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The Soul of Work:
Interview with Jo-Ann Triner
By Carin Chea
Jo-Ann Triner is a force to be reckoned with, though in the most healing and meaningful way imaginable. Triner (who has a doctorate in Educational Administration) has over three decades of experience in the area of advanced and high-level leadership.
And now, well into her second career, Triner has successfully parlayed her expertise into her debut book, Soulful Work 2.0: Powered by Inner-Person Potential.
The author emphasizes the value of honoring your soul’s calling by finding meaningful work that also allow us to become responsible stewards of our world.
Soulful Work 2.0 comes as a much-needed insight on the heels of The Great Resignation. In an age where re-invention is as commonplace as breathing, Triner’s book is the place to turn for guidance.
Written for the masses of hard-working men and women who find themselves painfully employed; this book can be a mantra of reinvigoration.
Tell us about your background and how you came to discover your passion for meaningful, soulful work.
Throughout my administrative career, I was privileged to work with the brightest and the best. They were people of immense giftedness and goodness. Beyond having impeccable credentials, they were the premier candidates, fired up and determined to make a difference. That is why I hired them.
Professional in every sense of the word, they brought to their jobs a fervor and flair that impressed people. Despite their high ability and strong work ethic, however, the quality of their lives was often curiously low.
In just a few short years, many of these public servants were suffering from a soul-deep fatigue from which there is no recovery.
The signs were obvious: They worked longer and harder with little to show for it. Out of touch and out of tune, they had no time to talk and no time to listen. Grossly overworked, they created a dissonance akin to an off-tempo orchestra.
Had each of them represented an audio wave, they would surely resound in a cacophony of screams and screeches. They would make no music, contributing only to the chaos and confusion.
To make matters worse, I could count myself among them.
This functional familiarity with work in the zone of burnout was not my only teacher. My dissertation work, done years earlier, sensitized me to the same brutal truth.
Written about quality of life in the workplace (QLW), it made of me an informed observer. I saw the drama of the workplace with a second pair of eyes that penetrated the surface issues.
Now immersed in an instructional environment of my very own, I was getting a privileged look into the soul-deep distress of working people from all walks of life. My work community was indeed a microcosm of the whole.
Over time and with a compassionate connection to each of them, I came to an over-arching conclusion: Trying to motivate maxed out employees is far from a solution. It is just one more imposition. Burnout is not the bedrock problem. It merely points to the soul-deep needs that employers and employees alike fail to address.
At times, the job distress was difficult to behold, but it allowed me to see the profound impact of work on dedicated people trying to make a difference. It also forced me to look outside the zone of manager-initiated motivation and to ask why the fire goes out in the first place.
Amidst the mire, I asked the critical questions:
- What are the searing issues of soul that plague employees?
- Who can break the silence on these issues and give employees a voice?
- What will it take to put the passion back into the work without wearing them out?
- What principles and practices can reawaken their tired souls?
- Is it possible to turn the outdated employment paradigm inside out?
Little did I know decades earlier just how valuable my education and experience would become as my second career unfolded. At that time, I knew only that I had jumped through the last hoop and had my degree in hand. I could not know then how this research was going to guide my perception.
Now face to face with employees from a broad spectrum of society, lessons came at me from every side as I listened to their plight and analyzed their predicaments. However diverse their occupations, their soul deficits seemed eerily the same.
This I recognized only because my doctoral research had given me a special lens through which to make sense of all the nonsense. As a result, I was able to see where contemporary management theory ended and where my own thinking emerged.
Breaking the age-old mindset about employment and getting beyond it marked the birthday of my soulful work initiatives and the eventual writing of this.
That must have been a shock to your system!
Yes, this transition was a culture shock from which I never recovered. In the for-profit setting, you have people working at a frenetic pace, in cold competition with each other, betraying, bullying and engaging in one-upmanship.
I thought, “Is this drama real? Is this how people treat each other?” Bullying, backstabbing, one-upmanship, and more.
Years later I accepted another job in market research and experienced more of the same. Just three years later, I left this rather harsh and competitive environment to begin my lifelong career in educational leadership.
