FREE ON-DEMAND CLASS
Rekindling Purpose at Work
What the science actually says about success, energy, and happiness at work
PRACTICAL INSIGHTS AND TOOLS FROM THE SCIENCE DIRECTOR OF THE GREATER GOOD SCIENCE CENTER
What happens when you’re still good at your job, but the job stops feeling good to do? You can like your work. Be good at it. Even be grateful for it. And still feel like something is missing. Researchers have spent decades studying what keeps people energized and engaged over a long career, and one thing keeps surfacing: purpose. It turns out purpose isn’t something you either have or you don’t. It can fade. And it can be rebuilt.
Airing Live on
Thursday, August 20, 2026 at 5 pm PT | 8 pm ET
Thursday, August 20
5 pm PT | 8 pm ET
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD
Science Director, Greater Good Science Center
TAMI SIMON
Founder, Sounds True
Feeling disconnected from work, even when you’re successful at it, is far more common than you might think.
This is where the research gets interesting. Somewhere between 55 and 80 percent of working adults describe work as something to endure. The more interesting question is what distinguishes everyone else: the people who stay energized, effective, and well across a long career.
Across decades of studies, one thread keeps surfacing. Researchers call it purpose, and they define it with unusual precision: the degree of alignment between what you value and what your work asks of you each day. In the data, purpose behaves less like a fixed trait and more like a variable. It can erode over a career. It can be rebuilt. And it tracks with outcomes that matter, including performance, health, energy, and longevity.
Join Tami Simon in conversation with Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD, to explore what the science suggests, and what it might open for your own work.
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD, is the Science Director of the Greater Good Science Center and co-creator of PERK, the four-pillar framework for happiness at work. She has spent her career studying why some people stay well and effective across decades of demanding work while others wear down, and she has brought that science to more than half a million people worldwide. In this conversation with Tami Simon, she’ll walk through what the research says about where a sense of purpose comes from, why money and titles can’t produce it, and how it gets rebuilt inside the job you already have.
By the end, you’ll have a clearer way to tell the difference between running out of energy and running out of alignment, and a place to begin if it’s the second one.
In this free class, you’ll learn:
Why purpose sits first in PERK, the framework for happiness at work Emiliana developed with Dacher Keltner at the Greater Good Science Center.
What the research shows about money and meaning, including why compensation and titles reliably fail to produce a sense of purpose, and what does.
The published evidence connecting purpose to performance, health, energy, and longevity, including a study of nearly 7,000 adults.
A practical, research-backed way to begin realigning your current role with your values, without changing jobs.
How to tell whether what’s draining you is the workload itself or the drift between the work and what you care about.
Why this hour is only a starting point, and how the Inner MBA gives you the time, structure, and teachers to make working from purpose your default.
Who this is for…
This class is for people who are good at what they do, but want their work to feel worth doing again.
You may be leading a company, a team, a practice, or your own business. People count on you. You’ve accomplished a lot. But somewhere along the way, achievement stopped being enough.
This class is for you if you want to:
- Remember what used to make you care about the work
- Feel more energized by your days, instead of just getting through them
- Bring some happiness back into a part of your life that takes up a lot of it
- Understand why success can look good on paper and still leave you feeling like something is missing
- Find more meaning in the work you already have, without assuming you need to walk away from it
You don’t necessarily want a different career. You want to feel differently about the one you have.
Register Now:
Meet your hosts
Emiliana Simon-Thomas, PhD
Science Director, Greater Good Science Center; Inner MBA Instructor
Emiliana R. Simon-Thomas, Ph.D., is the science director of the Greater Good Science Center, where she directs the GGSC’s research fellowship program, is a co-instructor of its Science of Happiness and Science of Happiness at Work online courses, and runs key study initiatives like Expanding the Science and Practice of Gratitude.
Emiliana is a leading expert on the neuroscience and psychology of compassion, kindness, gratitude, and other prosocial skills that bolster human happiness. She earned her doctorate in Cognition, Brain, and Behavior, and her dissertation used behavioral and neuroscience methods to examine how unpleasant emotions influence thinking and decision-making. During her postdoc, Emiliana shifted to studying the origins and effects of prosocial states like love of humanity, compassion, and awe. Before joining GGSC in 2010, Emiliana served as Associate Director/Senior Scientist at CCARE (the Center for Compassion and Altruism Research and Education at Stanford University), focusing on how compassion benefits health, well-being, and psychosocial functioning.
Today, Emiliana’s work spotlights the science that connects health and happiness to social affiliation, caregiving, and collaborative relationships, as she continues to examine the potential for – as well as the benefits of – living a more meaningful life.
TAMI SIMON
Founder, Sounds True
Tami Simon founded Sounds True in 1985 with a clear mission: to disseminate spiritual wisdom. What started as a project with one woman and her tape recorder has grown into a multimedia publishing company that features hundreds of leading teachers and visionaries of our time. Sounds True has produced over 3,000 titles, including events, certification programs, and transformational online learning experiences, and is North America’s leading publisher of spoken-word spiritual teachings. Tami hosts the popular Sounds True podcast, Insights at the Edge, which has been downloaded more than 15 million times. She is also the founder of the Sounds True Foundation, which is dedicated to bringing spiritual education to people who would otherwise not have access.
She’ll guide the hour with the directness, depth, and practicality she’s known for, helping bring Emiliana’s research into the real careers and real decisions this audience is living.
Your work takes up too much of your life to spend your days just getting through it.
You can be successful and still want more from the hours you give to your work: more meaning, more energy, more happiness, and a stronger sense that what you’re doing actually matters to you.
Watch Rekindling Purpose at Work today and discover what the science can teach us about finding our way back to work that feels worth doing.
A program by Sounds True
In consultation with the Greater Good Science Center
For more information contact innermba@soundstrue.com
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