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Boost your personal and professional growth with a Guided Discussion

The Guided Discussion is a one-on-one virtual conversation facilitated by one of our MeaningSphere Guides. Designed as a companion to the Meaningful Work Inventory Report, this hour-long session can help you discover what’s meaningful to you at work and develop a roadmap for positive change. In this piece, Part 2 of our series on Guide Services, we break down everything you should expect from your Guided Discussion. 


A woman sitting at a computer on a video call. A warm beam of light envelops her.

Ever wish you had a safe place to reflect on your work? Or maybe you’ve taken the Meaningful Work Inventory, but could use some help turning your results into something actionable. In either case, the Guided Discussion is for you!


In Part 1 of this series, we introduced the unique role of a MeaningSphere Guide. In a nutshell, our Guides are skilled, empathetic professionals trained to use a framework called the Map of Meaning to help you uncover what really matters in your worklife. Guides won’t offer career advice or review your resume. Instead, they work with you to go one step deeper in your thought process, helping you answer the question, “What is the meaning of my work to me?” They do this in a unique, structured format called a Guided Discussion. 


What is a Guided Discussion? (TL;DR version) 

The Guided Discussion is a one-on-one virtual session facilitated by one of our MeaningSphere Guides. The experience is designed as a companion to the Meaningful Work Inventory (MWI), a self-assessment tool that measures how meaningful your current worklife feels to you. For this reason, Guided Discussions are only available to people who have completed the MWI and downloaded their report.

 

Over the course of an hour, you can expect to learn about the framework behind the MWI, unpack your assessment results, and develop a Stop, Start, Continue plan focused on steps toward experiencing greater meaning at work. 

 

How the Guided Discussion pairs with the Meaningful Work Inventory 

When you take the Meaningful Work Inventory and purchase your report, you’ll get to see your results mapped out using the Map of Meaning. Developed through rigorous research by Dr. Marjolein Lips-Wiersma, this framework breaks down the human experience into four key areas—known as pathways—and three central tensions. (You can learn more about these pathways and tensions here.) 


Your report shows your current levels of meaning in each of the four pathways— your Personal Meaning Profile— and how your experience compares to that of others around the world who have taken the Inventory.  


As you take in your personal scores, you'll start to get valuable insights and ideas. Your report also includes instructional videos with real-life examples of people interpreting their results, helping you gain a deeper understanding of your profile. For some individuals, this robust report alone is enough to provoke valuable new insights, the kind that can break them out of a routine and lead to positive changes at work. But what if you could get even more value out of the experience?  

Enter the MeaningSphere Guides! 

 

With your report in hand, you are now eligible to book a Guided Discussion, unleashing new insights beyond your everyday mindset to kickstart your professional growth.  

After selecting a Guide from the Guide Gallery, you'll be asked to identify five to seven items from the Inventory that stood out to you. These will be the starting points for your exploration. Guides don’t decide the agenda— you’re in the driver’s seat. Once you meet your Guide at the appointed time, you'll be ready to dive right in. 


The Guided Discussion through the “Explore-Understand-Act” model 

At MeaningSphere, we often use a learning process called E-U-A, which stands for Explore, Understand, Act. Developed by the psychologist Robert Carkhuff, author of The Art of Helping, the model empowers individuals to take mindful action by first moving through the phases of exploration and understanding. This three-part model can also be applied to the Guided Discussion. 


🔎  Explore  

After getting to know your Guide and having a look at the Map of Meaning together, you’ll start to explore what's going on for you at work based on the Inventory items you selected. As you share, the Guide listens for wishes, hopes, aspirations, issues, and personal concerns that keep your mind busy. It’s perfectly fine to bring a mess of ideas without yet knowing what key themes will emerge. 

As you delve into your work experience, needs, concerns, and successes, your reflection gives room for different interpretations to come alive. Patterns will start to take shape. 


💡 Understand  

This phase of the Guided Discussion aims at discovering causes and connections you didn’t make before.  


The Guide helps you personalize your findings and widen your scope. You'll begin to paint a bigger and clearer picture of your work experiences and discover what’s meaningful to you. From that process, insights will emerge. 


To personalize what a work situation or experience means to you, a Guide will mirror and validate what you say, causing you to investigate your assumptions and ideas. In this shared exploration, you will acknowledge where tensions arise and how they may play out for you, with “tensions” in this context referring to the ongoing push and pull between equal and opposite forces outlined in the Map of Meaning (between Being and Doing, Self and Others, and Inspiration and Reality). The insights you gain lead to ideas about what to do next. 


💪  Act! 

Dilemmas or problems are seldom solved by repeating the same behaviors—we need to break out of our patterns and try something new. Once you have better insight and understanding, you will be ready to find ideas about what to stop, start, and continue. Your Guide will encourage you to reframe experiences, imagine possible and workable solutions, and consider whether specific actions lead to different outcomes.  Your Guide will also invite you to try and learn whether you can better manage the tensions at play in your worklife to regain balance and find more coherence and fulfillment in your daily work.  


Finally, by making an action plan, you will have successfully moved from the abstract “Explore” phase (expressing thoughts, feelings, and wishes) to the concrete “Act” phase (developing your next steps). 


An infographic showing the phases before, during, and after your Guided Discussion.
This infographic shows the phases before, during, and after your Guided Discussion.

The long-term benefits of a Guided Discussion 

Reflection, action, and learning deepen self-exploration and stimulate personal and professional development. The experience of taking the Inventory and having a Guided Discussion will illuminate issues that have been under the surface of your awareness until now. More importantly, it will open you up to what you can do to create a more fulfilling worklife. 


As you go into your Guided Discussion, it’s helpful to view the session not as a solution to a problem, but as a part of a healthy reflective practice that will serve you for many years. The framework Guides use is based on an understanding of meaning not as a goal to be achieved, but as an ongoing balance to be maintained. There is always a next step in your personal development and room for a recurring cycle of exploration, understanding, and action. In time, however, our small steps lead to more profound action and positive change in our worklives. 


This has been the second part of our series on Guide Services! In Part 1, we introduced you to the unique role of the MeaningSphere Guide. In Part 3, you’ll get to know the Guides themselves: we'll share some of our Guides’ individual profiles as well as their experiences working with individuals in their own words. Stay tuned!

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