Amelia Dunlop - Elevating the Human Experience: Three Paths to Love and Worth at Work

Elevating the Human Experience offers a roadmap for bringing our whole selves through the door at work to forge richer relationships and to create more affirming work environments.

Enshalla Anderson, Global Head of Brand Strategy, Google Cloud

This is an outrageously intelligent and heartfelt book. Women will identify with Amelia, and men will learn important secrets from her.

Thomas Moore, author of Care of the Soul and Soul Therapy

Brilliant and brave. Brilliant because of the stories, models, and applications that compose Elevating the Human Experience. Brave because it is a rarely discussed truth that love is the unseen guiding force in all great work. Amelia Dunlop bridges the most human of all emotions with the desire for worth and purpose in a new and profound way. One of the most original books of its kind in years.

David Baum, PhD, DMin, author of Lightning in a Bottle, Proven Lessons for Leading Change, and The Randori Principles

By organizing this incisively original, deeply personal meditation around the vital concepts of love and worth, Amelia Dunlop takes her place among the truly distinctive thinkers to have addressed this most important of questions: enhancing lived human experience.

Rogan Kersh, Provost and Professor, Wake Forest University

Amelia Dunlop makes the bold proposition that we should be the same person at work as we are at home. She adds the equally bold idea that love (of self and others) should be a part of our work lives. Through her own vulnerability in these pages, she invites us to open up, to connect, and to adopt the radical idea that we can be fully human, even in that place we call work. This book is for managers and the managed, for-profit and nonprofit, secular corporations and religious institutions, companies big and smallany organization that wants team members to think creatively, speak boldly, work passionately, collaborate deeply, and actually thrive at work.

Aaron M. G. Zimmerman, Episcopal priest; host of Same Old Song podcast

Elevating the Human Experience: Love and Worth at Work is personal; its insightful; and it's exactly what is needed right now as many of us reckon with how to reconcile our humanity and our careers.

Dane Jensen, CEO, Third Factor; author of The Power of Pressure

This book represents a heartfelt and deep paradigm shift. While most business leaders walk on eggshells trying to describe the humanity and emotional well-being of their workforce, Amelia Dunlop, simply and satisfyingly, asks us to love.

Renato Mazziero, Vice President, Experience and Innovation, Thrivent

The prospect of a workplace that incorporates love as a means of unlocking, even transforming the humans who comprise it, is a bold stroke. Connecting investment in the human experience at work with individual and organizational performance, Elevating the Human Experience is a refreshing and inspiring work.

Tim NeCastro, president and CEO, Erie Insurance Group

By

Amelia Dunlop

Copyright 2022 by John Wiley & Sons, Inc. All rights reserved.

Published by John Wiley & Sons, Inc., Hoboken, New Jersey.

Published simultaneously in Canada.

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Dunlop, Amelia, author.

Title: Elevating the human experience : three paths to love and worth at work / Amelia Dunlop.

Description: Hoboken, New Jersey : Wiley, [2022]

Identifiers: LCCN 2021031992 (print) | LCCN 2021031993 (ebook) | ISBN 9781119791348 (hardback) | ISBN 9781119791379 (adobe pdf) | ISBN 9781119791355 (epub)

Subjects: LCSH: Quality of work life.

Classification: LCC HD6955 .D89 2022 (print) | LCC HD6955 (ebook) | DDC 650.1dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031992

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021031993

COVER DESIGN: PAUL MCCARTHY

BACK COVER ILLUSTRATION: ABISHEK SIRCAR

To my mother and father

Love and work are the cornerstones of our humanness.

Sigmund Freuds

Ever since I was a little girl, I struggled to feel worthy of love. I didnt know what to call it as a child, but as I lay in bed at night in the room I shared with my older brother, the evidence seemed to mount in that direction. Something always seemed to be a bit off, crooked, like the pinky finger on my right hand that does not straighten. Children would be equal parts fascinated and repulsed by my crooked finger. I would proudly tell them that it was genetic, using a big word to tell them that I was born that way. And, no, as weird as it looked, it did not hurt. Sometimes they wouldnt believe me, and they would try to force my finger to straighten, pushing it down as hard as they could under a pile of books. That did hurt. And my crooked finger reminded me, and them, that I was not quite worthy.

It was my mother who noticed that I could not see or hear what other children could. She tells the story of watching me sit dressing my Barbies on the rug while she called my name from across the room. As she tells it, I never looked up, never heard her. I have no memory of this. I had surgery on my ears at age four, and by then I had a 70% hearing loss. My eyes, we discovered later, were closer to blind than they were to 20/20 vision