinking about this initially, I didn't realize that I was one of the very people I had been called to solve. And I think, coming through this experience and really reflecting on my life, I realized

• 9:07John R. Miles?

  that not only was I one of those, but I was suffering from many of those. And that was a huge turning point.

• 9:14Speaker 02

  I think we get caught up in the grind, and we don't realize, maybe we've changed. And you said—it was a family member that looked at you one day and said, "When was the last time you laughed?" Right? And you probably did ask yourself, "When is the last time I laughed?" Tell us about that story.

• 9:33John R. Miles?

  Well, I mean, this one is a hard one, because it involves my son. And he was young at the time, playing blocks with his sister, and they would do, you know, the typical game where he was building up the blocks, and she would knock them down on the floor. And the two of them were laughing and all giddy, and I was in a completely different place. At the time, I was working at Dell, and I think I had just come off a two-week trip to overseas, and I'd been working 100-hour weeks, and I was just consumed with all the stuff that was going on. And he just made the comment, "Dad, why don't you ever laugh anymore?"

• 10:18John R. Miles?

  And that was a huge—that was a huge wake-up call at that point.

• 10:23Speaker 02

  So you weren't enjoying just the simple moment of playing with blocks?

• 10:27John R. Miles?

  No.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  Yeah. If I can share kind of an example, you were on my show yesterday and told that story, and it kind of stuck with me. And then today, you got—I had so much on my mind, I went to sit on the set to do a tease, and I had those big Velcro curlers still in my hair. You guys know that your grandma used to use those. I used those. My mom used to use them. And I started to do the tease, and my director popped me up, and I was horrified to see I still had my curlers on, right? And I thought it had gone out live, but it did not. She was only doing that, you know, she popped it up as a joke and wanted to show me that, you know, get it together, Hurtado, you got curlers in your hair.

• 11:11Speaker 02

  But she came out and belly laughed, belly laughed. And I thought of you, and I thought, oh, my gosh, we need more of this. We need to be, we should do stupid things every once in a while and be laughed, laughed at, laughed with, right? And laugh. So that really made, what you said to me yesterday really made a difference to me, too. So you knew you needed to make a change. Did you come up with the title of the book? You just knew what you wanted to write about? Like, what were the steps after that?

• 11:43John R. Miles?

  It wasn't even in my vernacular. Neither was the word "passion struck" at this time. I had been lucky to get introduced to the media world, your world, through Ed Kopko. Ed used to run Chief Executive Magazine, and had started this business called Bold Business. And he invited me to come into it to be the assistant editor in chief of this publication. So through this, we decided, or we were interviewing people all over the United States. And I developed a passion through doing this of a calling that I didn't know I had.

• 12:28John R. Miles?

  And so as I got further into this, I decided that I was going to write my first book, Passion Struck, which was really about the journey I took getting out of that initial hollow place and kind of taking my own course on a life of fulfillment. And as I was coming up for pitching this to agents to write a, if you're not an author, I don't think you realize how difficult it is to get a book in the world. Because if you don't have a platform, which I didn't have a platform at the time, the first thing they say is, you don't have an audience to sell the book to.

• 13:08John R. Miles?

  So as I was thinking about this, they said, you should start a podcast. And I happened to be talking to a mentor of mine, expressed this kind of feeling that you have inside when you find, you know your because, you find your why, you find the problem you want to solve, you have passion, but you then are trying to figure out, how do you deploy it in the world? And he said, well, it sounds like you go from stuck to passion struck. And that became...

• 13:38Speaker 02

  The log line.

• 13:39John R. Miles?

  The log line. And so I immediately went to go to Ed. He thought, in a million years, this thing's never going to be available, and there it was. As it turns out, it had been a fragrance for Victoria's Secrets, and they had just released their trademark on it. So I got it at exactly the right time. But even then, I wouldn't say that mattering was the core thing in my mind. I didn't know how to build a personal brand, so I started to work with this company called Brand Builders out of Nashville, and they have you do this one-word problem exercise. And after you kind of figure out your because, it helps you figure out what is the problem you're trying to solve. And so I went back to that calling.

• 14:24John R. Miles?

  You know, you're supposed to help the lonely, the beaten, the broken, et cetera. And I started to examine this. You know, we treat all these things as separate things. Loneliness is one thing, burnout is one thing, employee disengagement is another, rising mental health is another. And I asked the question, what if they are all downstream of something larger? And that became the question. And so what I started to look at is what causes all those things to happen? It's what happens when we become extremely visible on the outside, but more and more invisible to ourselves.

• 15:05John R. Miles?

  And so the problem I was called to solve was invisibility, and the way you reverse that is through mattering. And that's when mattering became the topic. And then, ever since then, it's been the North Star.

• 15:21Speaker 02

  So in your book, you say, success and mattering are not the same thing. Let's talk about that.

• 15:28John R. Miles?

  Well, I think success is something that you can aim for. It's a byproduct of you doing things that are because of your why. But I don't think success itself makes you feel fulfilled. It certainly didn't for me. So to me, mattering is a completely different element altogether from success.

• 15:56Speaker 02

  You call this the Great Erasure. So I think what you mean by that is that it's not just something that's happening to you, or your neighbor, or your community. It's happening to the world.

• 16:07John R. Miles?

