Hey, it's Rachel Cook, your modern mentor.

Today's episode is all about what you can do if you're feeling just a little bit meh right now.

It's something so many people are experiencing.

It's called languishing.

And the good news is there's a simple framework you can use to climb on over it.

In the past couple of years,

burnout has commanded a lot of our collective attention because so many have suffered from its

symptoms, overwhelm, exhaustion, cynicism, and a kind of helplessness. Burnout is real, but it's not

universal. And while many of us aren't quite at the point of burnout,

they're clearly not thriving either. People are feeling kind of that sense of meh.

This gray, bland middle place that's starting to feel familiar to many of us is what

organizational psychologist Adam Grant calls languishing. It's not depression or burnout,

and it's definitely not thriving or flourishing. It's the space in between. A USA Today piece

describes it as a feeling of a lack of focus and a general purgatory between mental wellness and

illness. Does this feel familiar? If so, the good news is that Grant

offers a clear and simple antidote to this feeling, in a recent TED talk he gave. So let's break

down his three-part framework and talk about how you might apply this at work to get a boost.

Overcoming languishing is about finding flow, and we do this by pulling three

levers, mastery, mindfulness, and mattering. Let's touch on each one and think about what it might

look like in practice. Let's start with mastery. Mastery is the idea of achieving something that

feels meaningful to you. It's not crossing something

off your to-do list or delivering something your boss or client needs. Those are important,

...