Shift the Work: The Revolutionary Science of Moving From Apathetic to All in Using Your Head, Heart and Gut

By Joe Mechlinski

70% of the American workforce is disengaged.

With every tick of the clock, millions of people inch closer to their breaking points—a growing epidemic of apathy and anxiety in the workplace that is affecting life outside of the office. But meaningful work-life integration is possible.

In Shift the Work, Joe Mechlinski, the New York Times bestselling author of Grow Regardless, shares his personal journey to find purpose, and how it influenced him to take a deeper dive into the science of human behavior. Inspired by neuroscience research about the connections between the brains in the head, heart, and gut that drive human perspectives and conduct, Joe shares how everyone can re-engage with their work and impact the world.

Filled with actionable strategies and inspiring true stories, this indispensable guide motivates readers to seek fulfilling opportunities, reconnect with their passions, and recognize their power to make a difference.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Apr 3, 2018
• ISBN: 9781642791730

Book preview

PROLOGUE

DEATH IS DIFFERENT WHEN YOU FIND IT ON THE BATHROOM FLOOR.

DEATH IS DIFFERENT WHEN THE WALLS ARE SPLATTERED WITH BLOOD.

DEATH IS DIFFERENT WHEN THE SMELL OF ROT IS IN THE AIR.

And death is definitely different when the corpse before you is not only the woman who brought you into this world, but the scene reveals she violently struggled until her last breath.

Since seeing my mother’s lifeless body sprawled on the floor, the fear of death has been a constant companion in my life, and the wish to go peacefully—with no regrets—has taken on the utmost meaning.

INTRODUCTION:

THE ENGAGEMENT CRISIS

Put those f***ing journals away, our companion said, looking up from his menu. My friends Yanik Silver, Joe Polish, and I had pulled out our pens and notebooks, intent on capturing the brilliant ideas of the man joining us that day for lunch.

Richard Saul Wurman is an icon of the digital age. As the founder of the TED conference in 1983, he foresaw how the convergence of technology, entertainment, and design would come to define the next generation of human advancement. Thanks to Yanik’s ingenuity and courage, the three of us now had the extraordinary opportunity to pick this giant’s brain.

Eighty years old at the time of our meeting, Wurman had already written close to eighty books on wildly different topics, the majority exploring how humans learn. His great insight was recognizing that industry leaders were not the only people capable of imparting knowledge. Wisdom, he believed, could come from the bottom up, from everyday people who mastered particular areas in life and work. Anyone, according to Wurman, has the potential to influence and shape the world.

In person, Wurman was stiff and distracted, as if he couldn’t slow the many thoughts running through his mind. Then came his demand that we put our notebooks away.

Writing notes, research shows, helps reinforce memory, Yanik defended.

Life shows me that’s bulls***, Wurman answered. Learning is remembering what you’re interested in.

We chewed our breadsticks slowly, digesting his words.

Everything you need to know from this lunch, you’ll remember, he explained. You won’t forget a thing you were interested in.

It’s an idea that has informed his life and career. A person doesn’t write ninety books on almost ninety different topics—or create an entity as multifaceted as the TED conference—without having a deep enthusiasm for all his subjects.

On the flight home, I reflected on the connection between interest and learning. It made perfect sense. Don’t students excel in the subjects they find most interesting? I began wondering how it related to my own work.

OUR MISSION IS TO SHIFT THE WORK TO TRANSFORM THE WORLD.

Since 2001, we’ve been in the business of helping organizations—and individuals within them—strive, strengthen, and surge! Our successes, pathways, and proprietary methodologies have been forged in the beautiful struggle of helping more than six hundred businesses flourish.

At the time of the meeting with Wurman, my colleagues and I were struggling to wrap our heads around one particularly alarming statistic about the American workforce.

70% OF WORKERS

A) THINK THEY AREN’T GOOD AT THEIR JOBS, OR

B) AREN’T PASSIONATE ABOUT THEIR JOBS, OR

C) DON’T BELIEVE THEIR WORK IS ABOUT SOMETHING BIGGER THAN THEMSELVES.

In other words, these workers have checked out. For seventeen years, this number has remained unchanged.Intro:N1

How can businesses expect to thrive if close to three-quarters of the workforce shows no passion—or even interest—for the work?

This led to a frightening realization, since the work world and the real world mirror one another.