  Yeah. And so I've been in a master's program that I'm doing in organizational psychology. And this, I specifically picked a university that's based outside the United States because I wanted a community that would hear what I'm working on and reflect back more than what I get in the United States. And so what I am hearing is universal. So when you start looking at the statistics, one out of six people around the world is lonely. In the United States, it's one in two.

• 16:44Speaker 02

  Wow, it's one in two in the U.S.

• 16:48John R. Miles?

  According to the Surgeon General. 64% of people feel like they don't belong at work. 900 million workers are disengaged. According to McKinsey, 22% of people are burned out globally. I think it's even higher than that. 74% of Americans don't believe they belong in the communities that they exist in. And we lose 12 billion hours of work just in the United States alone, which is over a trillion dollar due to rising anxiety and mental health levels. So when you look at all that, that is the lonely, the broken, the beaten, the battered, the bored.

• 17:26John R. Miles?

  And so when I looked at all of that, I started to think, what is causing us to feel invisible? And it's when the systems and environments that are around you keep extracting your value without reflecting your worth back to you. And that became the hypothesis behind the Great Erasure. Let me take a moment to share a little more about the book behind today's conversation. The Mattering Effect explores why so many people feel overlooked, disconnected, or valued primarily for what they produce, and how we can begin to change that. Drawing on research in psychology, behavioral science, and organizational behavior, I introduce

• 18:10John R. Miles?

  a practical framework for strengthening the conditions that help us feel significant in our own lives and in our relationships with others. If these ideas resonate with you, you can find The Mattering Effect wherever books are sold. And if you've already read it, I'd love to hear what stood out to you. Just connect with me on Instagram, theignitedlife.net, or LinkedIn. Now, a quick break for our sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show.

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• 19:18John R. Miles?

  You're listening to Passion Struck right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's return to the conversation.

• 19:31Speaker 02

  So no appreciation for a job well done. Let's dig deeper into that. Like, how can the average, how is that affecting the average worker today that shows up on the job? And is checking off the boxes that they're supposed to?

• 19:46John R. Miles?

  So, I, like, when I went to Lowe's, I got this, this job, and the job was, Lowe's had experienced the worst hacking event in retail history around 2003. The main perpetrators, two of them got two to three years in jail, the main person got a decade. And I took over this function, thought I was going in to fix this security issue. Well, day 10 into the job, the Chief Human Resources Officer calls me into her office, and I think we're there to talk about what can she do to help me meet more people in the organization to help me get my arms around this. But that wasn't it.

• 20:28John R. Miles?

  She instead said, "We just did the first employee engagement survey in Lowe's history." She was new to the company. "And out of 350,000 employees, your group scored last." And not last by a little margin, by a huge margin. And so, the question you're asking me became the question that I sought to answer. So, it, what I heard externally from everyone who was a customer of the group was that these people should all, you need to get a whole new bus of people. They don't know what they're doing, they're completely, their heads are somewhere else, they're not, they're not engaged with the work.

• 21:10Speaker 02

  So it's the, it's the worker's fault?

• 21:12John R. Miles?

  It's the worker's fault. You've got a bunch of people who are dysfunctional, you know, they don't know what they're doing, and they need to be replaced. And then, when I did the work over the next series of months, what I found out was, they didn't, they didn't understand how their jobs mattered or meant, they didn't understand the meaning of their jobs in the larger scheme of the business. How did, how did what they do influence a customer in a store, or someone using a financial system in the, in the finance department? They didn't have autonomy in their roles. They were complete order takers in the organization.

• 21:54John R. Miles?

  Their time was consumed by tons of bureaucracy, so they had no time for white space. They had no trust in the executives above them, because they had been telling them for such a long time about these security issues and other things, but no one did anything about it. They had a low return on energy, because the environment was taking from them but not giving back, and they had no one who was showing care to them. And if you look at what I just said, it, it spells the word "matter," meaning autonomy, time, trust, energy, and mutual care reciprocity.

• 22:34Speaker 02

  And why are all those important together, that they have to work together?

• 22:39John R. Miles?

  So, looking at that, I then took this as an hypothesis. And this is where talking to leading psychologists, behavioral scientists came into play. So, I wanted to see, were these really, I mean, I saw it at play, but now I wanted to look at the science behind it, to determine, are these really six ingredients that either, when they're present, cause us to feel like we matter, or when they're absent, lead to the mattering gap in our lives? And the conclusion I have come to, after thousands of peer review articles I've read, and the interviews that I've done, is that these six things, which just happen to spell

• 23:24John R. Miles?

  "matter," are the framework of mattering.

• 23:28Speaker 02

  So, how do we fix this? Or, maybe you can talk about how you fixed it, or tried to fix it while you were still at Lowe's, and then, how you hope this book gives everybody in the audience, and anyone who reads it, some tools?

• 23:45John R. Miles?

  So, I, I think analogies are good, for understanding something this big. And so, as I was approaching this, I thought of, here in Florida, we're all familiar with the Champlain condominium disaster down in Surfside, that happened in, I think it was 2021. So if you, if you look at what happened in that terrible accident, you had a condominium that had been there for many years, but ended up collapsing in 12 seconds. And as I went back and I kept reading the engineering reports for it, what they signified was that, in engineering terms, it was a progressive failure.

• 24:26John R. Miles?

  So there were a number of things that had happened over the years, that were attributing to decay, and rot, and other things.

• 24:34Speaker 02

  Like passing the buck on paying for improvements, just one of them, but like, right, they, they pile up.

