Finding meaning and happiness in your career boils down to how you align your work with your values and passions. When we work on something that feels purposeful, it gives a sense of fulfillment that goes beyond a paycheck. How can we find a career that resonates with who we are?
In this episode, I chat with Debbie Morris, the founder of Live, Learn, Serve, a career transition coaching service. We talk about how to create a happier, more meaningful work life by focusing on things like employee engagement, career growth, and aligning your values with your work. Debbie breaks down why so many people feel disconnected at work and shares tips on finding purpose, practicing self-reflection, and adopting a positive mindset. Don’t miss this conversation—it’s packed with insight!
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Finding Meaning and Happiness in Your Career with Debbie Morris
Welcome to Action’s Antidotes, your antidote to the mindset that keeps you settling for less. Today, I want to talk to you about a topic that’s really new to me as I’ve experienced it myself, I know a lot of other people have experienced it, which is how do we make work a better place to be, a happier place to be, a place that you really want to be? And I often comment that hating work is kind of built into our culture, if you think about Sunday scaries, Wednesday hump day, thank God it’s Friday, and I’ve often said to people that it doesn’t have to be that way. We can live a life where work is just one of the things we do along with weekends and you enjoy your weekend, you go, you dance, you party, and then you come to work on Monday and you also get to do something you love doing. To talk about how we can maybe help make that world a little bit more of a reality for more people, I would like to bring to you my guest today, Debbie Morris, the founder of Live Learn Serve career transition coaching service.
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Debbie, welcome to the program.
Thank you. I’m happy to be here. Thank you. I’m excited,
Well, I’m excited to talk to you about this because you’ve brought up the Gallup surveys that seem to be pretty consistently stuck with only about a third of the people in this country actually being engaged in their work, and then, globally, that number is even worse than the United States. So let’s start there. What leads to this result and this kind of stagnant result that, despite the fact that we’ve understood for so long that results in our organizations would be better if more people enjoy their job, why is it still that only a third of Americans are actually engaged in and what keeps it stagnant?
Well, I think first we have to sort of deconstruct the word and the intent of engagement. So, as organizations grow and they bring folks in, they want people to be committed to their work and to find alignment with the organization’s values. So, intrinsically, they want that level of commitment and they know that if you are intrinsically motivated, that you are more likely to stay and be high performing. So, the goal is to have that level of engagement. In order to do that, though, there has to be some level of alignment so there has to be alignment to what I believe in, what that organization believes in, and I think, first and foremost, what we’ve seen lately is that, oftentimes, there is a misalignment. So, people don’t necessarily feel like they are connected and believe in the same things their organization does. So, number one, there’s misalignment. Number two, I think people have said over and over again, we hear this all the time, is that they want opportunities to grow. So, career growth, that is a type of growth, but then as we look across generations, we see growth as meaning different things. So, growth could be vertical movement within an organization, but it could just also mean I want to expand as an individual or I want to expand as a global citizen or I want to contribute to something larger. So, growth can mean a lot of different things but people depend on organizations to help them with that growth.
And so when you talk about misalignment, okay, I always think of misalignment as having a couple of different or many different dimensions, actually, and so I think of misalignment of like, okay, this organization has a mission that I just don’t care about, versus this organization is a culture that just isn’t really a good fit for me or, sometimes, it’s just what your role is and that there’s a different role out there that could theoretically be better fit. And, of course, the third scenario is probably the best one or easiest one for any organization to deal with because that means that there’s a way to keep them with the company, it’s just a matter of coaching them through a transition to a new role where, hopefully, they can thrive and contribute a lot better because, as you mentioned, no one really contributes well when they don’t like their job and I feel like that two thirds or whatever number it is, depending on how you measure engagement versus commitment, people are not exactly giving the best results for their organizations.
