Passion Struck with John R. Miles - Why You Feel Like You Don’t Matter (And How to Fix It) | Angela Maiers - EP 752

Episode Date: April 9, 2026

What if the question underneath everything in your life is this: Do I matter?In this episode of Passion Struck, I sit down with Angela Maiers to explore one of the most fundamental human needs—the need to feel seen, valued, and needed.For decades, Angela has studied what makes people feel seen, valued, and needed—and what happens when they don’t. What she’s found is simple, but powerful: when people stop feeling like they matter, everything else begins to break down.We talk about how this starts earlier than most people think, why so many adults tie their worth to performance, and how that shows up later as burnout, disconnection, and disengagement.We also explore the difference between belonging and mattering—and why being included isn’t the same as feeling significant.Most importantly, Angela shares what actually helps people feel like they matter—and it’s not complicated. It’s in how we show up, how we listen, and how we make others feel seen. Pick up a copy of Angela's children's book M is for Mattering.This conversation will change how you think about your relationships, your work, and the way you show up in the world.Passion Struck is the #1 alternative health and personal growth podcast dedicated to human flourishing and the science of mattering.Check the full show notes here:Explore companion insights for this episode at: https://www.theignitedlife.netThank You to Our SponsorsLimited Time Offer – Get Huel today with my exclusive offer of 15% OFF online with my code PASSION at huel.com/passion. New Customers Only. Thank you to Huel for partnering and supporting our show!Connect with JohnKeynotes, books, podcast, and resources: https://linktr.ee/John_R_MilesChildren’s Book — You Matter, Luma: https://youmatterluma.com/Pre-Order The Mattering Effect: https://matteringeffect.com/In This Episode, You Will Learn:What makes someone feel like they truly matter—and why being needed is at the center of itHow early we begin tying our worth to performance instead of presenceWhy burnout, loneliness, and disengagement often have a deeper rootThe difference between belonging and mattering—and why it matters more than we thinkWhat causes people to feel invisible at work, even when they’re performingSimple ways to help someone feel seen, valued, and neededSupport the MovementEvery human deserves to feel seen, valued, and like they matter. Wear it. Live it. Show it. https://StartMattering.comDisclaimerThe Passion Struck podcast is for educational and entertainment purposes only. The views and opinions expressed by guests are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of Passion Struck or its affiliates. This podcast is not a substitute for professional medical or psychological advice.See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Coming up next on Passion Struck. I don't think we have a loneliness problem. I think we have a mattering problem. I don't believe we have a suicide problem. I believe we have a mattering problem. Mattering comes first period, biologically, sociologically, physiologically. And if we guarantee those conditions, then those are consequences of either feeling like you do matter, feeling significant or feeling insignificant.

We treat the symptom of insignificance, but we don't treat the core of what it takes to feel significant. Welcome to Passionstruck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters. Each week, I sit down with change makers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning. heal what hurts and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming. Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter.

Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 752 of PassionStruck. Over the course of this month, we've been exploring powerful ideas. that a meaningful life doesn't happen by accident. It's something we design. We started this April series Purpose by Design with Arthur Brooks, looking at why so many people today are facing a crisis of meaning. Then with Corinne Lowe, we explored how the systems around us, our work, our expectations, our environments,

shape the lives that we end up living. And on Tuesday, in my last episode with Claude Steele, we examined something even more subtle, how our interactions with others, and the fear of how we're perceived can shape how we show up in the moments that matter most. But today, we bring it all together. Because underneath meaning, underneath systems, underneath identity and interaction, there's something even more fundamental. The human need to know that we matter. Because when that need is met, we feel seen, we feel valued, we feel connected.

But when it's not, everything begins to fracture. our energy, our relationships, our sense of purpose, and even our will to keep going. And that's where today's guest comes in. My guest is Angela Myers, a pioneer in the science and practice of mattering. For decades, Angela has studied what makes people feel significant and what happens when they don't. And what she reveals is both simple and profound. That mattering is a biological necessity.

In today's conversation, we explore what it truly means to matter and why it's so different. from belonging. How worthiness becomes conditional and why it starts so early in life. We go into why burnout, loneliness, and disengagement are all symptoms of something deeper and how reclaiming a sense of matter and can transform how you live, lead, and relate. At its core, this episode is about one of the most important questions you can ask. Not just what am I doing with my life, but does my life actually feel like it matters? Before we dive in, a quick note, if you want to go deeper into this entire purpose by design series, I'm sharing companion reflections and tools at the ignited life.net.

And if you want to go further into the concepts of today's episode, then pre-order my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. It's designed to help you not only hear these ideas, but to directly show you how to apply them into your life. Now, let's dive into my conversation with Angela Myers. Thank you for choosing Passion Struck and choosing me to be your hosting guide on your journey to creating an intentional life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. I am absolutely honored today to have Angela Myers join me.

Angela, it's so great to finally get you on the show. John, I could not be more excited to be here. And I want to start off by giving our good friend Gord Flett, kudos for getting us together finally. So thank you, Lord, for doing that. Thank you, Gord. Thank you. Angela, you have been studying mattering in all aspects of it,

as long as anyone I know who's in the stories. I wanted to start here. After everything that you've seen, and this kind of started in the kindergarten classroom, what most reliably convinces a person from what you've seen that they truly matter? That they are needed without question. There's two practices in kindergarten classrooms that should be practices across every classroom, every grade, every community, every business. And that is number one show and tell. and number two jobs.

And let me explain. Show and tell is a phenomenon. It is not just about bringing something cool from home in your backpack to show off your shiny thing and compete with the person next to you. Show and tell is about figuring out very carefully this dance between positioning and pitching your value to other people who have value and being needed because of it. It's an act of personal branding because if you try to outdo the person's backpack next to you, then you miss the whole point of show and tell, which is to be called out, to be sought after at recess,

and hear the words, tell me more. Can you show me more? Can you help me? So you are having to listen to 25 other people and what's in their backpack so that you don't compete, so that you don't go head to head, but that you bring something. that has additional value, that advances the value of the community. And if you think about how socially, psychologically, culturally, that is so wired in our DNA. It is not just, and those are the two parts of mattering, it is not just that we have value,

that everybody has something in their backpack that is unique and representative of their experience and their essence. It is that there is someone else in the room or the world. old that needs exactly what you have. And holding it and hiding it in your backpack is immoral. If you think of five-year-old, I don't know when you've been around them lately, but if you look at five-year-olds, holding stuff in their backpack, they literally cannot physically sit or breathe. They are so excited to share, not because they want to show off. Look at what I got. Look at what I got. Because they fundamentally know that what they have someone else in the way.

their world will need and can benefit and can be inspired and can be helped by it. And if we can get back to our biological roots as human beings, those are the conditions of being human to know that you are valued and respected that you have a unique contribution to make. And the knowledge that withholding that then hurts another person because there is some someone else in the room or the world that needs exactly what you have and only you can deliver. I have heard you use a $100 bill exercise as a way to help people understand this. And I think it's a great analogy for people to hear. I just did this with a room of women CEOs because it doesn't matter if you're bigger than five,

whether you're 55 or you're 85, and I won't say only women, but I see this as a significant cultural contextual trait in women where we struggle to feel enough. As I'll say this as a mother, you never, and as a father, I'm sure, you always feel like you are screwing up or disappointing. From the moment you have a child all the way, minor 20, 6, 27, 28, and 29. and I still feel, oh, I should have, would have. And so we live in a world, no matter, you know, what role you have in that world where worthiness is conditional.