• 24:39John R. Miles?

  They all piled up, and they all got postponed, and postponed, and postponed, until you took something that had some, some cracks in it, and the whole thing went down. And the same thing I correlate is happening to so many of us, but I, I call it the slow fade, which then leads to the vanish. So that same way that it's a progressive failure in that condominium, the same thing happens to us as humans.

• 25:11Speaker 02

  So what steps do we take?

• 25:15John R. Miles?

  So, so the purpose of the book was, I, I felt like there were other books that have come out recently, Mattering, Mattering Instinct, Power of Mattering, that kind of expressed why mattering is so important. So, what I think my contribution is, on top of those, is explaining the systemic component to it that I've discussed today, which is the environments and systems around us. But there has been no book that explains, how do you build this back? So what I discovered, doing the research on this, and specifically, there were, there were two researchers who have done more on the science of mattering than anyone.

• 25:56John R. Miles?

  One is Isaac Perlatensky, who passed away a number of months ago as I was writing the book, and we were in dialogue almost until the day he, he died. He and his wife both died within about a week of each other, but he, he is the one who defined mattering as both giving value and feeling value. And then the other person is psychologist Gordon Flett. And Gordon Flett, I think, is the father of the science of mattering. He, he came up with this term antimattering. So antimattering is what we feel inside of us when we go through prolonged, prolonged periods of feeling insignificant. So that's what I was trying to figure out, how do you reverse?

• 26:41John R. Miles?

  So, the six steps to reversing this, first need to start with you as an individual. So, this is some of the, the deepest research that comes from Gordon Flett, is to feel like you matter to others, you have to first feel like you matter to yourself. So the way that the book is laid out is, I go through the six matter components, and then I, I go into, how do you apply this? And I bring about what I call the mattering compass. So the mattering compass has north, northeast, west, and south coordinates.

• 27:21John R. Miles?

  So north, true north is personal mattering, that you matter to yourself. East is what I call relational mattering, which means you are seen by others. The west coordinate is you are known. So this is emotional mattering. You feel, you feel the sense of mattering. And then south is impact mattering, you feel like you can make an impact with your life. And so when you build those four coordinates back, using the matter components, which we can talk about some of them, it then unleashes the mattering effect. So that is building the mattering dividend, and then, once that dividend is restored

• 28:03John R. Miles?

  within you as a person, it then unleashes the energy that you have been storing inside, that becomes the mattering dividend, which then becomes the mattering effect that you can then take into your relationships, house, communities, work.

• 28:20Speaker 02

  I'm curious how you, how you started with yourself, this whole idea of mattering to yourself. You know, you hear meditate, you hear positive thinking, you don't talk negatively to yourself. But what did, what did you do to?

• 28:36John R. Miles?

  Well, I guess, for me, I knew that Gordon was on to something, because there, there was a point, for me, around 2014, where I, I felt so emotionally numb inside, that I, I was losing my mind. I was going to...

• 29:02John R. Miles?

  Neurologist thinking I had a brain tumor. I was forgetting things. I mean, it was just like, it was some of the worst darkness I had ever experienced. And so what that taught me was that, at that point, I didn't matter to myself. And so I knew I was on to the right thing because I'd felt it personally. And then the more people I've talked to about this, it keeps, the science keeps coming back to, it is the starting point.

• 29:36Speaker 02

  Let's talk a little bit more about the health angle of that. These physical symptoms were manifestations of an emotional or internal, I don't know if I want to use the word illness, but emptiness maybe is better.

• 29:52John R. Miles?

  Well, I think what we don't realize about mattering is it's like, as I said earlier to Mark Wilson, it's like water. It flows everywhere in your life when it's absent. And the research shows that it is as important as safety and love, but it's the first thing we experience in life. It is the mattering instinct. So when it is lacking, it doesn't just affect one part of your life, it impacts everything. So it impacts your physical health, you're not sleeping as well, you're not functioning as well, it impacts your mental health, it impacts your emotional.

• 30:34Speaker 02

  You may actually get sick.

• 30:36John R. Miles?

  You could, you may actually get sick, you experience hypervigilance, you experience depression, and it impacts your relationships, it impacts your career, it impacts everything. It impacts your ability to feel. So it was interesting. The book was luckily selected as a next big idea club, and we were doing this discussion with all the authors who are in the October cohort, and there was this doctor who was on there, who I got, who made the statement, he wrote this book, Food is Medicine, and he said, "Food is the most important thing in our lives. I want anyone here to tell me it's not." And I said, "Let's talk about food."

• 31:20John R. Miles?

  You know, food definitely is a shortage, and you can't live without it, but what aspects of your life does it influence compared to the things I just went over? And by the time we were done, he was like, "I stand corrected." So mattering impacts every area. And the way I think about this is it's like, your life is on a stool, and it's got different supports on it. And like, going back to career, relationship, physical health, mental health, emotional health, all those. Now imagine if multiple things are broken at the same time. How are you going to sit on that stool?

• 32:03John R. Miles?

  That's exactly what mattering is like.

• 32:06Speaker 02

  So the steps you took were changing your work, spending more time with the family. What other kind of things did you do and would you recommend or recommend in the book?

• 32:21John R. Miles?

