The Thinker: April 2026

Meaning & mattering

As the late, great Chrissie Amphlett sang: “we’re living in desperate times; these are desperate times my dear”. The world is a bit of a shit show right now, and we’re being fed continual information that can be distressing, infuriating and downright scary. It has got us thinking about how we hold onto hope, and focus on what matters, when our values of equity, social justice, safety and opportunity can feel like they are being challenged.

How do we hold onto our sense of professional meaning, and how do we remind ourselves that what we do matters?

Big questions, lots of potential responses! There’s increasing research about the drivers of workplace wellbeing and resilience, and unsurprisingly they have less to do with technical skill and more to do with recognising the complexity of human nature. Research identifying the protective factors that contribute to employee resilience shows that these factors align beautifully with the concept of Meaning and Mattering. They are:

• Self-efficacy (knowing you can do the tasks of your role well; having some autonomy and agency in the work; building skills)
• Positive affect and optimism (ability to keep things in perspective; having hope)
• Sense of coherence (a belief that what you’re doing actually matters, both to you and others; experiencing this by having the resources required to do the job; that things make sense)
• Social support (positive relationships particularly with workplace peers; team culture of psychological safety; belonging)
• Leader-member exchange (relationship between individual and their line manager; feeling understood and included; two-way trust, respect and communication)

We’ve been having quite a few conversations with teams recently who are seeking to identify and articulate shared values, so that they have something to collectively ground them when the work context gets tricky and stress gets in the way of clear thinking. Listening to people name their own individual values and then explore how they align with their colleagues’ values and principles really moves people into reflecting on why they started doing this work in the first place, their ‘meaning’.

In challenging times, it is relationships that can hold us, or harm us. In the work context, pausing to think about how what you do and who you are matters and adds value can be helpful. When clients say things like “You were the one who never stopped trying for me” or “You actually took the time to get to know me instead of just trying to fix me” – you helped them to feel that they mattered. What people remember, as Maya Angelou reminds us, is how we made them feel.

In our workshops with graduate practitioners we remind them that even if they don’t get to see the impact they have had in someone’s life, they have probably planted a seed, or nurtured that seed’s growth, or played a role in creating the environment for that plant to take root and grow. And so often, that seed has been the relationship we formed with them - their experience of being heard, of having us walk alongside them, sit with their pain…that really matters!

So, as we navigate turbulent times, remember to pause, ground yourself and zoom in on what creates meaning for you, and how what you do and who you are, matters.

💠If you want to assess your own professional wellbeing, see the tool linked in the Brain Building Bit below ⬇️

ThinkWell Tidbit

Instead of starting the day by looking at your calendar and asking, ‘what do I have to do today?’, ask yourself ‘how do I want to be today?’

Go on, give it a try!

The brain building bit

Professional Wellbeing - how’s yours? Your team’s? 🌿

An excellent resource for both self-reflection and supervision conversations is the professional wellbeing self-assessment tool, developed by Vicki Hirst and Rosemary Nash, professional supervisors working in private practice in Aotearoa New Zealand.

They wanted to create a tool that specifically focused on professional wellbeing (rather than personal), in response to their experience of supervising practitioners who were exhausted, burning out and overwhelmed with the impact of the work. There are more useful resources for leaders and practitioners at this website: https://www.researchinpractice.org.uk/.