And we have accepted that worthiness is conditional. And so whether we put those conditions on ourselves, so I dropped out of graduate school, I'm a PhD dropout. So that stayed with me for a long time. Well, when I get my master's, I'll be respected. Well, when I get my PhD, well, when I publish this, well, if I did this. or just only if we put all these conditions around. And that is before social media.

So now add the world of filters and perfection and hashtag, everything is great on top of it. And worthiness is not a fleeting concept. It is not self-esteem, which can go up and down like I'm having a good hair day. I feel good today. And tomorrow it could be terrible. It is absolutely influenced by outside forces. and it does impact your identity. But worthiness is immutable.

You matter, period. And so I don't even know where I saw this or heard it back. I've been using it for a decade is I bring a $100 bill or a $50 bill if I can't find 100 and hold it up in the room and everybody raised their hand. How many people want this? Of course, why? Because that is $100, period. Period.

That is $100. Immutable value. And then I step on it, I crumple it, I dump water on it, I like will mark on it with a marker carefully, mark on it, I will literally destroy it with every outside force that I have. And then I hold that little wimpy dollar back up there, tattered and torn and just brutalized by these outside forces and ask the same question, how many of you want that? And they all raise their hand. because no matter what happened, no matter what force, whether we perpetrated that force or it just happened to blow away in the wind and get tattered and torn, that value never changed. And as soon as we get that, a whole lot of everything else in the world makes sense. And what I love most about my

insights into mattering starting with five-year-olds is five-year-olds, no matter what country I'm in, no matter what language, no matter what zip code they come from, how tall they are, if their hair is curly, if they wear glasses, they all know that. They show up into the world and they understand that they matter. They do not have to be convinced. They just demand that human dignity reciprocated. You will see me. You will say my name. You will honor that, but they show up like, hey, you are so lucky to be in my presence. And they're not doing it out of hubris. They're not doing it out of ego. They truly believe that they have something that their presence will bring to you that will leave you better off than they found you. And that's a beautiful thing to be around. Oh, it certainly is. And like you, I have a children's book that just came out. So I've been spending more time around four and five year olds than I have in a very long time.

It's exhilarating, isn't it? In fact, I'm going to your neck of the woods next week to Colorado to a whole school. Oh, my God. We have to. I have to come to that. I have to meet you. I have to meet you in person. It's on the other side of the state from you.

It's in Grand Juncture. Oh, that is a little ways. But I'm still glad you're here. You're still flying to Denver, right? I guess that all depends on who you go through. If you fly United, you go through there. Right. Yeah, right.

I'll have to get back to you because I can't remember who I'm flying. Absolutely. No, it's very humbling. It's a humbling experience to be around five-year-olds, around, I would say, students in general. It really doesn't matter what grade level, because they very rarely get their presence as human beings, not as students or not as children, but their presence as human beings validated, where you are really there to listen and to learn and to be fully present for who they are because we're so busy as adults trying to create and guide and craft them into who they're going to be that we forget to understand and be in awe

of who they are right now. I think that's a perfect way to say it. And when I really dove into this, started coming at this from the adult angle because that's who I am. But I realize that that mattering is like an immunity, a social immunity. And when it starts breaking down, it's being broken down from generation to generation. And the people who feel it the most are kids. If you're going to intervene and start giving them that signal earlier,

then the best time to do it is not when they're in high school. It's when they're been that three to five, six-year-old period. What have you found are the most observable signs that a child feels like they matter before they have the language to express it? I know it starts with the mattering instinct when we're born. Right. But what are other things that that child, children give off? Ben Zander, who was the former conductor of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra, and I got to see him live, has one of the best underrated TED Talks. And in his TED talks, I think it's called the art of possibility or something like that, but just type in Ben Zander, Ted.

And he talks about him as a conductor, as a teacher, and that at the end of the day, after he goes through his whole cycle of teaching, that he looks for one indicator, one indicator that he has left a human being who happens to be one of his students better off than he found him. And he said, I look to see if their eyes are smiling. And if their eyes are smiling when they leave my classroom, they will run back the next day. And if their eyes aren't smiling, then I ask myself, what have I done today? And what do I need to do tomorrow to make their eyes smile? And I think that's a telltale human sign that cannot be faked. It cannot be. it's just so a part of us when someone is in our presence that we know not only is safe,

we know not only that they might be there to help us in some way, but they are there to see us, to fully see and appreciate who we are, our eyes, smile. Maya Angelou talks about this too, like whenever you greet your child, that you greet them at the eye level because eyes are the window to the soul and you can genuinely tell if somebody is like, oh, hey, good to see you. We see past each other all of the time. But not only when you see somebody, but when your eyes are smiling because of someone else, there's just nothing better for your soul, for your heart, for your brain, for you. And one of my big realizations, before I even knew the word mattering, I did what many parents do.

You drag your kids to the front porch and you sit them on the front porch and you take their picture at kindergarten first grade all the way up. I can tell you to the date what grade level that my kid's eyes started smiling, stopped smiling. I could see literally their soul sucked out in their faces the moment school became a get to go and a get to do to a half to do. And I think you could see that same progression, whether you're putting CEOs in front of their building all the way, the second your eyes stop smiling because of who you get to be with, the second your company, your organization, your classroom, your relationship is in big trouble. And it's such a unmistakable indicator. Yeah, I really, here in the United States, I go back to the 80. when we introduced No Kid Left Behind and some of the other programs, which were to do really good things.