  So the steps I ended up taking were, without knowing it, the steps that I outlay in this book. So one is, I had to reconnect with what I felt was meaning in my life. So I went back to, what is my because? And to me, your because comes before your why. So my because was, I felt called to serve the lonely, broken, beaten, battered part of the world. I then got very deep on understanding what the problem was I was supposed to solve, which was invisibility. So then I had to figure out, like, what are the choices that I'm making that are keeping me away from pursuing this dream?

• 33:06John R. Miles?

  And so I-

• 33:08Speaker 02

  Did you share some of them with us? I'm just curious, like-

• 33:10John R. Miles?

  Well, one of them, if I'm going to be honest, was drinking. So I learned that my drinking was a barrier to some of the relationships that I had with my family members, and the environments that I was in, it was becoming a huge thing that was costing me time to pursue the things I wanted to pursue. So that was a huge decision for me, and it took many years to finally make the decision. But over three years ago, I made it, and there's not a day I regret not drinking.

• 33:53John R. Miles?

  So, I mean, that's a big one, but, you know, some of the other things was getting into a routine where every single day, I get up at 5:00 a.m. and I go for a five-mile walk. And on that walk, I meditate for the first 30 minutes of my day. And I do gratitude practices, and it was all those things showing me that the more I took, the more I made choices to stop postponing the things that I wanted to do, the more my autonomy grew.

• 34:25Speaker 02

  Do you think a lot of people do that for money or security? Because I think for a lot of people, you know, the job that pays the bills, that's like, we're taught, security. But it may not feed your soul.

• 34:40John R. Miles?

  Well, I mean, that is the hardest thing, is, I'm not immune to this. It is so easy, it is like you build your whole life, and, I mean, I had gotten the dream job I had always wanted at one point, I had climbed my Everest. And then I realized that I was on the wrong mountain. And the mountain that you see is Kilimanjaro, and it's 3,000 miles away, but you have no idea, how do you get from point A to point B? And I think that's where so many people get stuck, because you know you want to get there, but you have no idea, how do you cross it?

• 35:20Speaker 02

  And you have obligations.

• 35:21John R. Miles?

  And you have a ton of obligations.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  Right. So one piece of advice, I guess, maybe to someone who finds themselves in that situation, in a work environment?

• 35:31John R. Miles?

  Stop looking at Kilimanjaro and take the first step off of Everest. I mean, I think the thing, that's the hardest thing to do, is to actually start. I mean, that is the hardest thing. And for me, the starting point, like, the easiest way I can think about it is, you've got to look at, what is the biggest stuck point in your life? For me, it was pent-up PTSD from being in combat, that I had never properly addressed. So before I could deal with anything else, I had to, I had to go to cognitive processing

• 36:15John R. Miles?

  therapy, and I had to do EMDR, and I had to do prolonged exposure therapy, and I had to do, I mean, it sucked. And it took like 18 months, but I had to get through that before I could unleash the other things.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  I feel, I guess, as a journalist, maybe, I think what you're talking about right now, while I do believe what you're saying is true, that mattering is an issue, I think it is okay more today than ever to say, "I need help." And there are different ways, like you just talked about, to actually start and retrain your brain, if that's the right thing to say.

• 36:56John R. Miles?

  I think there are more. I think the military is doing better. When I was in, it was definitely not the case. I mean, I worked for the National Security Agency, and so it was known, if I would have gone to CECO back then, I would have lost all my security clearances. Plus, at that time, I was spending a lot of time with special forces. And so in that community, you didn't do it either. And so because of that, I just, you know, ended up internalizing so much of it.

• 37:30Speaker 02

  What else do you want to talk about before we just, I'd like to ask you some other questions, just in general, about making the shift to becoming an author and a podcaster, and what life is like now. But is there anything that I haven't touched on that you think is really important in the book that might help some of the people in the audience right now?

• 37:52John R. Miles?

  Maybe I'll just talk about reciprocity because this wasn't really my vernacular. It kind of became part of my vernacular, really understanding it over the past two years. And there's a great book out there by Sonya Lieber-Merischke and Harry Rees, who, if you have no idea who they are. Sonya is a professor in California and the foremost authority, one of happiness research, and Harry is one of the foremost authorities, teaches at the University of Rochester, on relationships. So the two of them came together and wrote this book. And they came up with this great analogy of the seesaw.

• 38:35John R. Miles?

  And to me, that's what reciprocity means. If you think about mutual care, and what I'm talking about with us giving value and not getting it back, for so many people today, we become the strong one, the essential person at work, the provider at the house, the teacher who's carrying the weight of so many kids who are struggling, or they're in a district that's not providing them the needs that they have to do their job. But you take on that responsibility, and you keep giving and giving and giving, but you're not getting that care back. And that's exactly what I was experiencing when I was at Dell.

• 39:20John R. Miles?

