You've made it through Lesson 1, wonderful. Now, we're in Lesson 2, which is really getting into the heart of the matter of this course, which is purposeful work. The overview of the course includes what we're facing right now. We're going to talk about purpose and resilience, especially in the workplace. We're going to talk about domains of purpose that one might have, that includes work, but we also have other purposes as well. We're going to talk about finding your purpose and work, we're going to talk about a growth mindset and work, we'll talk about finding a purposeful culture at work. For example, if you're looking for a job, how would you find a job that has a purposeful culture? What questions would you ask the interviewer to determine whether you want to be working in that culture because that can influence whether you can become purposeful or not? Then we'll talk about how you become purposeful at work, and finally, we'll talk about the number 1 do goal. Remember when we talked about do goals, Number 1 do goal, managing our emotions, especially right now. Because let's talk about what we're facing right now. We're just getting through this pandemic. It looks like anyway, I'm going to knock on wood while we do that, but we're all used to working in buildings, and places, headquarters, locations, wherever we were, and then suddenly COVID hits. Many of us, not all of us, but many of us ended up starting to work out of our houses, out of our apartments, out of our wherever we were, and we're stuck there. Often we're going, wow, what do I do now? I mean, is this really being purposeful? Just being stuck in my apartment, being stuck in my house, being stuck wherever I am where I don't feel like I'm connecting with anyone, I'm not feeling, as Emil Durkheim said, part of this bigger collective purpose. Maybe I don't feel that anymore; that's a problem. So what happens then when we do feel separated like that? Here's what happens. We start feeling lonely. This is a survey that we conducted just recently, December of 2021, when we looked at loneliness by age, and you see younger people clearly feel much more lonely. We asked this simple question: Have you been feeling lonely more than half the days over the past two weeks? Looking at it by age, you see more than half of people who are younger are feeling lonely more than half the days. That's sad, that makes me sad. It's something that we need to do something about. People with stronger purpose, by the way, feel less lonely but we'll get to that later. We've asked people in my talks, I love to ask, just tell me what your emotions are that are dominating at work right now. Here are the emotions that are dominating. These are real people, real employees, reporting what their emotions have been like through this period of the pandemic. You see frustration, stressed, other people say fortunate community, other saying sad, exhausted, others saying engaged. Some people saying stressed, overwhelmed. Overwhelmed comes up a lot, anxious comes up a lot. You see a lot of different kinds of emotions but a lot of them aren't so good. We wanted to study this pretty carefully in a national survey of full-time employees. We asked what's called the PHQ-9. PHQ is patient health questionnaire and nine is that there are nine items in this patient health questionnaire. The PHQ-9 is looking at depression rates. It's a very standardized scale. It's been around for a couple of decades now. It's a very, very useful and validated scale of depression severity. It has different levels. The lowest level is none to minimal depression; wonderful, great. The second is mild depression. In which case, if I'm a physician or other clinician, I might want to repeat the PHQ-9 at a follow-up the next time we might be visiting. There is moderate depression from the PHQ-9. That moderate level encourages prompts the clinician to start thinking about counseling, follow up, and maybe some prescription medications for the person. Moderately severe prescription drugs and counseling are recommended. Severe, you're really talking about drugs very often. If there's a poor response to treatment, you refer the patient to a mental health specialist for counseling. I like to look at the moderately severe and the severe. I'm just going to put those into a category saying those people who are moderate to severely depressed are people we need to concern ourselves with. In particular, let's take a look at what's going on then. This is what's called a shadowgram. This is a shadowgram of depression rates in the United States from 2005-2006. You see overall that only five percent of people were moderately to severely depressed between 2005-2006, that's not too bad. You see the wave overall tends to be way back. Most people, large majority of people had none to minimal depression. Now, let's fast forward to 2017-2020, just pre-COVID. You see that depression rates have doubled, essentially or almost doubled. Moderate to severe depression move from five percent to nine percent. That's starting to get a little bit more scary, a little more concerning. Now, let's look at a survey that we did with the Harris poll just last year, December of 2021, when COVID is really hitting a lot of people, moderate to severe depression jumped to 35 percent. We started in 2006 and 2007 at five percent, now it's 35 percent. That is scaring a lot of people. Look at how many people have moderate and moderately severe depression. Eight percent have severe depression. Remember, in 2006, one percent had severe depression. Now, let's look at it by age. Full-time employees in December of 2021 who are 55-64, what we find is that 20 percent of them are moderately to severely depressed. Again, what I'm trying to do here is paint a picture of what we're dealing with right now. Older people? Yes. Moderately to severely depressed older employees? Yes. But let's get a little bit younger; 30 percent, moderately to severely depressed among full-time employees in the United States, December 2021, who are between 45 and 54 years of age, 48 percent for people 35-44, 60 percent for people who are 25-34, 70 percent for people who are 18-24. Where's the future of your workforce? It's in these people. It's in the 18-34 year old age group. We're at has 70 percent, 60 percent respectively depression, moderate to severe depression. This isn't just a little problem. This is a tsunami. This is something that is going to affect all of us as a society. We have to be prepared for this tsunami. As employers, if you're in this mooch, you need to understand that. If you're an employee, you need to understand this is where things are right now. It doesn't seem like this is going backwards at all as far as I can tell. It's scary. It's something we need to do something about.