But I think when we started making kids feel that their worth was conditional to grades and we started taking play out of the classroom, everything has fundamentally changed. Absolutely. So we stopped celebrating the essence and beauty of childhood in every way. We turned our kindergarten classrooms, not even kindergarten, our preschool classrooms into college prep classes. We treat getting into preschool as parents like you are trying to get into an Ivy League school like the level. And it just, we have completely lost our way, which is a whole other podcast topic. I was just talking to a friend of mine who he had, his kids are now in, in their 30s and one of

them lives in New York. And he wanted to send his kids to one of the best elementary schools in New York, private schools. And I just said to get an understanding, what is your son paying for their education? And the kids are, one is in kindergarten, the other is in second grade, $65,000 per year, $130,000. Oh, wow. I have no words. I literally, I have no words. Because worthiness to that parent is conditional. And it is mainstream, isn't even the right. word. It is so infused in our culture, not even like throwing social media under the bus or throwing the media under the bus that. So like I have this statement when I talk to kids, the first thing I say is you are a genius and the world needs your contribution. That's the fundamental thesis of choose

to matter. And of course, everybody freaks out. I remember my first one of my publishers was like, you can't use the word genius. I'm like, I absolutely am going to use the word genius just to disturb. because we have lost our mind that genius is some DNA anomaly average is the anomaly we have lost our way if you go back to i think the earliest definition i found was in 1604 by a scientist named alex hurley and he said the essence of genius is to keep the soul and spirit of childhood all the way through adulthood and think of the people that have been able to do that and the role of play and the royal of anyway so when i say that that encompasses every aspect and every principle of the science of mattering. And yet, like I've said it in front of auditorium with thousands of kids, kindergartner, how many kindergartners raise their hand when you say that? You are a genius and the world needs your contribution. Two hands go up.

They rush the stage. They're out there on the stage and I'm a dancer. I'm this, I'm that. And it used to be like you're thinking when I started teaching 35 years ago, that it was middle school when that started fading. started just being awkward about ourselves. Uh-uh. No, six and seven-year-olds. Six and seven-year-olds hesitate. And they have begun this cycle of conditional worthiness, of doubting who they are. And they'll be like, well, I can't raise my hand and say that I'm a genius. That's, I'm not.

I'm just. And then that whole horrific sequence of words comes in. I am just. I'm only. And if, and I'm, I'm, and then that whole narrative takes over, that is the norm. That is why we think genius is a weird word. And we don't think any of that is weird because we are conditioned to do that to ourselves and to each other. Before we continue, I want to pause for a moment because if there's one idea at the center of today's conversation, it's this. Mattering is not optional.

It's not something nice to have. It's not a bonus if life is going well. It's foundational. And when that sense of mattering starts to erode, it doesn't just affect one area of your life. It affects everything. Your energy, your motivation, your relationships, and your sense of purpose. That's exactly why I wrote my upcoming book, The Mattering Effect. Because what I found through research, through conversations like this one with Angela, and through my own life, is that many of the struggles people are facing today, burnout, disconnection, loneliness. They're not. separate problems, they're all signals that somewhere along the way we stop feeling like we matter. The mattering effect is about understanding how that happens and more importantly, how to reclaim it. So you can live, lead, and show up in a way that actually feels aligned with who you are. If today's episode resonates with you, you can pre-order the mattering effect now at the mattering effect.com. It's available October 6th. Because when you restore a sense of mattering, you don't just change how you feel. You completely change how you live. Now, a quick break for our

sponsors. Thank you for supporting those who support the show. You're listening to PassionStrapp right here on the Passion Struck Network. Now, let's return to my conversation with Angela Myers. Angela, I just want to take one step back because I think it's important. And you and I both key into this word worth. At what developmental stage, because you just mentioned seven and eight year olds. What developmental stage from your research and your lived experience, did children start linking their worth to performance rather than presence? It depends on their families. It doesn't depend on school. It depends on their families. So from a very early age, and I think there's other factors like gender and birth order that do have some validity that I don't know deep into that

research, but I was the first born. I was the first girl to go to college. and I lived in a super small town of 700 people in the middle of a cornfield in Iowa. It was like a big deal. So I think it's generational. I think it's cultural. I think that a lot of those factors. But I think the community's emphasis, not just, I'm not like dumping on parents. I don't want you to think I'm dumping on parents because parents feel the pressure.

But when I look at what we focus on expand and when we focus on, all of those outside factors. This is the best school in who qualifies the best school? What is qualifier? What are the qualifiers? They are test scores. They are how many kids get scholarships. There are how many kids that get into college. I went to my niece's graduation and I was just mortified because the whole graduation was celebrating these qualifiers like by the numbers. This is how much money in scholarships, XYZ got. This is how many kids. If you were sitting in the audience and you were a parent of a kid that didn't get this, that didn't wear some colored rope around their neck that said, I jumped through this suit. When we look at

the essence of our humanity is the impact that we have on other people, that we have in our community. So we have lost that. And maybe it is because I grew up in a small town and there's these unwritten small town rules literally like when a new person would come to a small town you would have a barbecue for them and everybody would bring their best they wouldn't bring like crusty bread and they definitely wouldn't go to the grocery store and put it in a Tupperware like you showcase the best of who you are because everything you brought to that barbecue but the next time and then you invited the new people to taste all the wares to get a sense of who we were as a community but the second time you had a barbecue, you better bring something. If you show up empty handed, you're in trouble.

If you show up and you copy another person, if you show up and try to compete with Donna's potato salad recipe, you are in trouble. The essence of what makes a small town role is that everybody has something unique. And when you put it all on the table, you have this feast of, you have this festival of talent and taste. And that's how they operate the small town. The my father was the mayor of the town and the fire chief, and he had a normal job at the plant, at the plant. So you're not just, no one is just a farmer. No one is just, they're a farmer, the pastor of a church,

the head of the city council, there are million things because in a small town you tap in and you acknowledge everyone. And the weird person in the community is the person he shuts all their windows and doesn't interact and doesn't honor everybody's little contribution. That's one of your biggest jobs when you move into a small town is figure out who are you going to be for that town. Who are we going to go to for what when we need X? And that's what five-year-olds do. Who are we going to figure out who to go to for whatever? When we isolate, when we put ourselves in categories, when we create these crazy hierarchies on random attributes,

then we lose the essence of what makes us human and what makes us strong communities that are resilient and can withstand and flourish using your word. When I was growing up, my father is from Detroit and I have a large family ecosystem system in Detroit. But unfortunately for him, his father, who I never got a chance to meet, because he unfortunately passed away before I was born, was just brutal. He was a very angry alcoholic, which is a dangerous combination. It is a very dangerous. Sorry, John. And my father was the firstborn, so he took the brunt of it. So as soon as he could escape, we became the nuclear family. But I was always so jealous in many ways because we would go home to the Detroit area

for Thanksgiving or Michigan football games or whatever. And they had this incredible family ecosystem where you would see all your cousins and aunts and uncles who were getting together almost every weekend in these big family units. And I remember going to Christmas there. And there were like 80, 90 people. And they all knew. other and they all and I really miss that to experience as a child and I think what you're saying about the small town is that difference between the nuclear family and having that larger ecosystem around you. You look culturally. I do a lot of work. I've been working in Hawaii for about 30 years in really rural communities, everything that is the opposite direction from all of what people

think Hawaii is, all the tours stuff. And that is one of the hallmarks. And that is one of the hallmarked. at both the school level, the community level, the family level. Like you can go through a park and you're not talking about like a family picnic for us was going to this park and everybody bring a covered dish. Their family picnics are you've got blow up toys and bouncy houses and they are there for the weekend you've got tents. It is an event and I go by that. I'm like, it just reminds me of kids don't grow up with that experience anymore.

