Introduction to Fulfilling Work, Meaningful Life

In this episode, host Anthony Craiker introduces Fulfilling Work, Meaningful Life and shares some of his personal story. He also discusses the meaning deficit many experience in their lives and highlights upcoming topics for future episodes. 

Parenting is hard. Intentional parenting can seem even harder. Motherhood, fatherhood, marriage, and all that goes with those important aspects of life can make it difficult to prioritize tasks, embrace intentional living, focus on present parenting, and build family bonds. We're here to help ease your parenting anxiety so that you can stop feeling overwhelmed, find joy in your parenting journey, and build family bonds that last for generations. Here at Parents Making Time, we are all about that parent-child connection, self-care for parents, and helping you overcome mom guilt and dad guilt. If you have a question or would like to share an experience about your own parenting, please feel free to reach out to one of us! Please note, we may use your question and/or comments as a part of a Q&A Parenting Advice segment on one of our episodes.

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Transcript

squadcaster-7g4j_3_01-11-2025_095214: 0:00

Hello and welcome to this introductory episode of fulfilling work, meaningful life. I'm your host, Anthony Craiker, and I'm so excited to begin this journey with you as I launched this podcast that I've been working on for the last several months. So what is fulfilling work, meaningful life all about, and who is it for? Well, in order to answer that question, I need to tell you a little bit about my own story. I grew up in a fairly dysfunctional family. My parents did not have a great relationship. My dad, unfortunately struggled with severe mental illness, which oftentimes resulted in him being unable to hold down a job, which in turn resulted in a great deal of financial stress in our home, which caused more problems with my parents marriage. It was sort of an endless cycle of dysfunction. My mom, bless her heart, did everything she could to try to hold things together for our family. But oftentimes, it was difficult growing up, and as I got older, I began to feel that stress in our home and recognize that things weren't quite right.