Yeah. I mean, misalignment, like you said, can mean a lot of different things. I think when we’re interviewing and we’re kind of doing that dance of determining this is the organization I’m going to be with, do you like me, do I like you, there’s a very surface level information that we’re using to make that type of decision. When people get a role and they get into an organization, you do the best that you can with the information that you have at the time. But then when you get in an organization, I think what happens is the organization then really shows you who they are. And so like any relationship, what you see and what you experience is more impactful. You hold on to that more than what is said. So, regardless of what someone says, I see you acting in a certain way and I see that this has happened to myself and my peers or this is the experience that I’ve had, you then determine, okay, so that’s really the truth. Do I like this truth? Am I compatible with this? And so there’s different levels. Like you get in there, you say, “Okay, well, this is what I heard and this is what I think it is,” and then when you get there, you’re like, “This is what it actually is. Am I comfortable with that?”
The vast majority of us, I’m not going to say everyone, but most of us have relationships that last a couple months or half a year before we actually form the one that’s really going to be the one that we stick with for a quasi indefinite period of time, and I don’t want to be unrealistic about certain things, and then the same thing can happen with every time people say younger people hop jobs more often because, oftentimes, younger people are just trying to figure out, okay, what is it that I want? Am I looking at –– do I want to be in a bigger organization? Do I want to be in a smaller organization? What are these things that I didn’t think of because you can only ask so many questions at the job interview, and it sounds like what you’re saying is that these things that trip people up after they start the job are often things that people don’t specifically ask in a job interview or the things that just pop up like, okay, this is how things really work, this is what’s really valued in this organization, this is the way they expect me to show up, and it’s not something that makes me happy, per se.
Yeah. I mean, you can ask. I mean, there are things that we try to ask and try to get ahead of, but there are just some things that you’re not going to know until you actually get there. And I think organizations try with behavioral models, competency models, we’ve all worked and we’ve all seen these models of how we are supposed to behave at work. The behavioral models are intended to show the how, and I think they are created with the best of intentions but the key to those behavioral models are definitely adoption and active modeling. Again, it goes back to what do I actually experience? What do I actually see? And so you can say that these are the values, and, in an interview, we can talk about those values, but when I get to an organization, do I see those leaders modeling those behaviors, and, therefore, do I see broad adoption of them? That’s really what people are looking at.
And, I mean, the parallels with relationships really continue because everyone’s been on, I won’t say everyone but the vast majority of people have been on a first date, second date where they’re like, “Oh, this person is saying they’re like this, they value that, they value that,” and then something happens and you look at them and you’re like, “Oh, you just ran over someone’s dog and peaced out without notifying the owner and I don’t want to start a relationship with you.”
People hate the connection of the company is the family, like the company is not your family, but the organization that you work for and you, that is definitely a relationship. I remember having this conversation with one of my leaders during the pandemic and they were just really frustrated with the polarizing views of decisions that had been made within the organization, and we just had a real conversation and I was like, “Well, look, this is a relationship and you switched up on some people, so people that had been working here for many years and had not seen that you had really taken a stance on much but now you’re taking a stance on this and this feels very different.” So, in this relationship, you’re showing up differently than you have always shown up and that’s not true. That’s not true to who you were and people are expecting a certain relationship from you. And so you have to acknowledge that you’re showing up differently, just like you’re frustrated with the other side of not accepting what you’re doing, you have to acknowledge that you’re changing and that that’s an outcome of change.
Yeah, and it seems like a change can happen both on the individual and organization side of this relationship because we’re all people and we’re going to have our personal growth story or suddenly come to a realization, I don’t want to sit inside eight hours a day anymore, something like that, whereas an organization may have a merger or an acquisition or just a growth period where when someone goes from 10 employees to 100 employees and then especially when they go from 100 to 500, you suddenly need to kind of do some operational things differently just by virtue of the fact that you’re now a different sized organization.
Yeah, and that’s okay, just like people grow and develop and evolve, organizations do the same thing. I think where the rub is is there’s the transparency, what it actually means, and what the change actually means for the individual and the employee. So, for the individual, culturally, is this still a fit for me, just like in any relationship, if one person changes, is this still going to work for me? And either side should have the freedom and the opportunity to decide whether or not that will.