They may play with one or two kids. And I get that balance of safety, but there's something so beautiful to see, like not 20 or 30, 60 people that are friends and family together. And that's a every weekend kind of thing. It's not, oh, it's this Fourth of July and all the families get together. That's every weekend. It's community is so embedded in the culture of Hawaii. So I do think you see that in different cultures and spaces. I think you see less and less of it in the United States.

When I look at that scenario and that family, everything has changed now because my grandmother and her sisters, et cetera, were the trigger point that I think the group organized around them because there were so many of them. And now that they've passed, a lot of the cousins who were my age have all drifted. So they're now living in Chicago or Pocci or so they're no longer there. So it leads me to this question. When you see communities start to disintegrate or these small towns or family ecosystems, do you think the loss of mattering is usually gradual or is it triggered by specific experiences?

That's such a tough question. I think if mattering is so individual, it is even though it is our universal, human condition. It is so fundamental to and inseparable from every aspect of our life. And yet, it's very personal. I'm working with a community. We're doing a project in Appalachia called You Matter Appalachia. And what I'm seeing there is a phenomenon of what is the impact when an entire community, not just a group within the community or an individual within the community. And or a gray level or a certain group that is what we would deem at risk or at promise. It's what if your brand as a community is, you don't matter.

And that's been proven to you over. And that goes into a lot of Gordon's work with anti-mattering. And when humans get to that point, what gets a human being to that point? And then I look at people who grew up in the same household. I've been very vocal about this, but I lost my brother to start. suicide at the pinnacle of his career, at the pinnacle of his life in a loving family, surrounded by people who cared about him, like stunning, just stunning. So it is as individual as it is, there isn't an answer.

I don't have an answer to that, but not noticing and not knowing. That's a hard part. I go back to then the quickest, I think you said something about anecdote, but that's what I feel like mattering is it is both both the promise and the peril that we have this anecdote that can, I don't think just ease, but can literally eradicate all the things that we struggle with from apathy to agony and everything in between. And it's free and it costs nothing and anybody can do it at any time. And when I say that out loud and I even say to the people I say it to. I know I sound like a snake oil salesman. If I said, you know what, here's this

pill and it's going to cost you $100,000 a month to buy and it's so rare and you've got to do all this training and it's going to take 17 years to even see. People would be buying it by the billions. I think that's like the cruelty about the science. Like the pain, if I look at what my deepest pain point is knowing that this anecdote is available and it's freely available to anyone at any time if they understood the elements of mattering and the urgency that humans need to know they matter. And yet no one knows it exists. No one seems like in many states cares that much. It just sounds like gobbledygook.

That's painful. My personal hypothesis on this is I compare it a lot to burn out, which is something I unfortunately went through. And I don't think any person goes from not being burned out to being burned out overnight. What ends up happening is it's a series of micro events that eventually caused it to happen so much so that while it's happening, you don't really realize it's like low state depression. before it becomes serious depression. You realize your world is getting a little less right,

but it's not such a huge change that you perceive it. And I think mattering is the same way. And so when people... I fully agree with that. I do. It happens slowly and then all of a sudden you wake up. I think that's what COVID was. COVID was that all of a sudden wake up.

like we did not have the great resignation and quiet quitting all of a sudden this has happened slowly dripping dripping dripping by these micro actions and micro movements and then at mass scale it was all revealed at the same time like it happened all of a sudden no one should be surprised that existed i think the surprise was that it was so collective and so but that it occurs that it occurred, not a surprise at all. Well, I'll tell you another thing that played into that is we are all so busy that most of us aren't really analyzing the human condition. Yes.

But in that time, people had more time to think about things. And I think so many of them realized, man, I hate what I'm doing. Why do I keep doing this? Why am I doing this? So, Anjillo, what have you found is the cost to an individual and then to society, if you could go through each one when people go through life believing they don't matter.

I don't think there's a greater cost. I think there's this invisible pandemic that we have called insignificance. And I think it is the greatest danger to an individual, to an organization, to our humanity, because when we feel insignificant and we feel like our presence doesn't matter in the world,

which is the definition of mattering. Every aspect of our life is affected. Because, so I do this exercise in my speeches or workshops because I want people to experience mattering because it can be experienced and activated so quickly. And so I'll have them close their eyes and I'll read some statements like, John, I see you. I hear you. when I saw your face today, I breathed a sire relief. I couldn't imagine doing this without you.

Just simple statements. And then I ask people, how does that feel just in those seconds? How did it feel to just hear those things? Where did it resonate? And you will get like profound feelings. And then I show the whole like in a word bubble. Like imagine people coming to the world feeling any one of these things, let alone multiple, feeling appreciated, feeling valuable, feeling worthy, feeling beautiful, feeling strong,

feeling hopeful. That's one of the biggest words that comes out. Feeling hopeful, feeling motivated, feeling energized. So when you look at every metric we have, whether it's a health metric, whether it's an academic measure, whether it's a metric that a Fortune 500 company has or a small business has. Every metric, every measure, everything that we achieve or envision is impacted by how human beings show up. And you show up differently to the world when you know you matter because you feel these things. It is in your DNA. You're wired for that. So when individuals don't feel these things or repeatedly don't feel or experience it. any of those things, if you can imagine that word cloud up, they're going to show up differently.

And they may get through work or they may get through this, but it, the long-term impact, it is inseparable from every aspect of our life. It's inseparable from our health. It's inseparable from our energy and ability to be productive. it's inseparable from how we show up in relationships. So how you show up in the world matters. And it is impacted not just by our perceptions, but by what we deeply need to feel. These aren't ego-driven things.

These are driven by our DNA. When I think about this and it took me a long time to get here and Gord is now talking about this as well, I for such a long time, like I think most of society, I would bucket disengagement at work and people feeling burned out and exhausted in one bucket. I put loneliness in another bucket. I put hopelessness in another bucket. I put people who were broken and the homeless in another bucket. And then I started backtracking.

And when you look at the word insignificance, when you reach a. When you reach a point like we were talking about where those micro elements are taken away from you so much, eventually it hockey sticks. And that's when all these conditions start happening. And I was on a podcast and they were asking me, what would you say to the person who doesn't feel significant? And I said the first thing that you're probably thinking is that you're alone. And then I want you to tell you, the loneliness epidemic is saying 50% of people feel this way. 77% of people are disengaged. You have this huge bucket.

Yep. I'm like, that's being Gallup for three decades. Ever since I've been reporting on Gallup in terms of workforce data, whether it's their individual workforce report or meta-analysis of many things. That's the number one thing. And that's why I said it's a range. It's literally an entire spectrum of everything from apathy. to full-blown agony and everything in between.