  Man, I was getting paid great, and it was part of the job, I understood it, but, you know, I would come off these trips, and my son can tell you, I was not, I mean, I was gone like half the time. And when I was there, I was working 100-hour weeks because, you know, what ended up happening to me is I came in and I was hired as the CIO of one division. Within three months, that president got fired. I went from CIO of one division to two divisions, to three divisions, to four divisions, to six divisions, to then being put in charge of, we acquired this company called Pro Systems, $5 billion company, 20,000 employees, wasn't going well, so they put that on top of me

• 40:05John R. Miles?

  too, and then put me as the co-captain on two of the three largest strategies in the company, and then put me as the co-captain on our merger and acquisition strategy, which didn't exist at the time. So I have all of these things hitting me. I'm going to India, I think I went there 27 times in two years. And I remember sitting in this room, and it had all the presidents in there, and Michael and, and I had, like, I had barely even come home to say hi to the family, I'm back in there, and the entire thing is just ripping me a new one about why this one project out

• 40:46John R. Miles?

  of 450 that we had going on was so down the table, and none of it was on anything else. And what I realized as I'm sitting there, and this is right after Josh had made that comment to me, is, like, you give and give and give and give, but what is anyone doing looking at the person who's giving? And, you know, what this is doing to their life? And, you know, even with that, I didn't get the wake-up call. And I, yeah.

• 41:18Speaker 02

  What is, what is your, what is life like now? Like, what are your days? Like, you get up, you walk, maybe you write a little bit, I mean, it's...

• 41:25John R. Miles?

  You should ask Corey. I, I mean, if I'm, if I'm honest, some, some of that drive that I've had doesn't go away. So, I mean, I am, I've always been a hard worker, so, so some of that drive never goes away. I, I try, I try to be more thoughtful at times about my, my energy level and what I'm giving. But I, I work out, I, I've kind of flipped the switch for, from, like, what is guiding my life? So what, the reason I wrote this book is because I saw so many people suffering.

• 42:10John R. Miles?

  So it's really the impact that I'm trying to, to, to give. But, you know, there, there are times when, when it's hard because this stuff, when you become a solopreneur, solopreneur, an entrepreneur, you've got no one else to do the work. So at the end of the day, it falls back on you if, if, if stuff needs to get done, if the podcast needs to go out, if you got to get something back to your editor, there's no one else to do it. So, so it's still a balanced thing that I, I work on.

• 42:44Speaker 02

  Do you feel like you matter now, more?

• 42:47John R. Miles?

  Oh, yes, definitely. Well, and Corey's been a huge part of that, so, a huge blessing in my life.

• 42:54Speaker 02

  To people Corey is, your life.

• 42:56John R. Miles?

  And my friends who are, and my friends who are, who are here in the audience. So thank you all for coming.

• 43:01Speaker 02

  Shall we open it up to questions? Do you guys have some questions? I'll be glad to walk around and give you guys the mic. Okay, hold on, let me, let me walk to you.

• 43:12Speaker 00

  My voice can't...

• 43:13Speaker 02

  Okay, good, good, good, all right.

• 43:15Speaker 00

  So you recently wrote a children's book, "Matterluna." That's like an introduction to this as an adult. Can you talk a little bit about that?

• 43:26John R. Miles?

  Marilyn, thank you. And she and I had the, the great opportunity to work at Catalina Marketing together, and I wish I had, had had the ability to be in that company before I got there because the founders of that company, man, they had built such an incredible culture inside, and it was one of those examples where a private equity firm comes in and kind, kind of starts taking it away. But we had a lot of fun working together.

• 43:59John R. Miles?

  But the, the thing I realized with mattering is that it's a social immune response. So it is our social immunity, mattering is. And what I discovered is what it is, like, if, if you think about what's happening to us, who is the person who is the largest victim of this? It's our kids. Because we reflect to them what worth looks like. And if we're not feeling it, then what are we reflecting to our kids? So as I started to think about this, I thought, like, what are the intervention points that

• 44:44John R. Miles?

  you can do for children? And there are really two. I've been working with this great group of people at the Global Compassion Coalition, if you're not familiar with this organization, Rick Hansen, a phenomenal human being, started this, and they're trying to spread compassion through the world. And so I, they were good enough to help me start looking at the research, and it turns out you've got two periods of time with kids where I call them the wet cement years. The first one is three to eight, second one is nine to 14. The biggest difference is when they're nine to 14, they're asking the deeper questions that they, they don't know how to ask when they're three to eight.

• 45:27John R. Miles?

  So "You Matter Luma" was my attempt to put a book into the world that serves two purposes. One, I was definitely trying to influence the three to eight-year-old who's reading it, so they had an understanding through the story of watching Luma's journey, of discovering that, that she's a storyteller and that she has a voice that matters in the forest, that they matter too. And I put storms in it and other things, so it's not a complete linear track for her. But the difficult thing when you're writing a children's book is it's not the child who buys it, it's the parents. So you have to write it for two lenses.

• 46:07John R. Miles?

  So the whole book is written on behavioral science, positive psychology, and organizational psychology principles that are built into the illustrations that my illustrator did. So it's teaching this at both an adult level and a child level because I was trying to impart on the adult who's reading it the importance of mattering too.

• 46:33Speaker 02

  So, and does it help parents tell their kids without just saying you matter? Like, how, how do they show their children they matter without just using words?

• 46:45John R. Miles?

  So, so what I was...

• 46:50John R. Miles?

  So we have built a whole curriculum around it. But so for teachers who homeschool, we have a whole curriculum. I partnered with Kaplan, an after-school program company who's developed courses to support it. And we developed a whole website called Pass the Ripple, where after a child reads it, they can go to this site that logs random acts of kindness that they can see ripple throughout the world. So the idea was to create an extension to the book. But for the parent, they can either use the guide along with the book, or the more important thing is using the story and the different symbols that I put in the book, they can ask their child questions as they're reading it.

• 47:35John R. Miles?