Yeah. So do similar, I guess, issues or events happen in work relationships as in regular relationships where someone will, say, be afraid to move on, or someone will, say, stay in an abusive relationship way too long, all these like kind of cliched, okay, these are things that people do in relationships that are destructive or anything like that, you get the player that freelances for five different organizations without letting them know.
We have all types of things, but people develop loyalties and you kind of see how that plays out.
But then I think that takes us to our conversation about happiness as well. So, we’ll find that people get entrenched or committed to organizations just because those organizations or those roles are filling other buckets of happiness.
Oh, yeah.
So if we think about the formula, you can look it up. It’s called PERMA. PERMA, it’s an acronym for the formula for happiness, and it’s Positive Emotion, Engagement, Relationships, Meaning, and Achievement, and then there’s the health aspects of it. So, really, when you think about engagement, that’s the piece of happiness that gets you in flow, like it gets you into a place. I don’t know if you’ve been there, and you probably have. You’ve been in a space of flow where you’ve kind of lost track of time, you’re really focused on an activity, it’s challenging, it’s right there, you can figure it out, and it has all of your attention, and that’s really how we should feel about work sometimes, but then there are these other pieces of happiness that work can fulfill. You can get a lot of positive emotions from work. If you think about some positive emotions like joy and humor and happiness and hope, you can get that from work. People have lifelong friendships. People meet their spouses at work, meaning you can get that from work, especially if you’re working for maybe a nonprofit or public service.
You can fill a lot of buckets from work just because we spend so much time there. Share on X
Whether it be PERMA or any other formula, the formula for what you need in life, there are things that we traditionally get from work and things we traditionally get from elsewhere. And, sometimes, I think about, if you want –– whatever you want to call the 1950s society, everything was clearly regimented. Work was for income and security and to contribute to the world but then everything else you’re supposed to get from your family life, your life outside of work. And now we’re getting this blending where more people are, first of all, open to getting these other forms of meaning from their work, but also there’s ways to get the other things that we used to get from work in other kind of forms. If you look at people who are looking for financial independence so that they could get their income from, say, a completely different source and then do what they want to do for just the purpose of getting meaning, the purpose of getting achievement, and so if someone’s independently wealthy and they still choose to do a job, they’re probably doing it for that meaning and achievement most likely. And so how do organizations or how do you advise organizations to kind of react to this kind of blurring of the lines of what aspects of your life’s meaning and achievements that come from work and what comes from elsewhere and how it could be a little bit more individualized now as opposed to being able to once assume that everyone had the same agenda around that?
Yeah. So, I mean, we definitely saw in trends and best practice that the feedback from employees or workers is that they definitely want a more personalized experience at work, and we’ve known that for some time, and the key to that is definitely having that open relationship, but then also recognizing that you can’t standardize everything. And I think I have been in situations where I’ve been a COE leader and you determine what you can develop from an enterprise lens and then you sort of lean on your managers and your employees to develop something unique that would work for them. The level of autonomy that you have to be able to trust your employees and your managers with begins to grow. And so when we think about those motivating factors at work, number one, autonomy is a huge driver. It’s in Daniel Pink’s book. Autonomy, the ability to determine how I get the work done, not necessarily what, but the how is important, and we’re seeing that, of course, after pandemic, flexibility is the big deal now, but driving that autonomy so that people can then develop those personalized experiences is a must, but you have to have the trust in your organization to be able to do that.
So the interesting thing is that it feels like there’s a two-way trust going on, where if you trust your organization and your organization trusts you, you can get to a point where you have that autonomy and that’s something also about being able to create a life that you want, because some people don’t want to be inside chained to a desk when it’s like daylight hours but then can get a lot work done after they put their kids to bed at 8:30.
Absolutely. I think it takes time, and, from an individual’s perspective, a level of responsibility to know what that is and understand what does that mean for me as I develop this relationship with this organization. I feel like what I have seen is unhappy people at work who have not decided what it is they actually want or need, then to understand why they are unhappy. They know they’re dissatisfied, they know they are unhappy with their current space or their current lot in life, but they cannot necessarily articulate why. That is a responsibility of the individual, not the organization. So the organization has become clear, these are our strategic objectives, these are our goals, these are our values, this is what we’re going to do this year, and what I can say, organizations are usually very clear on that, but from an individual perspective, people have to know what they need.