And we like pulling out those pieces because they seem more concrete and put a band-aid on that, like loneliness or even suicide. I don't think we have a loneliness problem. I think we have a mattering problem. I don't believe we have a suicide problem. I believe we have a mattering problem. Mattering comes first period, biologically, sociologically, physiologically.

And if we guarantee those conditions, then we start, those are consequences of either feeling like you do matter, feeling significant or feeling insignificant. So we treat the symptom of insignificance, but we don't treat the core of what it takes to feel significant. And that is like my biggest frustration because then we put, I think we've, probably quadrupled the cost of, I know just from education in, we were doing post-pandemic, how much money has been spent on SEL, social emotional learning, which is a joke in and of itself, but on all of these now belongings is the big thing. Before we went through this loneliness thing,

then we went through character, then we went through, I don't know, all the phases of education. Now it's on belonging. Everything is on belonging. And I'm, that was kindness, kindness was a long time than belonging. It's not that your anti-kindness or your anti-belonging. It's just those are these symptoms, these pieces or these elements that can either contribute to significance or decrease someone's ability to feel significant. But we never ever talk about what those conditions are. And then we just keep going run around. Angela, I just want to stop you for a second because people are listening to this and they're saying, and Angela are talking about mattering and then she just said that social emotional learning.

It's just like kind people. Oh no. Yeah. No. But where you're going is social emotional learning has been focusing on belonging. And this is one of the things I don't think people understand that belonging is different than mattering. Zach McCurro gave me a definition of this, but I'd love to hear yours.

Yeah. So mattering to me at its core is your belief that you are significant to the world. and those in it. Very simple. And it arises from two really key attributes that can be broken down. The first is, this is the show and tell, that you have something in your backpack that you bring to the world that has value. That's immutable. That you, because you exist, you have a backpack of experiences, of talents, of extraordinary insights and perspectives that is with you the moment you enter the world, this invisible backpack. You have value, period. And with that, we get our value acknowledged when people see us, when they hear us, when they have smiling eyes, when they're present with us,

all of those things. But the second part of mattering that has to be there for mattering to arise is that we give value to other people. Yes, we matter because we exist, but we were not created to exist. We were created for significance. So we are there in the world because someone else in that world needs exactly what we have and what we bring to it. And withholding that doesn't just hurt them. It actually hurts us because it's through our ability to give value away, to serve, to impact, to leave people better off than we found them, that we get to significance. Success is about usually our individual metric. That's why I've been pondering this really deep question.

I don't know the answer to it. But you know how Jim Collins rocked my world when he said, good is the enemy of great? Literally, I was like, that is a typo because we live in this world where it's the opposite. at where you get good and a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better and a little bit better and maybe you hit great. But he literally rocked my whole existence when he's like, good, our good is the enemy of great. And I'm like, are we at that precipice where success is the opposite of significance and that we can pursue success, which we see thousands of examples of people achieving the highest levels of anything humanly possible that could be celebrated at

gold medal level or have the talent of Whitney Houston or Michael Jackson and then find out that they still laid their head down and didn't think they were enough for the world. But when you pursue significance, when, which a requirement of that is that others are included, that you are sharing something, that you create a condition where you are needed, whether whether you are relied on, whether you are accounted on. That's actually what gives your life meaning. Victor Franco wrote all about this in a man's search for meaning and the most horrendous conditions.

And that I just taught, I was on a leadership podcast earlier and the CEO of this company that's like a $400 million company was saying my legacy is to impart that leadership isn't about you, that leadership is about how you leave people. and I'm just like it's such a simple concept, but that's the opposite of success because we've created leadership or we've created status or success is that you have made it to the top of your qualifiers. And maybe the world agrees with those qualifiers and you can have that label or title, but it doesn't make you satisfied. It doesn't make you feel complete and it certainly doesn't make you feel fulfilled. You're fulfilled when you know that

that somebody's day is different. Somebody showed up in the world differently because of you. Well, unfortunately, in the company environment, and I've been with some of the biggest companies in the world, everything is driven by the external metrics, especially if you're a public company that you're valued by. So typically that shareholder value, which then is driven by like your top line and your bottom line.

So that's where all the attention goes. So what has happened in corporations now for very long time is the employees just become utilities of that. So to me, it's really going to take systems change of having the metrics around which we judge what success is at a higher, more macro level to get this to change within companies. But when I was at Lowe's, I tell this story. I took over this function and I was inheriting a mess to begin with because Lowe's had undergone the worst hacking incident in the history of retail. This was like in 2004. I did not know that. And so you already had this huge issue. And then the group that I took over, which was responsible for fixing it,

we had a new head of HR who'd come in about six months before I got there, and she did the first employee engagement survey. And she sits me down like I'm in week two. And she goes, John, I know you got to fix this whole security thing. But the survey came back and you have the most disengaged group in the entire company. Wow. We're 120,000 employees and I've got engaged. And what I found when I started to interview my customers and my peers is they're like,

your group is like a bunch of absentees. They don't know what the heck they're doing. You should just get rid of all of them. And then when I started talking to them, what I inherited was a bunch of ghosts because they had no idea how anything that like they did mattered to anything. Right. And then their leadership couldn't have cured anything about what their dreams or aspirations for.

You just described my husband's company, which he literally counting the days he's been with this company for almost 30 years. And every day, like I even said, like his voice, you can feel like the soul being sucked out of him. And it's the level in which this large company treats their employees like should be studied. And it's not unique, whether it's his company or another one. It is, I don't understand how companies can afford to ignore this. You ignore it at your peril. And, even with examples like Starbucks and Disney and all of these places, Zappos that prove that mattering pays off, that heart share trumps market share and mine share, they still just operate. I just don't understand it. I don't understand how you can treat your employees like this and expect I don't get it. Zappos is such a sad story because here you have Tony, who was trying to create a company to make everyone feel like they mattered when he himself, especially after Amazon purchased him, lost his own significance.

And when I asked you that question, what is the cost? He paid the ultimate cost. Right. Because he felt so insignificant. Absolutely. His life ended at 46. Just, yeah. And that's, I bring that up because that is, that's what we're talking about here.