Anthony: 1:15

So, when I got into high school, I met my sweetheart. we were later married, we've been married for over 23 years, and we decided to start our family. At that time, My number one goal in life became to take care of my family and to provide a stable home for them. I wanted to take care of my family financially, emotionally, spiritually, physically, so that There was some stability that I didn't have growing up. Now, I don't mean to imply that my entire childhood was bad or that I don't have good memories of things growing up. That's not the case at all, but on the whole, my life growing up was somewhat difficult. And so I wanted to give my kids a different environment to grow up in. So that became sort of a mission for me, a passion, if you will. And I began to think a lot about the things that matter most in life. I began to think about the importance of God in our relationship with God, the importance of family and what family means. And in my work, I became committed to doing good work and being successful in my work. So that I could take care of my family and provide that stable home environment that I didn't always have growing up professionally. I'm an attorney. I've been practicing law for over 15 years now, and I've found a great deal of fulfillment in my work. I get to help people. It also provides a stable source of income for my family. I get to use my gifts and skills in my work as an attorney, which is fulfilling and meaningful to me. I Am in a senior managing attorney role. I have been in that role for several years. I have supervised associate attorneys. I've overseen various projects over the years, so I have some experience in leadership and management and those opportunities to have brought a great deal of fulfillment and meaning to my life. I'm also very involved in my church. I serve in a. lay leadership position where I help oversee several different congregations in our area. And I love serving in my church and being a part of my faith community. That too has brought a great deal of meaning to my life. I have served in other leadership positions in the past. I've served in teaching roles. I've also done a fair amount of public speaking. And that's a little bit about my background and my current life. And I wanted you to be aware of that so that you could understand where I'm coming from with this project of fulfilling work, meaningful life that I hope to share with many of you. You know, as I look around and I observe our culture and some of the changes that we've gone through as a society over the last couple of decades, it seems to me that we suffer from a meaning deficit. And what I mean by that is that while a lot of people draw meaning from different aspects of their lives, things like family. And maybe work and involvement in the community or religious organizations. On the whole, there seems to be a deficit of meaning because of the things out there that distract us and take us away from focusing on the things that matter most with the advancements in technology. And social media and streaming services and all of the many amazing things that we have, it's so easy to get distracted and waste time and spend too much time on the things that don't matter while not spending enough time on the things that really do matter. And the things that bring meaning to our lives, to our everyday lives. And so the purpose of fulfilling work meaningful life is to help you find and create meaning in all aspects of your life, whether that's at work, whether that's at home, in your relationships with your spouse and your Children, your relationships with extended family and close friends, whether that's in your own personal development and growth. We want to help you here at Fulfilling Work Meaningful Life find and create meaning. That's what this show is all about. That's what this project is all about. So what kind of topics could you expect me to cover in this show? Well, we're going to cover a variety of topics related to finding and creating meaning in our lives. I will from time to time be doing some interviews with people who I think are interesting and who have found fulfilling work or created fulfilling work for themselves or have something important or insightful to say about finding or creating meaning in our lives. I'll talk about things like leadership, how to develop our leadership qualities and how that brings meaning to our everyday lives in the way that we interact with people and lead others in our work leading our family and our home. We'll talk about dealing with adversity some of the challenges that we face as a society. And we'll talk specifically about dealing with adversity in the workplace. You know, A lot of you out there are probably deeply unhappy with the work that you're doing. And believe me, I've been there. I have had jobs that I've hated. I've had jobs that didn't last very long because I, because I couldn't stand the job. I've had jobs where, I had difficulty getting out of bed in the morning to motivate myself to get out the door and go to work. So I get it. I understand. And some of you out there may have a great deal of stress in your job. That's detracting from the meeting. Full parts of your life. You might be dealing with a toxic workplace, a difficult boss or coworkers, or you may just not like the industry that you're in. And you may be looking to transition or hoping to transition to something better, something that you will enjoy and that will bring fulfillment and meaning into your life. So we'll talk about those kinds of things. I'll also be doing book reviews. I love reading. I love reading all sorts of things. I read a lot of nonfiction, a lot of fiction, classic literature, science fiction but on this show, we'll be doing some book reviews from time to time about books that help with our personal development and our individual growth. Goals and achievement and things that help us to become better and to maintain a positive outlook and positive mindset in life. In fact, next episode, which will be my very first full episode. I'll be talking about a book called 48 days to the work you love by an author named Dan Miller. Now, many of you may be familiar with Dan. Dan unfortunately passed away about a year ago due to stage four pancreatic cancer, but he was influential in a lot of people's lives. Dan was a popular podcaster. Speaker, coach, author. I listened to his podcast for many years and have read several of his books. I never got to meet Dan in person, unfortunately, but I did get to interact with him a little bit some years ago via email. He was kind enough to respond to an email that I sent him and shared that on an episode of his podcast. So Dan had a great deal of influence on my life. And I know on many, many other people's lives. So as a way to kick off this podcast, as my first full episode, I wanted to pay tribute to Dan and honor him for the influence that he's had on me personally and on so many other people. So next episode, stay tuned because we'll be talking about 48 days to the work you love. By Dan Miller and it's a great practical guide to finding work that is fulfilling, meaningful and profitable. So we'll be doing book reviews. We'll talk about goals and personal development, how to set goals, how to make a plan to achieve those goals. We'll talk about what. Realistic goals look like we'll talk about how to stay motivated and how to maintain a positive mindset. We'll talk about how to better connect with the people that we love and the people that are important to us in our lives and so much more, there's a whole world of topics that fall under this umbrella of finding and creating meaning in all aspects of our lives. My goal is to release one episode a week. They will typically drop on Tuesdays. You can find me on social media. I have an Instagram, a Facebook page, X accounts, and I have a YouTube page on the YouTube page, I'll be sharing some short form content. I'll also from time to time, upload a full episode of the show that I'll do by video. For example, if I do an interview that I record with video, I'll upload that entire episode. For you to view. So there's a lot of different ways for you to interact with me and to find my content. Just search for fulfilling work, meaningful life to connect with me on those platforms and I'll drop the links to those platforms in the show notes as well. I also have a website, it's fulfilling work, meaningful life. com. I invite you to go to that website there. You can enter your email and subscribe to my monthly newsletter that I'll send out via email. Now, I'm not going to spam you. I'm not going to send you a bunch of emails to your inbox. I'll send out the monthly newsletter and I might occasionally send one or two other emails in the month. If there's a resource that I want to make you aware of that I'm offering or A particular thought or blog posts that I want to highlight on the website, I will have a blog as well. That will be weekly. Now the blog will be related to the topic of each podcast, but it's not going to be a regurgitation of the podcast episode. So it's going to be different content. Related to the same topic. So you can listen to the podcast, you can read the blog, you can subscribe to the newsletter. And then the thing that I'm really excited about right now is a free resource that I've developed and that I'm offering to anyone who's interested. And it's a 14 day reflection journal for finding or creating fulfilling work. In order to get this resource, all you have to do is go to my website. Again, that's fulfilling work, meaningful life. com. Put in your email address to subscribe to the newsletter. And I'll send you a an email with a link to download this free resource. Now, let me tell you a little bit about this resource. So 14 day reflection journal. So it's designed to be done in a two week time period. Each day, there are questions. Journal prompts that you'll answer. You'll write those in the journal. You can type them on your computer if you prefer. But the, the journal has space to, to write your answers. And then at the end of each day, there are action items, specific action items that you'll take that will move you along the path. Towards finding or creating fulfilling work in your life. And these are practical things that you'll do and they're designed to get you to take action because that's the only way we can make changes in our lives, right? Is to take action. We have to be moving forward. Otherwise we're complacent. And in some cases we're even moving backward. And so, This 14 day reflection journal for finding or creating work again is a free resource. If you go to the website, fulfilling work, meaningful life. com, put in your email address, I'll send you a link to download it. It's designed to help those of you who are at a time in your life where you're looking to make a transition in your work, or you're, you're looking to find a way to make your work more fulfilling. So I invite you to check that out. Well. That's everything for today. I just wanted to introduce the show and tell you a little bit about myself. I very much look forward to interacting with you. I think of this show as more of a conversation with my audience, and I hope that I. We'll hear from many of you. If you have questions for me, please hit me up on social media or on the website. There's a space on the website where you can ask Anthony a question. You can send in a question and I'll look at that and consider whether to respond to that on the show or possibly email you back personally. I want to hear from you. I also want to learn from you and your experiences about finding and creating meaning in your lives. So please hit me up with comments or questions and we'll be on this journey together as we build this community around the idea of finding and creating meaning in our lives. That's what fulfilling work, meaningful life is all about. It's designed to help you find and create meaning in your life. Thank you so much for listening. That's all I have for today. So I'll sign off in the meantime, let's make it a meaningful week.