If we aren’t ALL IN at work, how can we expect to be ALL IN at home and in our personal lives?

Our lack of engagement at work follows us home.

I REPEAT: OUR LACK OF ENGAGEMENT AT WORK FOLLOWS US HOME.

Take out your pen and write out that last sentence; I want it to sink in.

WRITE IT OUT

Have you ever felt trapped at a company because of their lackluster mission or misaligned values?

When we leave work feeling depleted and hopeless, we don’t return to our families and communities feeling empowered, looking for opportunities to innovate and create in our personal lives. Instead, the moment we step into the house, we put ourselves in front of the television to numb the pain with the mistaken belief that we lack a better option for how we spend our days.

We the people do whatever is easiest, which is maintaining the status quo and allowing inertia to take over.

We hate our politicians but can’t be bothered to vote.

Who has the energy to get involved after a long day at work and taking care of the children?

We complain about high medical costs, yet we are the most obese nation on the planet.

Our schools are failing, inequality is growing, opioid abuse is destroying entire communities, and six million citizens are either in jail or on parole, yet a majority of our focus is reserved for TMZ, Tinder, and Facebook. Imagine the change we could bring if we held ourselves to a higher standard at work, trying to bring meaning to the one activity that makes up the bulk of our day.

Imagine the compassion we could unleash if we acted on our convictions and started to view apathy as the plague it is!

THE ENGAGEMENT CRISIS

HITS HOME

West Baltimore. April 2015. Riots break out after the death of Freddie Gray.

Businesses destroyed, hundreds arrested, the Maryland National Guard deployed. The hopelessness triggering this chaos is familiar to me. I grew up in East Baltimore, several miles away. Freddie Gray hailed from Sandtown-Winchester (West Baltimore), where unemployment rates sit at 50 percent. The other 50 percent that does work earns a median income of $24,000, well below the federal poverty level for a family of four.Intro:N2

These people are on the bottom rung of Maslow’s pyramid.

Every day is a fight to obtain the basic needs of food, clothing, and shelter.

Rising to the pyramid’s second tier—to satisfy psychological needs like esteem and belongingness—is a pipe dream. The people in these communities struggle to find a purpose beyond survival.

Environments of despair have a clear mental effect on people, but they also—as this book will demonstrate—impact the body’s physiology and biochemistry.

What if these workers had jobs that lit them up?

What if these workers enjoyed environments with equity, equality, and justice?

What if the companies they worked for could bring the best out of their employees?

What if the 70 percent of the workforce that feels disengaged succeeded in positively shifting their work?

CUE THE CHANGE…

The brains and bodies of these workers would change.

Workers would feel fulfilled, knowing they were making an impact at the place they spend a third of their life.

Employers would profit from a workforce that now went ALL IN on the job.

Productivity would rise, a more genial culture would emerge, and employees would spend time thinking about how to innovate and improve efficiency, instead of counting down the minutes until they could punch out.

Communities would benefit from citizens, fathers, mothers, and children (of working age) who now leave for work every day with a sense of purpose and come home feeling empowered to have a positive impact on their surroundings.

The possibility of creating nourishing work environments and connected communities doesn’t apply only to the people of West Baltimore.

The entire country stands to gain if we can engage the workforce. In fact, the entire world does.

HOW DO WE GET

EVERYONE TO GO ALL-IN?

Work isn’t supposed to be fun.

So goes the typical response from earlier generations when asked about the engagement crisis.

At one time, this was true. Earlier generations had limited choices when it came to work. Skills, education, location, and family connections generally determined a person’s job choice. If you lived in a coal-mining town, you were destined to become a miner. If your father was a banker, welcome to Wall Street. Middle-class workers with college degrees could expect a nine-to-five job at a company the person would call home for the next forty years, with every promotion and pay raise set according to a schedule. Nobody questioned these choices because people needed these jobs in order to cover basic needs—security, food, shelter—the bottom levels of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs.

America has attained unprecedented levels of prosperity over the last thirty years.

This achievement gives people an extraordinary liberty to choose careers and jobs that light them up inside.

The time has come to capitalize on this newfound freedom.

WE DO NOT HAVE TO ACCEPT A 70 PERCENT DISENGAGED WORKFORCE AS A FACT OF LIFE. IT’S NO LONGER A HARD TRUTH ABOUT THE WORLD.