  That then starts the dialogue. And there are prompts in the book as well, especially at the end, for them to use.

• 47:42Speaker 02

  Will this be a continuing series?

• 47:44John R. Miles?

  Yes, thank you. So it was so hard to write the first one, once I got the formula down, I wrote 10 of them. So the second one, we're in the middle of illustrating now. And then that one, we're done, the black and white illustrations. So the process is, you go through all these rounds of doing black and white illustrations, and then we're just about ready to start the colored illustrations. And then after that, we'll start working on the next three books in the series.

• 48:16Speaker 02

  And both of these books available at your local bookstores, Town Volo, of course, but and also on Amazon?

• 48:22John R. Miles?

  Amazon, Barnes & Noble, everywhere.

• 48:24Speaker 02

  Everywhere. That was a great question. Anybody else have a question? Yes, sir. Would you like me to come over, or do you have a loud voice, too?

• 48:30Speaker 04

  I also have a loud voice. John, I love the work that you're doing, and it makes me think that if mattering matters so much, why is it so scarce? But then I think it's not scarce. I think there's so many people climbing their wrong Everest, right? With trying to get famous with being an influencer, or they want the Lamborghini. But you already got there, and you know that that's like the false, you know, summit. So how do you get to people that think they're doing it, but you know that maybe the path they're on is going to be empty when they get to the destination? Like, how do you get to those people?

• 49:04John R. Miles?

  Yeah, well, first thing I wanted to address is, you would think mattering is such a big thing, people would be studying it. They're not. So there's currently no PhD program in the world for mattering. There's no master's program either. Stanford is about ready to start the first one, I just learned. So as I was starting to look at, how do I study this? I asked people at Wharton, like, who at Wharton is studying mattering? No one. Talked to Ethan Cross at Michigan. So I asked Ethan. Talked to Edward DC or Richard Ryan at Rochester.

• 49:47John R. Miles?

  So if you don't know these names, they started self-determination theory, which is one of the major theories of intrinsic motivation. But through this huge journey, I finally found this guy in London of all places, who said, there's this professor at this university you've probably never heard of, called the University of York in Ontario. He's the leading researcher on the science of mattering. And that turned out to be Gordon Flett. So it turns out, there was no one, there's not a lot of people studying this. There's people studying belonging, there's people studying aspects of it. But there were really two or three professors in the entire world who were studying the topic.

• 50:26John R. Miles?

  So your second question is, how do you go to the people who need it the most? So that is where the podcast, Substack, things like that come into play. It's interesting, there's this gentleman who taught at Boston College named Peter Gray, who's been studying the youth mental health crisis for the past 40 years. And he has this great Substack, and he let me do a guest post on it. And my guest post was examining the story of a friend of mine, who I call in the book

• 51:08John R. Miles?

  David, who was one of the best leaders I've ever worked with. He was over all of supply chain at Lowe's when I was there. I had probably 50,000 people in this organization. And this guy, I mean, I never went to a distribution center, and these things are a million and a half square foot, 5,000 people in them, where he didn't know every single person's name, what they did, everything. But when he got home, he was as numb as I was. And his kids were recognizing this, and they started to put a brick on the table any time that he was spacing out and wasn't present. And so that brick became his new centering point.

• 51:51John R. Miles?

  So I told this story to try to get the people to see it. And this article came out yesterday, had 38,000 views today, and I went in to start doing the comments section, because I thought there were like two or three, there was like 38 comments that I had to respond to. So it's telling me that this is a topic that, so grassroots level is how you have to do it. So you have to do it the same way that you're doing it with the meaning mixers that you're doing at them. It's, you can't, you can't only top down this. It's like the Global Compassion Coalition, the way that they're getting the traction

• 52:33John R. Miles?

  is they've started compassion groups, where they're facilitating small groups of compassion, and that's how they're growing it. And now they're in like 80 countries throughout the world.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  Word of mouth, just keep spreading, right?

• 52:47John R. Miles?

  You got to start, you've got to, I mean, you've got to think globally, but you have to act locally, is how you do it.

• 52:54Speaker 02

  Anybody else have a question? No more?

• 53:01Speaker 05

  I do, but I'm not sure exactly how to phrase it. So I know that I matter. But what do you do when the people closest around you don't recognize that or acknowledge it?

• 53:21Speaker 02

  That you matter.

• 53:22Speaker 05

  I know. I got no problems. I'm full of confidence, and I feel good about myself. I do a lot of things, charity work, and a business, and my mom lives with me, and friends and family, and all of that. But how do you get other people that are close to you to acknowledge that? Because it seems a lot of times, it's so taken for granted. And I think it's great to reach other people, because they think there's a lot of depression and loneliness, because they do, they're stuck in a job, and a life, and whatever,

• 54:05Speaker 05

  and they can't stand it, and they don't know how to get out of it. But I'm not in that. But sometimes I, how do you get other people that are close to you to acknowledge and give you that feedback, so that you know that they know that you matter?

• 54:23Speaker 02

  Are you looking for action, or are you looking for words?

• 54:26Speaker 05

  Well, words are, words are so, thank you, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Sorry.

• 54:36John R. Miles?

  I mean, from a relationship standpoint, I, yeah, I mean, I hate to use, it comes back to your love languages, but I think it comes back to them not, them being on their own signal frequency, and being on a completely different frequency from understanding your needs compared to theirs. And they don't know how to bridge that gap and give you what you need. So if they can't close that gap, I mean, you can seek outside help for it, or you've got to communicate to them how you feel and what you need back from them.