So these individuals and there’s many reasons why people may have seasons, whether they’re challenged around figuring out, “Okay, what is it that I want? I just know that I’m happy,” but is that one of the primary factors behind why this employee engagement numbers remains kind of stubbornly low despite the fact that we’re coming to all these realizations about what it means to live the good life at work?
I can’t say that for sure, I can only talk about my experience in terms of the dissatisfaction that I’ve seen as a talent leader. And a lot of it does delve into, “Well, I wanted this promotion,” or, “I wanted this specific job and I was supposed to be here at this specific time,” but then at the end of the day, they can’t tell me why. Why was it necessary for you to be an AVP in the next two years? What is that going to do or how is that going to hamper your overall contribution to this world?
And is that the types of clients that you primarily work with at Live Learn Serve?
Primarily, they are director level and above folks. I would say, probably have been working at least 20 years. You’ve been in the world of work for a while. And I feel like the clients that I have that have come to me are in a space of, “I’ve been doing this for a long time. I’ve reached pretty much where I thought I would but I’m still not happy,” or, “I don’t understand why my life is still feeling this way, and in a way, space of confusion and unclarity and I just don’t understand why I’m not happy yet, and I’ve been working towards this for so long.”
And how often is the answer something outside of work, something people can change elsewhere in their lives without even having to change what their work title, their work situation is?
I would say a lot of it has to do with something outside of work but it can be helped by work. I know there have been definitely instances, especially I can think of for myself, but clients, of course, they’ve discovered like, “Oh, okay, my overall contribution to the world is X, Y, Z. They might determine out in the future, I might want to impact the lives of women and girls, and that’s an important cause for me.” If you kind of back up into what that could mean for impacting women and girls, you might decide that there’s something in your work today that if you just tweaked it a little bit, it might get you on that path of impacting women and girls.
Understanding the end, you have to understand the end first for you to be able to make any sort of change or tweak to what you’re doing today. Share on XAnd it might be small, it might be a start, but there are things that you can always do. And I tell my clients this today, there’s always something you can do today that’ll get you on the path of the direction of where you want to go.
Let’s say someone comes up with that, I want to impact women and girls, but their current title is director of marketing for a toothpaste company. Is there still something that they can do from that role that still tweak it in a way that helps them satisfy that need?
Yeah, so if you’re a director of marketing at a toothpaste company, there might be some philanthropic efforts that that company is doing. You can go to your foundation, the department that organizes those causes, and say, “Hey, what causes do we typically support?” One of those causes might be something that’s women and girls. Or you could say, “Hey, I have an idea for an organization that I think might benefit from some of the things that we have,” and you might spearhead, campaign on hygiene or something, if you’re working at a toothpaste company for this nonprofit, and you might, you never know, but there’s always a way, but it requires you to be in that abundant mindset, to have that abundant mindset and not just think, “I should have been working at a nonprofit for women and girls.” You have to be able to think broadly and creatively about the gifts and the talents that you’ve been given to say that, “Oh, I can use my talents in this way and it still is going to put me on the path of impacting women and girls.” So the path is yours to write. It’s just that, as a coach, I’m helping you broaden the expectation that you have for how that impact is or how you’re going to contribute.
So it’s about not coming from that narrow mindset of “If I want to do this, I have to be doing that.”
Exactly. It starts with, as an individual, “Who am I? What talents have I been blessed or gifted with? How have my experiences shaped my value system and how I appear in the world? What do people kind of need from me? Am I listening intently enough? Am I making those observations of what are people coming to me for? What is the world consistently asking me for?” And then you take all of that, it’s like life puzzle pieces. I kind of coach my clients, I’m like, you have all these puzzle pieces and everyone has different pieces. It’s up to you to figure out how to put those together to make the picture that you want for your life.
