As a keynote speaker and consultant, Jenn Whitmer was initially interested in conflict resolution. She’d been at a wonderful workplace that turned toxic; she got her master’s in communication and culture in part to understand what had gone wrong at the job she once loved.
But it was only after building a career speaking about workplace issues that she finally realized the one value driving everything she cared about.
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It was joy.
“Coming out of the pandemic, I was clarifying my own values and realizing that one of them is joy, and that my definition of joy actually is the center of everything that I’m doing,” she says. “And that’s when I started to realize how much joy didn’t just matter to me, but I was noticing in the research how much it mattered in business and to leaders.”
She’s now focused on helping leaders find their joy—and by doing so, transforming the places where they work. Her new book from Ideapress Publishing, Joyosity: How to Cultivate Intense Happiness in Work and Life (Even if Things Are What They Are), is both a self-help guide and an exhortation. More than anything, Whitmer seems to realize that we need to believe joy is just possible. “Joy doesn’t merely show up,” she writes. “You’ve got to chase it down, tackle it, and actively cultivate it.”
And yes, you can find that joy at work—in fact, you need to find it there in order to live an overall joyous life. As Whitmer reminds her readers, you can never fully separate work from home. “Three in four people who experience work-related anxiety and stress report that it significantly impacts their home life,” she writes.
But Whitmer sees workplace problems as solvable, in part because she takes an optimistic view of work. She’s convinced you don’t have to be in a do-gooder role to find purpose. “Businesses are here to solve problems for people,” she says. “You know, a magazine solves the problem of telling people what’s happening in the community, and the grocery store solves the problem of I don’t have any food.”
Whitmer argues it’s about more than making money, pointing out that for the majority of people, their work feeling purposeful is enough to retain them even if they don’t get a raise.
“So we aren’t as interested in money as our culture tells us to be. But we are very interested in other people and purpose and having meaningful work—and those are all components of joy,” she says.
Whitmer believes that helping employees find that meaning, and find joy, can ultimately help a business perform better. “When you cultivate joy in these very specific ways, all of the business research shows that you have higher profits, more retention, higher engaged employees, you’re more creative [and] innovative, you create better products,” she says. “All of those things happen when you take out ‘how do we make more money’ as the center.”
A Kansas City native, Whitmer moved to St. Louis after college and became a music teacher in the Pattonville district. But after three kids in very short succession (later followed by a fourth), she stepped away from teaching to focus on child-raising. It was when she returned to work as the director of assessment and feedback at a small private school that she found her workplace happiness to turn to great unhappiness. (She doesn’t name the school in the book, but it’s easy enough to find on her LinkedIn.) After her job was eliminated, she stayed on in a new role, only to realize that she had to quit to preserve herself. From there, she went back to school for her master’s and found a new career as a public speaker, consultant, and coach.
Whitmer is a great believer in Enneagrams (to lead others, she writes, you must first lead yourself—and to do that, you must understand yourself). As an Enneagram 7 (“The Enthusiast”), she finds her joy in life on the road, taking her presentations to companies as diverse as Chick-fil-A and Mozilla.
“We like the change,” she says, laughing. “So the Enneagram 7, their deep motivation is to avoid pain. So what better way of avoiding pain than going on a trip?”
When not traveling, she finds her joy at home with her family in Clayton, which she calls a “hidden gem of a community.”
“People think of it as just this business district, but it’s actually this really lovely community of people,” she says. “There’s all these great, lovely neighborhoods. We walk a lot, and you see the same people all the time. And people are just friendly!”
