“I’ve chosen opportunities where I might fail rather than live in the shadow of my own potential.”

— Reshma Saujani

Finding purpose. Isn’t that our life’s goal? Identifying what it is that excites us, that gets us to flow within our days, that shapes our working lives? But how do we go about doing that?

And when we find whatever it is that uniquely drives us, how do we then deal with everything that working life brings: the inevitable questions around work-life balance, how to be more productive, how to deal with failure or burnout, or even the Sunday night Scaries?

In this month’s playlist, we’ve pulled together some recent listens on how we can better think about our working lives and show up with more purpose, and more presence (the two we’ve found are often connected).

Featured

Friends with Mental Health Benefits | With Reshma Saujani, Workplaces Are Burning Out Working Moms

In this podcast series, Marah Lidey and Naomi Hirabayashi of the award-winning Shine app are creating the space for much-needed conversations about work and mental wellbeing. This conversation with Reshma Saujani – the founder of Girls Who Code and the Marshall Plan for Moms – is both inspiring and moving. It covers how showing vulnerability hasn’t had a place in workplaces (to our detriment), how that might be shifting, and how we can better adapt workplaces for women and marginalized communities. This one gives us hope that maybe we don’t need to hide half of ourselves at work while also showing how much more needs to be done to support working women.

Is This Working? | Oliver Burkeman on how not to waste your time

Hosts Anna Codrea-Rado and Tiffany Philippou talk with Oliver Burkeman about his book Four Thousand Weeks, which came out of his Guardian column on time management, productivity, and building a meaningful work-life and his ultimate realization that it may not be possible to achieve a fully optimized life. In this episode, Burkeman offers some confronting thoughts on why the search for maximum productivity might be the wrong one and how we might think more meaningfully about the time we have available to us.

Ctrl Alt Delete | #373 Daisy Buchanan: When A Dream Job Turns Toxic

Emma Gannon has become our go-to person when we’re in need of a new perspective and her podcast is one of our weekly must-plays. We enjoyed this episode with journalist Daisy Buchanan – journalist, author of How To Be A Grown-Up, The Sisterhood, and novels Insatiable and Careering – about the toxic relationships we can have with even our dream jobs. Also, as lovers of magazines, Buchanan shares a glimpse of what it was like to work on titles during their heyday (remember Just17 and spending Sundays lingering over glossy supplements?)

The One You Feed | #474 Leah Weiss on Workplace Burnout

Is anyone else feeling burned out? Then you need this episode from the inspiring The One You Feed podcast. Leah Weiss is an expert on burnout: she teaches compassionate leadership at Stanford School of Business, is the principal and founding faculty member of Stanford’s Compassion Cultivation Program, and co-founded Skylyte, a company that applies neuroscience and behavior change in corporate contexts. She’s also personally struggled with burnout as someone living in the hothouse of Palo Alto, with three kids, and a competitive career. Here Weiss discusses what burnout is, how to recognize it when it shows up and how it’s different than depression, anxiety, and compassion fatigue.

Endless Thread | The complicated, chaotic rise of 'antiwork'

Co-hosts Ben Brock Johnson and Amory Sivertson take a deep dive into the r/antiwork, a Reddit community that became a movement of people wanting to rethink what work is and why we work, enabling everyone, not just the super-rich, to shape how they spend their time. With stories of people expected to show up in spite of funerals or health matters, treated as less than, and humiliated, this episode wonders out loud what work really does for us.

On Purpose with Jay Shetty | Interview by Gwyneth Paltrow

In this episode podcast host Jay Shetty gets a turn to be interviewed by none other than GP. Here the one-time monk, now hugely popular dispenser of wisdom, talks about how best to start meditation, where to find purpose, and what do you do when you find yourself in the wrong place.

Before Breakfast | Finding Your Moonshot

An episode on thinking big, like moonshot big, in your life. This isn’t about how to write the daily to-list but about how committing to something big and challenging in your life can have positive impacts in all areas. This edition of Before Breakfast can help you think about what this might be for you and also why that might matter to you (seeking out something hard in and of itself doesn’t mean that’s the best thing to do). Reading all works of Shakespeare in a year, running a marathon, or getting your degree, whatever it is for you, this podcast encourages the biggest of thinking.

Sunday Scaries by Headspace | Feel Everything

You know the feeling. It’s Sunday night, and your tummy is starting to hurt and the working week is starting to press in on your weekend. Monday morning is coming around too fast. This podcast from Headspace is designed to deal with the Sunday Scaries. In the last year — with the pandemic, social injustices, and now the war in Europe — tragedy on a monumental scale has come into our lives, but we still have to go on with our everyday lives, we still have to answer email and show up at work. Host Dora Kamau shares how feeling everything allows all the contradictory aspects of our lives to exist in a healthier way (resisting feeling is going to do the opposite). This podcast allows us to pause, reflect, and breathe, in the form of a mini-meditation for the night before we return to work. Pair with this advice from Headspace on how to negotiate the Sunday Scaries.

“Productivity is a trap. Becoming more efficient just makes you more rushed, and trying to clear the decks simply makes them fill up again faster. Nobody in the history of humanity has ever achieved “work-life balance,” whatever that might be, and you certainly won’t get there by copying the “six things successful people do before 7:00 a.m.” The day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; when nobody’s angry with you for missing a deadline or dropping the ball; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about. Let’s start by admitting defeat: none of this is ever going to happen. But you know what? That’s excellent news.”

— Oliver Burkeman, Four Thousand Weeks

All these selections can be found in our Spotify Playlist for Purpose. You can listen here:

Let us know what you’ve been listening to this month to help you think about your professional life. Which podcasts have helped you think about how you spend your working days?

To seek out more resources for finding your own purpose take a look at our guide.

Main Image: Photo by Surface on Unsplash