Elevating the Human Experience - 9781119791348

Elevating the Human Experience: Three Paths to Love and Worth at Work is a book for anyone who knows what it is to struggle to feel loved and worthy when showing up at work. It is for people who struggle to bring their authentic identities to work, because they are female, Black, brown, gay, or any of these intersections. It is also for the people who have no idea what it may feel like to struggle every day just to feel loved and worthy, but love people and lead people who do. With equal parts courage and insight, Amelia Dunlop tells her story of what it means to discover her own sense of love and worth in her twenty-year career as a management consultant at the world's largest professional services firm. I was always either a management consultant or Mama. I was never just a woman named Amelia, worthy of love, whether at home or at work. She talks candidly about how hard it is to be a woman measured by a male yardstick when you lack a Y chromosome. Dunlop had a hypothesis that she might not be the only one showing up at work feeling unworthy. According to our 6000-person Love and Worth quantitative study, almost 90% of people agreed or strongly agreed that it matters to them to feel worthy. And yet, almost five out of ten people indicated that they sometimes, often, or always struggle to feel worthy. This, according to Dunlop, is the Worthiness Gap, the gap between how much it matters to feel worthy, and how hard we struggle to do so. In Elevating the Human Experience, Dunlop invites you to go on the journey of the three paths of love and worth at work. The First path is the path of the self, a deeply personal exploration where you learn to love yourself and recognize your own fundamental human worth, particularly when you encounter obstacles that challenge your sense of worth. The Second path is about the journey to loving and recognizing the worth of Another in your life. Dunlop challenges you to become a better ally, by consciously and intentionally giving your support, voice, power, or all three, to someone else. The Third path is the path of learning to love and recognize the worth of others you meet at work every day. It is the path of designing workplaces to recognize the worth and love of people who find themselves systematically marginalized, unseen, and unrepresented at work.