Elevating the Human Experience

Introduction

The first time I heard the phrase elevating the human experience was at work. It was the spring of 2018 in a meeting with my new boss and his newly formed leadership team. I thought, “He is crazy if he thinks we will ever say those words out loud to each other, much less to a potential client.” They sounded like an aspiration, worthy of striving towards but just out of reach. I wondered what they could possibly mean for me, for my colleagues in the world's largest professional services firm, for our clients and the people they served. For some of my peers, who had been laboring and loving quietly for years, the words were affirming and inspiring like a Zen koan: You know you have elevated the human experience because your heart feels full when you are done. For others, the words “elevating the human experience” were easy to mock, for all of the ways we daily fall short of living up to them in the workplace, for all the ways we feel anything but worthy of love when we show up at work.

I can hear the objections now. “Love is best left squarely in the domain of one's personal life,” so let's define love. Love is not a warm feeling or attachment. It is not only about the romantic or erotic. There is a lesser-known version of love the Greeks called eudaimonia, often translated as “human flourishing.” Building on the Greeks, and adapting from Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving, let's define love as the choice to extend yourself for the purpose of your own or another's growth. ...