I started as a teacher and was quickly promoted to Department Chair, Director of Curriculum, Director of Instructional Personnel, and Principal.
In the midst of that career, I earned a Master’s Degree and later a Doctoral degree. Given my fascination with the difference between a mission-driven culture and a money-driven culture, I did my dissertation on quality of life in the workplace, a study that exposed me to the big picture of workplace issues from a global perspective.
That thirty-year career just flew by, but that educational community offered me a window into the lives of working people from all walks of life: teachers, parents, support personnel, and of course, the students themselves.
Parents who came to pick up their children often shared with me the challenges of their workday. Nurses at the local hospital, for example, would tell me about their job expectations and its exhausting impact on their lives.
Each day I sought to gain more insight into the curiously low quality of life that jobs seemed to impose.
What I observed after having completed my dissertation was akin to a 14-year qualitative study. As if wearing a second set of lenses, I saw more than the drama of their lives. I saw into the drama of their lives.
A deep compassion arose in me for all hard-working people who lay their lives down at the feet of employers only to come away so utterly de-energized. And with that compassion, I came to understand that each person has a spark of interest in a specific line of work that is all too often extinguished by the oppression of the cultures in which they work.
I could see this spark just as clearly as I could see the fatigue that eclipsed it.
This season of your life has been described as your second career. Why is that?
After 30 years on the treadmill in a variety of leadership roles, I retired. It was highly rewarding and a great privilege to work with people in an educational community, but equally exhausting.
The needs inside of the educational arena are enormous. The problems are complex, deep sociological problems that often reflect the community at large. These years offered precious, valuable insight.
What called me forward was a lifelong desire to write on the lessons learned and the deep wisdom that comes from public service.
One of my obvious strengths throughout those years was my innate ability to write, which my employers seemed to appreciate most. Without every aspiring to be the resident writer, that is exactly what I became in the end.
I was always asked to write and that entailed minutes of meetings, Board reports, newsletters, newspaper inserts on a variety of topics, educational papers, etc.
In addition to other primary roles, I became the federal, state and local grand writer as well as the grants administrator for the district I served. I knew, in my heart of hearts, I was supposed to be writing and that is exactly what I did when finally I took the fork in the road and began second career as president of Soulful Work LLC.
In the first years I gathered my concepts, wrote a 372-page book and never managed to publish it. Little did I know it was the training ground for a less dense book of 250 pages that was eventually published in August of 2023, thanks to Dr. Stephen G. Post of Stony Brook University who had seen my website, read my work and challenged me to get it out.
We think life changes at a slow amphibian pace, but while rewriting my book, I had to update everything given the rapid changes occurring in the work arena.
As I wrote, we were welcoming the Age of Artificial Intelligence, went through the period of time known as The Great Resignation, and The Quiet Quit and The Great Reshuffle.
Dramatic change was taking place, and I needed to frame my concepts of Soulful Work in line with the widespread disinterest in work as well as the costly problem of worker disengagement that plagues us not only in the USA but across the globe.
Gallup Polls publish statistics that show the appalling cost personally and collectively that all of us pay for the price of employment.
Congratulations on Soulful Work 2.0! What inspired you to write this book?
I always had a fascination with quality of life in the workplace. My own story, with its mission-driven beginning is very significant. There is an internal reward when you’re doing mission-driven work as opposed to duty-driven work that is more an exercise in self-discipline than it is rewarding.
The theme of “calling” comes through from my time at the convent. I see people with callings everywhere, even students in the school district, or when I’m being waited upon at a restaurant by a 20-year old.
How do we discern what we’re born to do and how do we get there? I have an insatiable interest in this topic. It’s a topic we needed to talk about from the beginning of time. I love asking people about their gifts, their big dream, their path forward in life. The question itself holds great power and prompts people to self-reflect.
Always, you see a sparkle in the eye when a young person focuses in on their core competency and how it might help others.
