Elevating the Human Experience

Chapter 11Love and Worth at Work

People will forget what you did. People will forget what you said. People will never forget how you made them feel.

—Maya Angelou

There is a strong but invisible thread that connects how we love ourselves, recognizing our own worth, with how we love a single other person seeing their inherent worth, with how we love the communities of people we see at work every day. The problem with coming on the long journey to begin to see that I am worthy of love, and that the individuals around me, at home and at work, are equally worthy of love, is that I can't unsee it. I can't decide that it doesn't extend to “this person” or “that person” just because I am in a place we named work. Unfortunately, I can't eliminate anyone from the “circle of us,” deserving of love whether at home or at work. It can be irritating at times, because when people act in ways that are thoughtless, small minded, uncaring, it would seem so much easier to justify not loving them in return. They aren't “worth it.” It would be easier to write them off as people I do not have to learn to love. They are “just” strangers, colleagues, customers whom I may never see again.

The third part of the book expands from the path of the self and the path of the single other to explore this third path of love and worth in a community of work. Each path builds upon the previous one. In this section, I will share how we learned to make the words “elevating the human experience” mean something ...