I was talking to a friend who is now trying to help the current administration deal with suicides in the veteran community. And it's like no matter how much money they throw at this. Absolutely. It's not changing. And I had a friend who did a TED talk on this. And you know how much background research Ted does before you present anything. And he did this TED talk. And he's during the 20-year war on terror, there was.

were 5,000, 6,000 service members who lost their lives. But he goes, if you look at how many suicides there were in the same period of time, it was well over 150,000 and that's not counting active duty. Right, right. So you can see the ramifications of this, and I think a ton of them could be linked directly to this. 100%. It is where my urgency comes from. I'm sad that an employee is disengaged or doesn't bring their best

self to work, but we are not just talking about life affirming things or life changing things, like creating a different culture at your work. We're talking about life saving. And that's probably the realm that I spend the most time in and really understand when you dig down into it. I have so many communities in store. I worked with this. It was at five communities that in five months had 28 suicides, the youngest five years. years old. So they created this task force with every touch point from first responders to hospitals, to parents, to schools, to everything. And we put all that data together, the foundational thing discovered was that if you asked everyone in that community, does this kid matter to you? Would you

care if they showed up? Their perception was that if I didn't show up, nobody would notice and nobody would care. And so we have this perception gap. That's why we have a perception problem. because we perceive and want to believe that everybody we touch knows that they matter, when the reality is if we presented mattering as it should be like an essential need, food, water, shelter, air, then we would take care of each other as a community and understand that without being seen, without being heard, without understanding our value, without an opportunity to contribute that value. We are withholding basic needs.

This isn't a nicety. It's not an employee engagement. It's not a theme to kick up the school year. This is about life, living fully, flourishing, and closing your eyes at the end of the day, no matter how imperfect you were in that day or the day itself was, knowing that you're going to get back up the next day and do it all again because there's people that are,

are counting on you. You are needed. Angela, since you brought this back to children, because I think this manifests then later for adults who do the same thing, why does some children act out while others withdraw when they feel they don't matter? Because we will do anything. So this goes back to the mattering instinct from the moment we are born for your community that this is new. The moment an infant comes out, our first act as a living, breathing human being is to

twist our necks to look up and to have our existence acknowledged. And infants who don't get this go into failing to thrive. So there's a physical response. So before we ask for food, before we belong, before we decide if we're lonely and need people around, mattering comes first. So what we don't understand is that every breath after that, we are on a quest for significance. So we don't a sign that says do I matter to you, but every day as human beings, just like we don't wear a sign that says, I need to eat three times a day or I get really grumpy. Or I need seven hours of sleep because if you saw me on four hours of sleep, you don't want to be around me. Or I'm going to show up at the bare minimum today because I have not been drinking water. I've been drinking soda

or whatever it is. That's what those elements are. That's what those are conditions being human and they are the foundation not only of our liveliness, they're the foundation of our dignity. So not only we taking like essential biological needs away, like we would withholding sleep or withholding food or water, food and water and sleep are not found, they're foundational, but they don't directly relate to our dignity immediately. But when we feel invisible or we feel unheard or we feel like the world is not going to care if I don't show up today, then we're losing our humanity by ignoring mattering. And so the level of urgency for the world to understand that this is the most powerful force and we have 50 years of science to back it up, it is heartbreaking

to be like, I've never heard of nutrition and how nutrition is linked to. health. It's like that blatant. And mattering is still in the scheme, not our world, but in the scheme of the world, something that even the world's most elite don't know about. And we've got to stop that. That's my mission. Do you think it's more damaging for a child to receive negative attention or for them to be ignored entirely? And why? I think that. So I'll go back to I should have answered your first question, which is every breath after that first breath, we are on a quest to matter. And we will pursue that biologically, subconsciously, no matter where that leads.

And if we're not getting it in a positive way, then we're going to get it in a negative way. From personal experience, I think, obviously, negative behavior gets attention. It gets attention. even if it's in the wrong way, it gets something. I think one of the cruelest things that we can do to human beings is not see them, make them feel non-existent and invisible. So I think that has far more reaching, damaging effects than punishment of bad behavior. You can look into all the research on solitary confinement.

You can look on all the research on invisibility. I think the dangers are that you are much more likely, I believe. Let's say you were a naughty kid in school and you got disciplined a lot and you spent a lot of time in the principal's office. I don't necessarily see a prison population like a direct line from that, but kids that were forsaken were ignored and completely just looked over that they score. and Gordon would be better to talk about this higher on the anti-mattering scale. That's my gut feeling. I don't have the hardcore numbers, but I don't think there's anything more heart-wrenching. When you think of invisibility, you think of agony.

It's agonizing, feeling invisible. You physiologically ache when you're just trying to say, do I matter to you? Do you hear me? Do you see me? versus getting in trouble for doing something, you're still getting feedback. You're still getting attention. You're still being noticed. So I don't know. That is a good Gordon question. Yeah. When I go back to that example of my father, he was in a system and I think a lot of people who he's 87 now who grew up at that time, they were praised for being silent. Don't make any noise.

Don't disturb. Dad's had a hard day at work. he's drinking, just be silent. Yeah. But I think the modern world is so many parents do excessive praise and overprotection of their kids. Yes. How does that distort a child's internal sense of mattering? Because the child never gets the experience of being needed by someone else.

The child never builds resilience or self-efficacy or agency, which are critical to all of their development, not just academically, but emotionally in relationships, the form. We are creating a generation of human beings that have been denied the opportunity to find out how strong they are, have been denied the opportunity to find out what they are truly capable of, because it is through those obstacles. It is through pain and heartbreak that we discover. And not just from others, but for ourselves, yes, this is horrible, but I know I can make it. I know I am capable.

If this happens again, I know exactly what to do and what not to do. When you take away all of that, all of the struggle as a parent, and on top of that, you give kids everything to continually make them feel good. This goes to worthiness. Worthiness is deep in our DNA. If it's not conditional on the outside, you cannot throw worthiness at somebody else. You've got this trophy. Then it's about the parent's perception of worthiness.

It's not about the kid at all. My kid goes through the school. My kid has this. My kid, that's great. You can be proud of your kid, but it's a fine line. Because if you don't have an example of pain that your child has handled on their own, that you have been their buffer for everything, that it is so dangerous because we have have human beings that don't know how to build up their own courage muscles.

They do not know how to intentionally lean into discomfort because, everything in their life has been at the minimum comfortable. And I get that as a parent. It is so hard to watch your kids struggle. And it is so easy to want to jump in and fix it. And yet I look at every lesson in my life, every scar I have, every failure, massive failures that I've done, has given me confidence that no accolade, no. no grade, no pat on the back, no anything. That's who I am and who I know who I am. Not because someone else built that or made that.

It's because I know what I'm made of. I know what I'm capable of. You can't buy that. There's no program for that. Experience is that. Life is that. And if you thwart life's experiences, then you are literally taking away that child's ability to live fully.

And parents don't get that. And it's a really hard conversation that I have with parents. And it just keeps getting worse and worse. I've never seen such a coddled generation. I've never seen. And even I was just saying to my husband the other night, like even characters on TV that we used to look up to, like that there was a scene like it was a,

I think it was like a Saturday night live skit. And it was a godfather scene where Marlon Brando was just like slapping the person. Or not Mark, but whoever was in the godfather, just like slapping them up the side because the son was crying or whining and just get out there. It was ridiculous. Like it's just hard to watch because it's a little bit at a time. And then it's all of a sudden you have an entire generation that that truly hasn't gone through.