And is that Venn diagram that is commonly shown where you’re trying to find the intersection of what am I good at, what do I enjoy doing, and what does the world need and find the intersection of those three things, is that a good approximation of this whole effort?
Yeah, that is a good approximation. One thing that I do add in there is values, because values, those are things that are important to us. They are developed very early in our childhood. And so what you see in terms of your life is definitely an outcome of those values. And if you kind of think about values, they’re like an anchor.
If you think about a ship and an anchor, your values are the anchor. They are beneath the surface. People don’t see them, but that ship never goes far from those values. Share on XYou’re constantly making decisions on a value system that you have adopted or that you’ve learned since childhood. So that’s why I kind of put values in there because they drive a lot of the reasons or a lot of the ways we make decisions.
And do you oftentimes encounter clients who are in a job role where what they feel like they’re expected to do from their organization is in conflict with their values?
Oh, yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely, especially –– well, I shouldn’t say especially, I’m thinking of a few clients, but it just doesn’t work. And those are the spaces where you’re like, if you can’t figure it out, if you can’t align yourself in a space where those values are going to be honored and respected, and your strengths too, because it’s hard to produce in an environment like that, and so there’s going to be some sort of transition or some sort of change eventually. So what I sort of say is how can we proactively address this change or what needs to happen in your life to get you back in alignment.
That makes sense. Now, I also kind of want to talk about your story, how you got to starting Live Learn Serve and what you were doing before that and what gave you the, I don’t know, the ability to feel like you could kind of produce this business of your own that can really impact something you care about?
Yeah. Well, I’ve been in Atlanta for many years, almost 20 years, and been in the space of talent management for the majority of that time. And in talent management, for folks that don’t know, we spend a lot of time on employee engagement. We spend time career development, talent reviews, succession planning, just sort of planning for talent and the organization’s ability to continue based on the talent that it has or the talent that it needs. I ended up just talking to a lot of employees about their career because they saw me in the space. They would come to me for advice and they knew that I supported their executive teams and so they wanted that insight. So, there was a specific project that I worked on that was focused on moving employees around internally and so part of our recommendation was to coach employees on how to do that better and so I had been looking at coaching as an option for a while, but that kind of project really kind of put the fire under me to say, okay, let me go ahead and get the certification. I felt like I’d been coaching for some time and so let me formalize whatever the skill set is. So I went and got certified, I did all the things to become a coach.
So a lot of it, and this is a story I’ve heard with some of my other guests as well, is in your current role, you were observant. You were observant and you observed yourself, how certain conversations, certain activities made you feel, and then you also observed others, you observed what you feel like the world was actually needing. Do you feel like there’s any common practice that prevents a lot of other people from being those observant type of people that would eventually discover what it is they truly want, whether it be a different job, something different at their job, or a new business like you did, from happening?
I think two things happen. So I think, personally, I think as an individual away from work, if we think about just our personal lives, don’t think we incentivize or that we encourage that level of self-reflection or the time that it takes for that level of discovery. I think in our society, there’s an expectation that you figure out what you want to do, you go to college, you get a major, you go do whatever it is that you’re going to do, and then you move up. And so we don’t necessarily encourage broadly that people take that step back and do the reflection and do the self-discovery that’s required for this type of work. So when people are transitioning or shifting, it takes time, like I think people just go get a self-help book and think that that’s what’s going to do it and it does not. It does not. And there’s testing involved in pivoting as well. You have to test some things out. And so it’s just not respected as much and I think people feel like you’re floundering if you are in that space as an individual of self-reflection. I think in the world of work, unfortunately, I think sometimes, we kind of position ourselves into a place where the nervous system, our fear mode versus our heart mode, we’re always worried, we’re always in a place of fear, we’re always in –– work kind of puts us on this constant cycle of having to produce and so it doesn’t necessarily, like I said, incentivize the moments of clarity or the moments where we are open to that level of clarity and so you end up on this sort of –– and people call it the hamster wheel, which is true, you end up on a hamster wheel or this cycle that doesn’t allow for the time for that type of reflection. And so you’ll find that there are some employees or there’s some people that kind of step out and they say, “I need a mentor, I need a sponsor. I need this, I need this,” and they make the time for it, but for the vast majority of people, I don’t think they recognize that they are on the cycle and they have to step off themselves in order to be able to do that.
