Do I matter? Absolutely, says author John R. Miles

John R. Miles contends that many of us measure our self-worth in terms of our jobs, our relationships and our place in the societal sphere, and that emotional health and security can only come when these issues are acknowledged, and dealt with.

His new book, The Mattering Effect: Creating a Life of Meaning and Worth, addresses the question: Do I matter?

“In a world plagued by burnout, apathy, and disengagement, the root issue is clear: too many feel unseen and unimportant,” he writes.

Miles, whose previous book Passion Struck won the Stevie Award for Best Business Book of the Year, also hosts the health and wellness podcast Passion Struck (with 85 million downloads thus far). He is celebrating publication of The Mattering Effect Tuesday (Oct. 6) at the St. Petersburg Museum of History.

Both books combine behavioral science with a proven operational framework.

Miles, a resident of St. Petersburg, is a Navy veteran with a resume of high-ranking jobs (CIO at Dell, Vice President of Data Integration at Lowe’s Companies, executive vice president at Catalina Marketing among them).

As an author, a coach and a motivational speaker, he uses the experiences from his life and career, as well as an ongoing deep-dive into Organizational Psychology, to tell people that there’s a way out, a way to feel appreciated. A way to understand and accept that they do, in fact, matter.

Tuesday’s 6 p.m. event will feature Miles talking with WTVT news anchor Linda Hurtado-Figueredo. “She’s a fantastic person to do this, because not only is she one of the best in the business, but she’s an author herself,” he enthuses.

“And moreso because she has this personal story that I hope she will tell – she left ABC and went to Fox after 20-plus years because she was living in the Mattering Gap. And they did not make her feel like she mattered.”

Find information and tickets, click here.

St. Pete Catalyst: Why do you do the podcast and write these books? What do you get out of it?

John R. Miles: This all started about 20 years ago. At the time, I was living in North Carolina and working at Lowe’s. I was taking a class at my church and I felt called to serve the words that were given to me: The lonely, the broken, the helpless, the beaten, the disengaged, the burned out. For a while, I didn’t know what to do with that. I didn’t know who these people were.

About 14, 15 years ago, one of my friends jumped off the Skyway Bridge. And it caused me to question life, and what am I doing? So I started to look at that question again. We treat them as separate epidemics: Loneliness is one crisis, burnout is another … but the deeper I went into the human condition, the more a different question began to haunt me: What if we’re endlessly treating downstream symptoms while ignoring an upstream wound sitting underneath all of them? So that’s what I really started to look at.

Whether it’s someone burning out at work, an employee checking out or someone quietly spiraling into isolation, you encounter the same unspoken human question: Do I matter? And I began to realize that billions of people are getting very little evidence that they do.

That really caused me to start putting my heart and soul into this. Especially once I self-identified that I was one of the very people that I had been called to serve. Once I saw it in myself, I started to see it everywhere I looked.

So there were parallels to your own arc?

As my career went on, and I got more senior in it, I realized that the reason I was making the money and had the title and everything else had less to do with me, and more to do with what I was producing. So over time, my identity became fixed with what I was achieving, what I was approving, what I was delivering.

I began to realize that the modern environments that we reside in are focused on out output, but they’re not focused on the human underneath it. I saw that clearly in these companies, where I was pouring, pouring more of my soul out to trying and deal with the firefighting and achieve the outcomes they were wanting me, and paying me, to achieve.

What were the repercussions in my life as a result of it? It was impacting my physical health, my emotional health, my relationships and my spiritual health, because I began to feel emotionally dead inside.

To play devil’s advocate, you’re not a licensed therapist, so why should we listen to what you’re saying?

For one, I’m in the middle of a Master’s degree in Organizational Psychology. But I think the bigger thing, beyond that, is that on my podcast I have interviewed over 750 people, but 500 of them are the leading behavioral scientists, psychologists, neuroscientists and contemplative practitioners in the world.

So a lot of this was me using these interviews to validate my work. And over the last eight or nine years I’ve probably read over 800 books.

How does the process that you outline help people? Is it for employees, or does it help employers be more sensitive?

It’s a bit of both. What I found through examining the science is that mattering has two dimensions to it. A lot of times we think of it as feeling seen, valued, etcetera, but it’s both being valued and giving value. And in the world that we’re living in, we’re way out of balance.

So many of us are being asked to give value far more than we’re receiving it back.

What I found was missing, six core things start to erode inside us: Our meaning, our autonomy, our agency, how we value our time, how we feel safe or trust in the environments that we inhabit, the way that energy is returned to us, and the way care is restored to us.

That’s M.A.T.T.E.R. Those six things are the signals that start getting distorted. And so the way you have to build it back is first, mattering has to be built back in each of us. You have to feel like you matter before you can make someone else feel like they matter, or receive it back.

Once you achieve that, you unleash the mattering dividend, and that then carries into the Mattering Effect, which is then how you carry the mattering dividend into your relationships, your home life, your work and the communities that you reside in.

And so, for an individual you build it back inside you. For a work environment, you build the conditions that allow those six things to happen: You give employees the ability to see the meaning of their work. You give them the agency that they’re not just a seat at the table, they have a voice at the table. That’s the difference between belonging and mattering.

I liked this quote from you: “Success is just an empty way to feel worth.”

I was chasing an invisible scorecard, and if you base your worth on an invisible scorecard, you enter into what I call The Mattering Gap. The other thing I talk about is the mattering tax that you pay when you’re sitting in that gap for too long.

What does success mean to you now?

It’s completely changed. It’s based on impact. To me, it’s the lives that I touch. The whole purpose for writing this book is to help people one, explain why they’re feeling the way that they are, and that there’s an explanation for it.

And two, to give them hope by showing that there’s a way to reverse it. It’s never been about how many books you sell.