• 55:17Speaker 05

  Doesn't work.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  Sorry.

• 55:22Speaker 05

  You can totally hit it there, though. I read a lot of, ooh, you answered it, you asked my question.

• 55:28Speaker 02

  Do you think therapy helps in situations like that?

• 55:31John R. Miles?

  I think you have to have two willing participants. And you have, and the other person has, you have to be able to see yourself in the situation, which I don't.

• 55:49Speaker 02

  You have to look in the mirror.

• 55:51John R. Miles?

  Yes.

• 55:52Speaker 06

  It'd be the same thing at work, though, you know? You feel like you're very worked, you're positioned in your job, your job, your boss doesn't appreciate or treat you that way, that you're disposable. I mean, I feel like it's in every relationship you can possibly have. So I feel like communicating is really, when you internalize and you just keep it in with yourself, I feel like that is you showing that you don't matter enough to yourself. And you matter enough to yourself, that's when you will speak up, and you will no longer tolerate that, whether it's in your home life or your work life, right? And I feel like that's where the acronym of the mattering sets, it really makes you look at yourself and be aware, because that's the first thing, you have to be aware that the Lamborghini is not bringing you the joy you thought it would. You know, if you still are just living in that Instagram world, maybe you don't even

• 56:36Speaker 06

  realize it, and you think you have it all. And then when you look around, and you're standing there alone, you're the Lamborghini, maybe you don't feel fulfilled.

• 56:43Speaker 02

  With work, though, I will tell you from personal experience, when you do stand up and say, you're not treating me the way I deserve to be treated, you have to be willing to be fired or walk. I mean, you do have to get to that point where that's a decision you're making in some cases, but I think a lot of cases. I see people nodding.

• 57:02Speaker 05

  They don't change, you really, you're right. You only have those two choices. Do you stay and take it, or do you do it?

• 57:11Speaker 02

  I walked and it was a really good decision. She's the boss. Yeah. I'm gonna quit my own job.

• 57:18John R. Miles?

  So if you, maybe you can just quickly tell that story because that was one of, I'm so thankful that you took your time to do this, Lynda. So thank you very much. And there were a couple of reasons why I wanted Lynda to do it. One, she's an author herself. Her books are for sale over there. But she is giving so much back to the Tampa Bay area because she features so many local authors on her show on Fox. And it is, for an author, it is so difficult to get publicity. And the fact that you do that is huge, but you also, so you know what it's like to be

• 58:00John R. Miles?

  an author, but you also, in this case, knew what it was like to not feel like you mattered in your work environment.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, I guess without naming names, but I, most of you probably know I worked at ABC for, before, Fox, here for 20 years. And new management came in, and the only reason I'll tell this story now is because they don't work there anymore. I wouldn't do that. But I could tell, you know, you get that instant feeling like, they don't care that I've been here 20 years, they don't care what I bring to the table, they don't, it's not about that, you know? I even had one boss tell an anchor, and it wasn't me, it was somebody else, I, I'm sure, new boss, I'm sure you're really good at what you do, but you're the first one who has their contract coming up and I need the money for something else.

• 58:49Speaker 02

  So, you know, when your contract's up, you're, you're gone, basically. And I guess he thought he was doing it in a nice way because he gave him six months notice, which I guess was nice. But talk about feeling like you don't matter, right? So I kind of had the feeling that I did matter, to this person anyway. And I had talked to my husband, who's sitting over there, and what he told me was, you're the brand. It's not the TV station. They have their own brand, but you are your brand. And if you're not happy, well, you know, I'll stand behind you and, you know, we'll go.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  And so, we put a plan to play together and silently executed it. And we were getting to the point where I was about to tell them that I was going to leave and go to another TV station in town. But I still was so conflicted about it, because the people that work there are great, I love them, I'm still good friends with them, you know? And I was very conflicted about it. And then, on the night before we were supposed to have this contract talk, he, the boss at the time, emails my agent and says, "Oh, I'm gonna have to cancel, I have to go to Los Angeles for a very important meeting, I'm gonna send her a one-month contract extension." Which was basically a kind of a mind game, right?

• 1:00:13Speaker 02

  You know, to try to make me feel insecure, make me feel not one, I'm not sure. But it was definitely a mind game. And, you know, he had no idea, obviously, that I was already out the door. So I told my agent at that time, I said, "Just tell him we don't, you know, need to sign that one-month contract that I'm leaving." And then I get an email, "Oh my gosh, this is so upsetting, now I can't go to Los Angeles and I need to see you in my office tomorrow morning." Now I matter. But at that point, I was already gone. And it turned out to be a really good decision. I mean, it was a scary one. But I understand what it felt like to come to work every day and just think, you know,

• 1:00:57Speaker 02

  I could be that person that is let go just because my contract is up. And it's not, it has nothing to do with the value I bring to the table, or, you know. And interestingly, when I did go to Fox, the American Cancer Society and all of these nonprofits and organizations that I was giving my time and doing things for, followed me. Which proved my husband's point, that I was the brand. And it wasn't necessarily the TV station. And now they're working with me again, but over at Fox. So it was scary. But, you know, sometimes you just have to take the stand and say, you know, "I want

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  to work someplace where I feel like I, you know, am valued." Right? Anybody else have any questions? Yes?