I know COVID was hard and I know there's hardships in the world. But not hardships like our grandfather went through, not hardships like our parents went through, like a whole different criteria of what is a hardship. It completely is. One, I think some of that resilience is extremely important, which is, and I've sent you a copy of my children's book, but I'm so excited for that. One of the last things I did when I was writing it is I put in a whole two scenes into it where I wanted the children reading it to see the main character going through a turbulent time

because I wanted them to see that even at some points when we feel like we matter and we find that superpower and everything feels great, life has ups and downs and you're going to run into them. But that doesn't mean going back to your $100 bill thing. Right. That when you go through that down period, that you matter and less. That's right. And that's what I was trying to restore. Yes, absolutely. So thinking of this restoration.

Yeah. Do you think one person can restore mattering for someone else? A hundred percent. Yes. Let me rephrase that. Anyone at any time, anywhere can change the state of someone's mattering by creating conditions. Complete strangers. We often think of mattering with people that we love and serve, and that's important.

But do not underestimate our role with strangers. as well. I forgot, I was listening to, I love the hidden brain, and there was a psychologist that did all this research on a train about our interactions with strangers on a train and followed the different train rides and how different it made people when you actually engaged, because you have no idea what another human is carrying in the milliseconds before they enter your presence. But you have the power to make, even if it's a small interaction, let's say it's at the grocery store, let's say you're walking down the sidewalk. You don't know if that moment of mattering, that millisecond of mattering is exactly what they needed to make it through the next minute of their life, let alone

the next day. And there's story after story. Like, it is a moment like this when somebody noticed me, when somebody just helped me when this is the kindness of strangers. Like it's not always, Mattering doesn't always, in fact, I would say often doesn't come from the people that we expect it to, the people in our immediate world, our friends, our family, all of that, because we get too comfortable with each other. But when, when you know that, like, I'm flying all the time and every airport has a story, every trip that I take, I'm like, okay, here's another airport story. Here's another story. There's a bazillion of them. Just watching how human beings treat each other. And there was this mom on a flight and I was struggling.

The baby was crying. It was a really long flight. And she was just struggling with everybody. And I'm like, if you trust me, I can either help your stuff or I can hold this. You're doing a great job. This is really hard. I cannot imagine traveling with a baby and a toddler. And she literally just broke down. She just sobbing. And she's like, thank you for, because I knew at that moment, she's feeling like a bad mom. Like she's feeling like she can't handle it. I'm like, it is, you're doing everything you can. And we're all standing around watching you struggle. And it just took that.

It didn't change. The baby still cried and the two-year-old was still grumpy and it wasn't a smooth flight, but it was a lot better because the mom entered it better because of someone else, because of me at that moment. And that's not because I'm such, but this extraordinary person, everybody has the power. We underestimate the power of something as simple as a small, mile or eye contact or just listening to somebody vent about what happened with their flight and missing luggage. And people don't need you to solve a lot of what they're saying. They just

need to feel heard and validated. So yes, I think we can absolutely at any moment choose to matter, choose to create the conditions of mattering for somebody else. And in turn, you are creating those, it's reciprocal. You're creating it for yourself because you made yourself valuable. You made yourself needed and appreciated. Does that change their life? Does it save their life? You can't say that, but you also can't say when and where, just like all of a sudden

you feel like you don't matter. The same moments add up for all of a sudden you feel like, you know what? I'm really glad I showed up today. So I don't underestimate moments and I don't underestimate the time, the very short time we have with people. I think what you're saying is what a lot of people don't understand is just like we lose mattering in these small actions that take it away. It's the small actions that build it back. So my example is my wife is a primary care provider and she loses a lot of her energy because she spends her whole day caring for other people. And so all, you know, her action of feeling like she matters is just getting to vent to me about what would happen. Right.

In her day. And that's really a small action by me doing it. But. And when people ask me the question, what can a parent do to make a child feel like they matter? I always say, it's the same thing you said like the first minute that you walk into the room in the morning or when you get home don't ask them about their homework don't ask them if they got their chores done right look at them smile because it makes them realize that they are the most important thing in your life 100% and I would say I would carry that out John and say that goes for anybody if you had one quick in what do you call it anecdot or one quick jab of the vaccine for not feeling like you matter it would be presence and it said i was listening to a ted talk last week new science out of harvard

on occupancy filling it with things that make us feel all of those things sad and stressed and anxious and all of that but that can be cured with they were saying one to 10 minutes of presence every day, I would say it's more Malcolm Gladwell's blink 10 to 20 seconds of presence every day. And so by giving your presence deliberately, and it requires deliberateness. It is, our brains are wiring different because we're in such a busy, distracted world on top of our mindlessness, but we need to be mindful of mattering. Mindfulness, absolutely is a great body of research we can go to, but we've got to attach mattering to mindfulness because it isn't just minding our own business or minding what our goals are,

minding what's going to make us feel better. The ultimate act of making us feel better is to leave someone else better off than you found them. That is the greatest way. It's like a straight shot of dopamine when you know, and we do that not through a grand act, not through, performing a feat. It is through a simple act of presence. Notice, acknowledge, value, help, smile, inspire, look into the eyes of another human being because that in every aspect is saying to them, you matter. You are worth me stopping my mind wandering and you are worth it.

And what is spectacular is the things you will learn, the insights you will give, even if it is a person that is irritating you at the airport. It is that person is put in your pathway to teach you something, if not patience or empathy or whatever. We build those things that make us not only good human beings, but strong, powerful, impactful human beings. We build them in many moments. I even hate saying moments because it doesn't take 60 seconds. can take two seconds, three seconds, four seconds to get to that part of our brain. And it changes everything. Angela, since you brought it up, but the last thing I want to talk about is social media. So over the past three, four weeks, meta has undergone a huge trial out in California. And there are many things that I've

seen there that have been quite disturbing, one of them being the filters that they knew kids under 13 were using millions of them yet they not only even after he was told by 18 scientific experts not to do it. They leaned into it even more because they were trying to up the consumption to over 45 minutes a day. But then I start looking at the other targeting that they were trying to do to kids. But if we look at this even beyond kids, do you think online visibility, increasingly, or decreases felt significance? I think that technology is a mirror and it will advance whoever the human is. So you can fake that for a little bit and you can try to get away with a persona online.

But I think the greatest compliments that I ever get about social media is you're exactly like I thought you would be. You're exactly like who you are as if that's a surprise. And now I take that as a badge of honor. And I think when you enter that space feeling like you are there to hit a number, you are there to compete, or you are there for a metric, or you are there to do anything but matter, truly matter, just get attention, negative or positive, that it's going to lead to emptiness, that you might have success. You might be an influencer or whatever. But it's an empty.