And do you think it’s up to the managers of employees to recognize when one of their employees is in one of those spots and could use a mentor or could use a little bit time to do self-reflection? Or do you think that responsibility should kind of stick with the individual?
I mean, I think it’s both. I think if you are a manager who is connected with their team as an observer or as someone who is giving feedback, that’s definitely part of your responsibility. So I think it’s, “Hey, I see that you might be well suited for this thing over here. I think given our conversations about your strengths and your abilities, I think that this might be an option for you.” I think a manager should be able to do that. But I think as an individual, we are all responsible for ourselves. We all have a responsibility to understand what our contribution is supposed to be for this world and we’re not dependent on other people to drive that for us. So, as an individual, I need to be seeking, I need to be listening, and I need to be observing of what’s going on in the world and how I’m going to impact it.
And was there a specific observation on your part or a specific moment where you had this aha and started thinking about what Live Learn Serve would become?
Oh, absolutely. It was definitely the pandemic. I mean, for me, staying home at the time, I had two young kids, I was homeschooling, I was going through a divorce at that time, so there’s a lot of clarity that comes when you’re going through divorce.
That’s a lot, that’s a lot.
And I was doing it all at home. So, I mean, there was a part of me where I said, “I’m going to do something for myself,” and I used the time at home to commit to myself that when the doors opened, when this pandemic ended, I was committed to coming out of it better than I had gone into it. And so a lot of that self-reflection, a lot of the tools that I created I created around that time because I needed to practice on myself. I needed to understand why I was unhappy or why I felt like there was a gap in my contribution and what process was I going to take to get there in terms of clarifying what that gap was. I use myself as the experiment, but I’m a corporate girly, I’ve been in corporate forever, so I used a lot of the same tools and the same methodologies that I’ve learned over the years of working.
And some of these observations that you’ve made over the years of working that you synthesized during the pandemic, is there any specific observation, specific common situation that you observed, encountered that really formed the core of what drove you to develop what you developed?
I think the aha for me is that we are so practiced at developing strategy and plans and implementing and executing for other people and for organizations. I had never done that for myself. It’s a lesson in putting yourself first, valuing your self-care and saying that I’m worthy of making these plans and making these commitments to myself and also believing them. Because we go to work every day, we believe that these goals, that this company, we don’t even know the people who are setting these goals most of the time, but we believe ––
Yeah, we believe them. Yeah, we believe you care about this.
Yeah. We don’t know who these people are, where they came up with these goals, what strategy, what data drove them, but we believe everything that we hear at work. Why is it that we don’t take the same amount of care in terms of developing plans for ourselves and the same level of belief that we have in ourselves that we can actually do the things that we set out to do, make a difference in this world and use the talents that we know that we have?
One of the common corporate tools I think a lot of people are aware of are things such as annual and quarterly planning. Is this something that people can apply to themselves individually? What is my plan for Q1? What is my plan for next year?
Yes, absolutely, absolutely. And it starts broader, I think –– you and I, in our talk, we talked about the all about me, like what is it that I have? What is it that I contribute? You have to find out the foundations of how you are going to contribute to the world. And then you go into saying, okay, so this is my life strategy. I’m going to build out a strategy, just like we do a strategy at work, we build out a long-term plan, and then you break that up into maybe years or quarters or whatever is comfortable for you. But I think what people struggle with is the end. It’s not necessarily breaking up the goal, it’s the “What do I want? What do I need?” In my coaching, I get very realistic answers. I think people have very realistic goals for themselves and I always find myself saying, “Okay, so that seems, okay, doable. I need you to 10X that. I need you to get to a place where it seems like outlandish or like crazy, because we’ve seen that crazy things have happened to many people, why can’t it happen for you?”
