To Thrive, You Have to Know What Makes You Feel Alive

I was sitting across from my boss at the time, over coffee, telling him I was leaving.

In many ways I had been his protégé. It wasn't the easiest mentoring relationship, but he had invested in me, and I think we both knew this conversation mattered. He listened. He accepted. And then he asked what I would do in between jobs.

I told him about Annapurna Base Camp.

My eyes lid up. The trek had been living in me for a long time. 

He paused. Then he said he hoped I would find a way to make people feel the way I was making him feel right now, talking about my passion.

That career move wasn't the most conscious one I would ever make. I was searching. And what was making me feel alive wasn't either of the jobs I was moving between.

What You're Strong At Is Also What You're Pulled Toward

Somewhere along the way, we were taught to think about strengths as capabilities. Things we're good at. Skills we've developed. Competencies we can list on a performance review.

But that's not quite what a strength is.

A strength is something you lean toward before anyone asks. The problem forming in your head before the meeting ends. The conversation you stay in longer than you meant to, because it doesn't cost you the way other things do.

Gallup identifies three signs: yearning, an intrinsic pull that precedes skill; rapid learning, you grow faster here than almost anywhere else; and flow, time disappears, energy returns.

Which raises a question worth sitting with:

When was the last time you did something that pulled you in before you were asked?

And felt genuinely magnetized toward something, curious, alive, present in a way that didn't require effort?

Most leaders I work with feel exhausted because they've been operating far from their pull for a very long time.

Competent. Productive. And quietly starving.

We're reactive by demand, creative by nature, and the gap between those two is where our exhaustion lives.

What are you drawn toward before anyone asks you to be?

What You Carry in Your Bones

We talk about values a lot in leadership. Vision, mission, values, the holy trinity of every strategic plan, every onboarding deck, every website's about page.

And yet most values lists are aspirational. They describe who we would like to be, or who we think we should be, or who we decided to be in a two-day offsite five years ago.

But there is another kind of value.

The kind that shows up as friction when it's violated, not just discomfort, but something closer to a loss of self. A quiet but unmistakable signal that something essential has been compromised.

These are the values we carry in our bones.

Integrity. Courage. Beauty. Justice. Depth. Freedom. These words mean something different to each person who carries them.

Which of your values causes your strong reaction when it's compromised? What is the one value you would not negotiate away, no matter the role, the salary, or the opportunity?

When a leader can answer that, not from their head but from somewhere deeper, all becomes easier to navigate. Not simple. But clearer.

Because thriving requires an internal compass. Something that turns toward true north even when you're tired, even when the pressure is high, even when no one is watching. Do you know what yours is pointing to?

The Fata Morgana of Performance

Performance and wellbeing, as they are currently practiced, are not the foundation of a thriving workplace.

Performance without learning is a fata morgana. A mirage. It looks real from a distance, the numbers, the targets, the quarterly results. You move toward it and it dissolves.

You hit the goal and there is nothing there. No growth, no meaning, no sense of having become anything in the process. Just the next target, each year - slightly higher, slightly more exhausting.

Wellbeing without vitality is a nice poster.

Literally, sometimes, the fruit bowl, the meditation app subscription. It decorates the wall of the very problem it claims to solve. The gesture or perk says "we care about you" while leaving untouched the conditions that are draining you in the first place.

What actually sustains people, what researchers Gretchen Spreitzer and Christine Porath found in their work on thriving at work, is something simpler and harder to fake:

Vitality: feeling genuinely alive and energized.

And learning: sensing that you are growing, that today you understand something you didn't yesterday.

You can perform without either. Many people do, for years. But you cannot thrive without them. When did you last feel genuinely alive at work? When did you last learn something that changed how you see things?

The organizations that matter, the ones that keep their best people, do their most important work, navigate the hardest seasons, are the ones that learn to ask what actually energizes their people. What makes them feel alive.

What would it mean to build a team around what makes people feel alive, not just what they're capable of delivering?

Partnering To Thrive

Thriving is not a destination anyone arrives at by working harder or longer or more strategically. It is not the reward at the end of the next promotion, the next funding round, the next successful campaign.

It is what becomes available when you finally turn toward the right questions.

What makes the time disappear for you?

What do you carry in your bones that you would not trade away?

What makes you feel genuinely alive?

These are not questions you answer once in a journal and move on from. They are questions you live inside. They deepen over time and invite you on a quest.

We all have blind spots. we are too close to our own lives to see them clearly. sometimes it takes someone sitting across from you, the way my boss did over that coffee, to reflect back what you already show but haven't yet consciously claimed.

That is what I do.

I work with leaders, founders, entrepreneurs and change-makers who sense that something needs to shift, and are curious enough to look at it.

If something in this post stayed with you, I'd love to connect.

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Hi, I’m Monika, Strengths Coach and facilitator. I help individuals and groups cultivate resilience, emotional intelligence, and well-being through strengths-based coaching. Passionate about transformative and creative leadership, I empower leaders to drive meaningful change within themselves, their organizations, and beyond.

I hope you’ll visit often, and I look forward to connecting and working together!