• 1:01:49Speaker 07

  If we are the person who's the boss, or if we're responsible for people, like if we're a parent, what's one thing that anyone can do every day to make the people around us feel like they know?

• 1:02:07John R. Miles?

  Yeah, well, so, I love this question when, when I get asked by parents about their kids. So, like, the simplest thing that you can do, like, if you're a parent with your, with your kids, is to give them, the first moment that you see them, complete undivided presence, that they are the only thing in the world. Like, your face lights up, and etc. So before, like, if you come home, before you ask them about your homework, before you do any of this, like, just light up and with your presence, show them how much they

• 1:02:52John R. Miles?

  mean to you. And I think the same thing reflects to us as adults as well.

• 1:02:58Speaker 02

  And I would say in a work setting, acknowledge someone's accomplishments and do it in a setting where, you know, they, it's not, it's not just you, one-on-one. But I think that everybody, like in a newsroom, appreciates a boss who will say, "Good job", to someone in a, in a setting where everybody's listening. I think that's really good because, you know, and again, it goes back to your, your language of love. Some people like attaboys, they want to hear, "Good job." And, and some people just want to be, you know, treated with respect. So I think it does help to know your employees, like you said, and know, and know what it is that they need.

• 1:03:40Speaker 02

  And I know that seems like a lot, but a loyal employee is gonna work so much harder for you, and will have your back, if they think that you have even taken the time to understand what it is they need, you know? Like, I would say my husband is kind of, he's, he likes action. Actions, like what you do, and I like to hear it. And I don't know if it's because I'm a woman, but, like, it's gotta go into my brain through my ears. And, but that's how we're different. Right?

• 1:04:11John R. Miles?

  Yeah, I, I would just give you one other example. When I was at that Lowe's job, I had this manager who had been there for like 20, 25 years. And we were putting in the new strategy in place, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I remember, he, he worked at night. So I went in at like 2:00 in the morning to spend some time with him on the shift. And it, I, I had done this a bunch. Because it, it took a bunch to get, to make him feel, because he was a manager, there was a senior manager, another person, a director, an executive director, and then me. So it's, it's not like this, he was like, in my direct individual chain of command.

• 1:04:53John R. Miles?

  But I knew that if we were gonna change the organization, it had to start with the frontline supervisors. So, after a while, when I, when he, I had earned his trust, that he could say things to me, he was talking about what he was doing on the shift and the details really don't matter, but he basically said, "So, how do you want me to get this team to perform better? Like, what are your instructions for me?" And I'm like, "You have the whole equation wrong." His name was Giles, and I said, "I, I, like, I trust you. I know that you know how to do your job. I can't be here doing it for you.

• 1:05:35John R. Miles?

  Like, what I need to know from you is, what better training do you need? What better support do you need? What barriers am I causing that I need to be aware of, or we are causing? What bureaucracy is getting in the way? And, and how do I help you do your job better and give you more ability to have autonomy in your job?" And he started crying. He, he said, "No one in my entire career has ever asked me that question." And, and it, it became a huge changing, changing point because he, he started to just take ownership. And instead of me going in front of everyone and showcasing his story, when we did all

• 1:06:19John R. Miles?

  hands, I put him in front of everyone and I said, "Tell them what happened, tell them what you're doing." And it wasn't that everything he did was perfect, he made a bunch of mistakes, but we didn't, like, we didn't penalize him for the mistakes, they became learning opportunities for him to grow. And then, from there, it just spread like wildfire. And the bottom line is, two years later, we were the second highest scoring group on the employee engagement survey.

• 1:06:47Speaker 02

  Nicely done.

• 1:06:51John R. Miles?

  I want to thank Lynda Hurtado for helping bring this conversation to life at the launch of The Mattering Effect, and everyone who joined us at the St. Petersburg Museum of History. For those who couldn't be there, thank you for spending part of your day with me here on Passion Struck. My hope is that something in this conversation helps you look differently at your own life, the people around you and the environments we have the power to shape. Because the question of mattering touches nearly every part of our lives. It influences how we see ourselves, how we treat others, and how we respond to the systems we're a part of. And that brings us to our next conversation in our current series, The Architecture of Agency.

• 1:07:34John R. Miles?

  Next Tuesday, I'll be joined by Nir Halliwell, a Stanford professor of organizational behavior and author of the new book, Level Up: Why Hierarchies Are Broken and How to Fix Them. Nir and I explore how hierarchy, competition, and status shape the way people behave, and what happens when the pursuit of advancement starts undermining collaboration. He shares a revealing insight about how competition can lead people to withhold information, keep their expertise to themselves, and choose not to help a colleague. These small decisions can tell us a great deal about the cultures we create, and whether those cultures help people thrive together. It's a conversation about leadership, human behavior, and the structures that shape our choices. I hope you'll join me on Tuesday.

• 1:08:17Speaker 08

  But I'm really worried about what happens when it gets to sabotage and other harmful behaviors. And it doesn't have to be a very active sabotage, it can just be that you're not helping your teammates or other coworkers and colleagues, right? They need a little bit of your time and a little bit of your experience and advice here and there, and you're keeping that to yourself. You're hoarding information, you're not sharing.

• 1:08:40John R. Miles?

  Until then, I'm John Miles. Stay curious, stay intentional, and stay passion-struck.