Especially in the era of the Internet, social media, et cetera, whatever you want to call it, we all have access to these wildly successful people, where everyone knows who Mr. Beast is and everyone knows these people who have just become just excessively famous, excessively rich, powerful, influential, whichever out of nowhere, and half of every pop stars that emerge every year from TikTok, we all kind of understand that, but it sounds like most people still have this idea that, okay, that’s not for me, that’s just these few exceptional people that have this path available to them and I need to still pick from this menu of jobs or whatever you want to call it.
Absolutely, absolutely. I mean, people will say, “Oh, I wanna write a book,” or, “I would love to have a house by late,” and my response is you could probably have that in five years. That’s not anything that is outside of the realm of possibility for you. But I think to get to that 10X, you have to start with why. Why do I exist? What is it that I’m here to do? What do I believe in, ultimately? And develop sort of that vision for yourself, and then back into all of the things that you could do that supports that vision. And then, if you’re open, if you’re open, really open to what all of those things could mean, you could come up with a hundred different scenarios, like, for example, that person with the women and kids, there are a hundred different ways you can impact, make a lasting impact to women and kids. So you have to start with the why first.
So if someone even comes to you with a really ambitious goal, say, they say, “All right, I wanna become the CEO of UnitedHealthcare and hopefully not get shot in the street, but I wanna become CEO of UnitedHealthcare,” you’d still want to ask that person, well, why do you want this?
Right, why? Because the why is what’s really going to keep you going. To become a CEO of, like you said, UnitedHealthcare, or CEO of any company, that’s a lifelong, for many people, a career long, lifelong journey. What is going to continue to fuel that? And so it’s your why that keeps you going. If you have the why, then, yeah, I think that’s doable. I think a lot of things that I’ve seen or that people ask for are doable. But what’s going to wake you up? What’s going to get you up at five o’clock in the morning to get you there?
And do you oftentimes encounter people that have gotten some other feedback from other people, because it sounds like you’re saying, “Yeah, it’s doable. Let’s be open. Let’s be a mindset of abundance,” but I’m sure there’s plenty of people say, “Yeah, I wanna become, I don’t know, head chef of a restaurant,” and people will ask, “Who are you? Who are you to say you can do that?”
Right, right. Well, you know, there is a part, I do this multistep process or framework, and it’s based on design thinking principles, and so the first part is empathy where you’re using your community to get a lot of feedback. So, yes, I do incorporate feedback, and it actually ends up being fun, because if you are engaged in a community that you love and that loves you back, they want to see you thrive. So they’re coming with the intention of giving you feedback, probably feedback they’ve always wanted to give you but they’re there to give you that feedback. And so we use feedback and we use 360 feedback, we use assessment feedback, we use a lot of journal entries, and then we kind of compile all of that to make an input. So one person’s feedback does not steer the ship. It’s in there with all of the other feedback. The other thing I would also say is that when people give you feedback, it’s also a reflection on them. That’s why feedback is not always the thing that you should depend on. You need a lot of feedback. You shouldn’t be depending on one person’s feedback. So, when someone gives you advice or feedback, it’s based on their value system and it’s based on their perspective of the world that they live in. You take it, you listen in, and you say, “Oh, okay, well, that’s what you think. I have all these other points of data in terms of feedback,” and then you make decisions off of that.
So it’s kind of that idea of discernment because like, especially in the era of first the internet and now artificial intelligence, it’s more important than ever to be discerning of not only do I think this thing that I’m seeing is valid, but also is it worth my time and energy.
Yeah, yeah. And then if you want to be a head chef, there’s no reason why you can’t chef at home. You can do some supper clubs. That’s why I say there’s always a way for you to start today. And so those same people that have that feedback can come to supper club, they can see you write your cookbook, they can see your YouTube channel, like there are all these things that you can do to live in your talents and to live in your strengths.
There’s always something you can do. And then, finally, I want to ask, what is the overall impact that you’re hoping to have? What’s your why behind Live Learn Serve?
