Kelly welcomes the always insightful Marcus Buckingham back to the podcast to talk about his new book, "Love and Work," which is a kind of manifesto to center love inside the work we do and in the workplace in general. To learn more, visit https://loveandwork.org/

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I hope you don’t mind me saying that this book feels born out of trauma.

“Work can be a place in which each one of us gets a chance to take our unique mark seriously and if we do that genuinely: as companies, as individuals, as teams. as leaders. If we do that genuinely then all the other constituencies get beautifully served.  But the whole point of what we're doing is that we get up and try to add value. Whether it's in a job or anywhere else, we try to take the unique things that we've been blessed with and contribute. And I think my personal trauma and the collective trauma of these last two and a half years, certainly led me to write this book.”

And you are using the word ‘love’ very specifically in this work context.

“There clearly is something that happens in your brain when you're in love with the activity that you're doing.  When you're in love with what you do, that is magnificent and so when CEO’s talk about what do we want from our people, and they wax lyrical about innovation or creativity or teamwork or resilience - all those long Latin words - what they're really saying is you can't get any of those without love.  They are all imposters without love. You need to engage with the word love. And if you're not comfortable with the word love, then bugger off because you're not going to get innovation or creativity.”

And to know what we love, we have to know who we are, right?

“You want to have a life in which you get that wonderful gift of being seen. And, of course, the first person who's got to do the seeing is you.  And that's why I started off the book to say most of us don't go far beyond the introduction to ourselves, ‘Hi, I'm Marcus.’ And so the first person that you've got to really see is yourself to really understand.”

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