The current workplace paradigm has been on life support since it was designed. The first workers on the assembly line were so endangered that they had to form unions. The message was clear: Our products are important and you, the workers, are not. It’s a mess and we can’t change it until we flip it inside out.
I’m excited for AI to do the dog work and so people can do what they were born to do. We shouldn’t be in prison at work, waiting for the weekend.
I have a quote opening one chapter, from a high-level techie in UK in charge of swarm AI technology. She said, “I believe AI is going to teach humankind a big lesson. In a roundabout kind of way and by contrast, they are going to teach us who we are as human beings.”
We often live in our minds in a hyper-cognitive way, and this leads us to disagree, to polarize, to engage in one-upmanship, and thus we tend toward negativity.
In a few ways, AI will function beyond our abilities but they will be entirely disabled when it comes to matters of the heart and soul. They have no heart and soul, no sensibilities, and the human touch that is completely beyond them.
I believe this contrast will become vividly apparent and we will begin to value humanity as never before.
Sadly, we’re still living in survival mode. We need to move up to self-actualization and that means breaking free of the old work paradigm that keeps us mired in the past. We need to honor our humanity and express it in work that befits creatures of soul and substance.
This creates the foundation for human flourishing and for our personal wellbeing. We need to move up on the hierarchy of needs as delineated by Maslow and we can do this.
Going back a little, what did you mean when you said we “live in our minds?”
“Living in our minds,” means we’re stuck in a hyper cognitive mode and unable to connect with our hearts. The more we think, the more we’re choked by information and data.
What we have at the end of each day is an enormous brain dump. If we could drop down to our heart space, where we actually know things, we can listen to each other without judgment and without the warrior mentality that seems to dominate society these days.
People will always have varying opinions but our value does not come from our opinions. Personal value is inherent within us all despite any and all opinions. We need to be more self-assured and simply make room for a wide variety of differences.
We are not destroyed by differences but rather enriched by them. We begin to see reality from many different points of view and we are none the less for it, but rather empowered with these understandings.
What do you hope to accomplish with Soulful Work 2.0?
I hope to connect with my audience and to give the painfully employed a voice, especially as work and the quality of our lives comes to center stage.
Hopefully my book inspires a radical re-think of our century-old employment model that’s been on life support for a very long time.
Gallup Polls indicated that worker disengagement (behaviors like high absenteeism, not caring, giving the minimum, even actively sabotaging the company) costs at least $450 to $500 billion dollars in the USA, and $7.8 trillion worldwide, and that’s data from Gallup Polls, 2022, the latest data we have.
Beyond the bleed of money that impacts our economy is the human toll that is almost incomprehensible. Like the gal working at the deli counter who has a master’s degree in archeology, awaiting an opportunity to engage her passion and her expensive preparation for the world of work.
We have to value people and their giftedness, and begin engaging in the heart and soul work that is exclusive to humans, and this we need more than anything else.
At the core of our problems is the need to find meaning, purpose and a reason to jump out of bed in the morning. Without that purpose, we cannot be drawn out of ourselves into community with others. The result is societal alienation and dehumanization.
If you could go back in time, what would you say to 17-year-old Jo-Ann, fresh out of high school?
What is your fascination? What do you find yourself doing when you look up at the clock and find that time has escaped you? Spend some time self-reflecting about your innate interests and what makes you unique.
And remember, when you’re in your bliss, you’re in your superpower. If you’re in the wrong calling, it will be a long day and a steep climb that is unsustainable.
Despite applying yourself and doing your best, you will not shine. You will become restless and the discomfort will be your wakeup call to move on and let yourself out of prison.
Before the work is always THE WORK of introspection. As the ancient inscription at the Temple of Apollo reads: Know thyself.
That self-knowledge is more valuable than anything else as you step out into the public arena. Self-knowledge yields self-assurance, and self-assurance is a power that cannot be feigned.
They can who think they can is the way some thinkers have stated it. The only way to arrive at such self-assurance is to do the inner work of self-discovery. Knowing your essential value is a first priority.
For more information, please visit www.SoulfulWork.net or email jtriner@earthlink.net.
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