The newest generation to enter the workforce is seizing this freedom to change the culture of work. Millennials—people born between 1981 and 1996—are well educated, value time over money, and have a refreshing perspective on what truly matters in life.

At the end of the day, when millennials look themselves in the mirror and ask, Was today worth it? they expect a meaningful answer.

Happily bouncing from job to job, they seek what both excites them and matches their values.

30 percent of Millennials are emotionally and behaviorally connected to their job and company.

60 percent of Millennials are open to new job opportunities.

36 percent of Millennials will look for a job with a different organization in the next twelve months.Intro:N3

In the coming years, this trend will intensify. The Department of Labor estimates that today’s students will have somewhere between ten and fourteen jobs by the time they’re thirty-eight years old.

Millennials are why companies like Zappos and Google constantly make headlines for bringing positive changes to the work culture. They are in tune with the demands of these younger workers who expect purpose from work and the workplace.

They need to believe the company’s mission aligns with their values.

It’s no accident that these companies boast high levels of employee engagement either. In words and actions, they embody the idea that culture is the priority, not just a priority.

Despite these positive developments, change on a massive scale is still a long way off. Preventing it is the archaic notion that all decisions about work, like the preferences of millennials, are products of rational thinking. Science in the last several years is telling a vastly different story about how and why work engages us.

Recent discoveries in neuroscience reveal that at every moment, your body’s neural network, which connects the brains in your head, heart, and gut, is sending signals about what it finds helpful or harmful.

The brain in your head controls and coordinates your actions and reactions, which allows you to learn, think, and store memories.

The brain in your heart beats to pump blood throughout your body, which transports nutrients and oxygen to cells.

The brain in your gut regulates your serotonin level, which dictates your mood and behavior.

In fact, there are countless ways these brains influence our decisions and behavior.

We will never solve the engagement crisis if we continue to ignore the brains in the heart and gut.

This book explores the emerging science around each of these brains, to help us move away from a work world that is designed solely to meet the needs of the brain in our head.

The three brains, when working together, don’t lie. I know this from personal experience.

IT IS

PERSONAL

Twenty-three.

That’s the number of funerals I attended before my twenty-third birthday. The last three deaths hit me the hardest, coming at what should’ve been an exciting time in my life.

The HBO television show The Wire is the best comparison to the neighborhood in Baltimore where I was raised.

Violence and unemployment were rampant.

My high school was the worst in the state of Maryland with a graduation rate of 23 percent.

A tough upbringing. Yet, I succeeded in making it out. I managed to get accepted to Johns Hopkins University. Right after graduation, I was offered a job at the prestigious Andersen Consulting (now Accenture). Accepting this job would be the bow on the new life I had created for myself. Oddly, at this moment, I found myself stuck in place, unable to decide on my next move.

First came the death of my mentor.

During college, I was always starting different businesses, and one of them was a house-painting company. By the business’s third year, I had more than a hundred people working for me. One day, some disgruntled workers trashed a mansion they were supposed to paint.

The owner, Stan Burns, insisted that I would personally repair the damages, even though I didn’t know how to paint. I was scheduled to leave Baltimore that week to begin work at Andersen.

He demanded I take responsibility.

I complied, delaying the start date of my new job. Over the next few weeks, as I worked on his house, this former bank executive took me under his wing and shared his philosophies on life and business.

You’ve got to love who you work with and love who you do the work for. That’s the kind of passion that breeds success, he told me.

This was a radical idea for a kid like me with a blue-collar upbringing. I’d always thought of work simply as a way to pay the bills. He suggested that someone with my background might not be happy in a suit-and-tie environment like Andersen. His words hit me because I wasn’t excited to say yes to the people at Andersen, but I wasn’t prepared to say no either.

I settled for pushing off my start date. Meanwhile, some buddies and I started a different business. It involved being on the road seven days a week, a different city each day.

Upon returning to Baltimore after one trip, I received a call from Stan’s daughter with news that he had passed unexpectedly.

Three weeks later, my cousin was killed in a drunk-driving accident.

Three weeks after that, my mother died. I’d be lying if I told you that her death didn’t come with a huge sense of relief.

For twenty-three years, I was my mother’s caretaker.

She called whenever she was sick, hungry, or troubled. She developed diabetes when pregnant with me and struggled with the disease for most of her life. She smoked and drank. She didn’t watch her diet, and