EP478: Jennifer Moss - How To Build A Happier Workplace - Part 1

Jennifer Moss with Succession Security: We've adopted pretty bad behavior since the pandemic of over-meeting and not caring about time and not setting our own boundaries. And we have this toxic productivity where we always have to be on. There's a sense of constant urgency that's manufactured. And there's also a lot of learned helplessness where you go in and just like, I'm just burned out and I'm gonna quiet quit instead of deciding, okay, how am I gonna play a role in my own wellbeing? You're listening to The Successful Bookkeeper with your host, Michael Palmer. Listen each week as inspiring guests share their secrets of success to help you increase your confidence, work smarter, and build a business you love. This episode of The Successful Bookkeeper is brought to you by purebookkeeping.com. The proven system to grow your bookkeeping business. Welcome back to the Successful Bookkeeper Podcast. I am your host, Michael Palmer, and we have another special two-part series with Jennifer Moss, who is an award-winning journalist, workplace happiness expert, and author of Unlocking Happiness at Work, Second Edition. In part one, you'll learn how your mindset impacts resilience, what burnout really looks like in detail-oriented roles like bookkeeping, and simple ways to create a happier, high-performing team. Let's dive into that right now. Jennifer Moss, welcome to the show. Hello, it's so great to be with you. This is going to be a great conversation. Yeah, I'm looking forward to it. Well, let's maybe start off with getting to know you a little bit. I'd love to know, how did you end up doing what you're doing today and writing books about happiness at work?

Well, I think like most people's careers, it's a bit circuitous. Although in grade 4, I did, uh, say that I was gonna win the Newbery Prize for literature for my book, but it was going to be a children's book. And it went in the time capsule and it's been buried there for many, many years. So I knew I was going to be a writer, but I assumed it was going to be, uh, children's, uh, fiction. So after all these years, here I am writing business books for and talking about happiness and work culture. And it really started just in this kind of life-changing moment. My husband became very ill. He was a pro athlete and then went through this situation that he realized that, you know, we have in these, you know, scenarios in life, especially if they're mortality-facing, like if we're facing the finitude of our