That's why I keep going back to my Jim Collins dilemma is success in the way we measure it, in the way we promote it, is that the opposite of significance. Because if you go there as an amplifier of who you are and truly who you are, then it amplifies your life. So when I look at what social media, India has done. I'm here with you. What a great honor. Literally, what a great honor. When in any other hemisphere would I be able to connect with you? And now to be able to talk to you. And then hopefully, as we continue to talk, call you a friend, a real friend. I don't see any difference between

in real life and online. Some of my deepest, most prolific humans in my life. I actually, Gordon is a perfect example. We're writing a book. And I'm trying to get him to the U.S. but he won't come. But I don't know when I'll meet him. I literally don't know when I'll meet him. And I've probably told him more than I've told some of my colleagues I work for a decade. So I think when we start seeing technology not as anything other than an amplifier and a magnifier of our humanity, then we're in trouble.

And it doesn't matter. Like I would say my social media, because I've been writing, has gone. way down, but I'm finding deeper ways to engage with people. Like, I've never been on TikTok. My social media accounts got hacked. My identity was stolen and auctioned off by, with a ransom. I didn't pay the ransom. So they erased. So I had to build from starting a year and a half ago, built from ground zero. And I thought my life, I really went through a really bad thing. Oh my God, who am I? And I'm like, I'm exactly who I've always been. It may have less numbers.

I may not have 25 years of content out there because they took all my content. But I know who I am and I've been that person consistently enough that it's been a joy building back up my community. Because I didn't look at like my numbers or I did 25 years of content that I put in that completely, I literally started at zero pieces of content. All my Instagram, all every day. thing. So it has been a lesson. It's been a humbling experience that I did get hacked because it makes you really think about, do I really feel the closest relationships on Instagram? Do I need to dance on TikTok or be? No, my goal is to advance this message and I know I could be doing it in better ways, but it is who I am. There's nothing different about talking to you if you were sitting in my living

room or I just think authenticity is a rarity online. And people, because they want to matter so much, and I get that, that they have conditional mattering. And it's empty at the end of the day. So I unfortunately went through something similar to what you did. A Passion Struck has quite a lot of downloads. And people look especially on Apple now and they go, why are your likes not higher? And what most people don't realize is at one point, I had 20,000 likes. Yeah. And then I had an entity in India start posting one-star reviews nonstop. Yeah.

They were posting like 50, 60, 70. And they started to come to me saying that they wanted tens of thousands of dollars to stop. Yes. And so I went to Apple and asked them. Did you? I didn't pay them. I went to Apple. Yeah.

Apple put a stop to it, but they said, unfortunately, the way we're going to have to do this is we're going to have to take you to zero. Yes. It has been brutal because to build it back, it took forever to reach there. And now it's a slow thing. But I wasn't going to sacrifice my soul for that. And I have to tell you one other thing is I had Jim Collins booked two weeks ago. Oh, good.

Oh, good. And I was so. And I was excited. because I wanted to talk to him about this topic. And unfortunately, he just canceled. Oh, he has to be back on and you have to tell me when, because I've got to know if he thinks about that. So you ask is the opposite of significant.

And the reason we have so few people finding and living a life of significance is because they're so damn successful, which is the second line of good to great. Well, Angela, it's been such a joy to have you here today, and it's one of those rare conversations that I get to talk to someone who is as passionate about the topic as I am. So thank you so much for joining. It was such an honor. Oh, my gosh. John, if you have not been told today, you matter what you're doing, keep building and keeping you. I am so honored to be in this conversation with you, to be doing this work with you. And we have a mission. We still have work to do.

So I can't wait for your book and I cannot wait for the conversations to come. So thank you and to all your community and go make somebody's day. My kindergartners say, be somebody. Like that's my call for today, be somebody. So thank you very much. And I forgot to ask, Angela, where's the best place for the audience to learn more about you, your books? Your children's book, you've got to hold it up because you've got a great children's book.

But it's called M is for Mattering. And I understand your son. is the artist. Yes, I've got to show you. Look at this. Look at these beautiful illustrations. I know I'm biased. I know I'm totally biased. But he is, yes. He did such a great job. He did an amazing job. It about killed us as a relationship to do this together. But it was a learning experience because working with an artist is different than working with an illustrator. So I get that now because everything that I needed to edit was like taking his work and he said it was like taking a chisel to it to the point he's I don't even want my name on

the book anymore because I never thought about that he's an artist like as I'm a writer taking and chiseling words that I have like an illustrator creates the pictures for your words an artist creates art and trying to match that up was a huge learning experience but yes so just message me so if you literally type in you matter Angela you'll get to all my stuff but I'm Angela Myers everywhere. So on the platform, M-M-A-I-E-R-S. Yes, yes. So reach out and, again, so grateful for you. I'm just so grateful to Gordon for connecting us, like I've known about you and been in your realm and for a long time. And to be able to talk to you and see your passion and see your commitment to this mission, it just makes me even more excited to do better. Yeah. Thank you so much.

Yes. Bye. Bye. That brings us to the end of today's conversation with Angela Myers. What stood out most to me is this. We often think that the biggest challenges we face are external. Too much work, too much stress, too many demands. But what Angela makes clear is something much deeper, that beneath so many of those struggles is a quiet, often invisible experience, that feeling that we don't matter. And when that feeling takes hold, we don't just disengage from work. We disconnect from ourselves. We begin to question our worth, we start shrinking our voice, and over time we lose sight of who we really are. But the opposite is also true, because when someone feels like they matter, everything

changes. They show up differently, they engage differently, they live differently, and that's what makes this idea so powerful. Because mattering isn't something reserved for a few people, it's something we can create, and how we show up, and how we listen, and how we make others feel seen. And that insight leads directly into our next conversation, because of today's Today's episode is about understanding why you matter. Next week, we explore how to reconnect with the parts of yourself that may have been hidden along the way. I'm joined by number one New York Times bestselling author, Kayla Shaheen.

In this conversation, we dive into the relationship between shadow work and light work and what it means to integrate both. We explore why so many of us carry hidden emotional weight from earlier in life and how to show up more fully and authentically in your life. If Angela Myers helps us understand the importance of mattering, Kayla Shaheen helps us understand. understand how to reconnect with the parts of ourselves that make that matter impossible. You won't want to miss it. Becoming aware of the inner voices within you and what they're doing, what function they have in yourself. And then striving for wholeness, which is found in the present moment.

If you're aware of all your senses here and now, then you can show up more presently and consciously versus, and if you're not feeling your senses and your mind is somewhere up. and you're striving for perfection, and that really takes you outside and into a liminal place that doesn't exist, but we're creating on our minds. If this episode resonated with you, share it with someone who might need it. Leave a five-star rating or review on Apple Podcast or Spotify and pre-order the mattering effect coming October 6th.

Until next time, remember, you don't have to earn your worth. You don't have to prove your value. You already matter. The question is, will you start living like it? I'm John Miles, and you've been passion-struck.