My ultimate belief is that I believe that good compounds. And so when you do good in the world, it compounds, and it has a greater return on investment than anything else. My why is that I believe I can help expand the potential of others so that they live in their purpose and they solve the world’s big problems as well. And the more that I do that, the more of the world’s problems get solved. So I believe that I am facilitating a lot of the solutions that I’d like to see in the world.
Yeah, because anyone can probably list out a bunch of the current problems with the modern world and you can probably put together the standard list of all these problems and no one’s going to solve all them, no one’s even going to solve one of them, it’s going to be like 25 pieces and 10 pieces of each of those 25 pieces to solve, and so I have a previous episode from two and a half years ago, a while back, from someone who put together a company called Harmony Turbines, which is just individual wind turbines for homes that you can kind of put on the side that don’t look like the eyesore that you see if you’ve ever driven across the state of Iowa and you’ve just seen a wind turbine, or if you’ve ever gone to Atlantic City, New Jersey, same thing. But that’s like, if you think about the problem of, like, say, sustainability, environmental stuff, that’s like one piece of one piece of that whole overall problem and you have to kind of look at that and just hope that someone’s looking at the other piece and someone’s looking at the other piece, or even just know that they’re looking at these other pieces, and that as long as the more people that get into the type of energy where they feel like they can do the thing that they’re really becoming motivated to do, because I always think about the difference between someone who’s doing the thing they’re motivated to do, anyone I interview on this podcast, for example, versus the people who don’t really –– spend most of their days sleep walking and it’s a big difference between how much good they’re doing for the world.
Exactly. And so if I can take people and redirect them from sleep walking, as you said, if I could stop them from sleep walking and redirect you into the thing that you are talented at and that you’re going to solve this big problem and you enjoy doing it and it feeds you, and you’re feeding the world, that’s a win for me, and I feel like that is a lot of what my purpose is, and so I hope to be able to be someone that is consistently redirecting the sleepwalkers.
One hundred percent. Well, Debbie, thank you so much for joining us today on Action’s Antidotes telling us about Live Learn Serve and telling us about how we can all look within ourselves, be curious, try to find what our purpose is, and ask a deeper why behind whether it’s something that we’re really enjoying, something that we really want, or something that we’re really dissatisfied by. That deeper why seems to be such a major part of the equation.
Yeah. Well, thank you for having me. This was so much fun, and I’m excited to hear more about what you’re doing with the podcast and to see what more you can get done.
Oh, yeah, 100 percent, for sure. And one of the things I’m doing with the podcast is trying to reach as many people as possible so I want to thank anyone out there listening. Hopefully, if you’ve been listening to the show for a while, you found the tools you need to no longer be sleepwalking, but if you are, hopefully, some of the ideas that came up today have helped you get to that better state where you’re at least thinking about, okay, if this is what I really want to do, there’s something I can do today, even in the situation I’m in now, and unless you’re in a coma, in which case you’re not listening, but unless you’re in a coma, there’s something you could do today to inch yourself very, very slightly toward that goal.
Absolutely. And I love the redirect the sleepwalkers. It seems like you and I are definitely aligned in that goal.
Oh, 100 percent, for sure. Well, everybody, have a wonderful day and have a wonderful 2025.
Important Links:
- Debbie on LinkedIn
- Live Learn Serve website
- Live Learn Serve Instagram
- Personal Vision Statement Worksheet freebie
About Debbie Morris
Debbie Morris is the founder of Live Learn Serve, an organization dedicated to helping people and organizations define clear pathways to positive change and a better workplace. Debbie has helped large organizations hone their talent management strategies to have meaningful impacts on their employee experience and business. With over 15+ years in HR and Talent Management coupled with her passion for well-being and and workforce development, Debbie is able to work directly with individuals and small organizations to find clarity and purpose in their work. Through Live Learn Serve, she has translated corporate talent management principles in order to design, customize and deliver reflective experiences to that lead to action and results for her clients. Debbie lives in Atlanta, GA with her two children. She holds a BS in Business Administration from Florida A&M University and an MBA in Organizational Management from Georgia State University.