Interview With Author Jo-Ann Triner
Tell us about yourself and how many books you have written.
Adult life for me began at the age of seventeen when I entered a Catholic Convent. This gave me a mission orientation and a spiritual grounding that equipped me to see today’s social issues from a different perspective. As I transitioned from this mission-driven culture to a money-driven culture 6 years later, I came away with a serious case of culture shock from which I have never quite recovered. A few years later I began my 30-year professional career in Educational Leadership. That career offered wisdom from the practical playing field of life that I have applied in my book.
Wisdom from the Practical Playing Field
Throughout my 30-year administrative career, I was privileged to work with the brightest
and the best. They were people of immense giftedness and goodness. Beyond having impeccable credentials, they were the premier candidates, fired up and determined to make a difference. That is why I hired them. Professional in every sense of the word, they brought to their jobs a fervor and flair that impressed people. Despite their high ability and strong work ethic, however, the quality of their lives was often curiously low.
In just a few short years, many of these public servants were suffering from a soul-deep
fatigue from which there is no recovery. The signs were obvious: They worked longer and harder with little to show for it. Out of touch and out of tune, they had no time to talk and no time to listen. Grossly overworked, they created a dissonance akin to an off-tempo orchestra. Had each of them represented an audio wave, they would surely resound in a cacophony of screams and screeches. They would make no music, contributing only to the chaos and confusion. To make matters worse, I could count myself among them.
This functional familiarity with work in the zone of burnout was not my only teacher. My
dissertation work, done years earlier, sensitized me to the same brutal truth. Written about
quality of life in the workplace (QLW), it made me an informed observer. I saw the drama of the workplace with a second pair of eyes that penetrated the surface issues.
Now immersed in an instructional environment of my very own, I was getting a
privileged look into the soul-deep distress of working people from all walks of life. My work
community was indeed a microcosm of the whole. Over time and with a compassionate
connection to each of them, I came to an over-arching conclusion: Trying to motivate maxed-out employees is far from a solution. It is just one more imposition. Burnout is not the bedrock problem. It merely points to the soul-deep needs that employers and employees alike fail to address.
At times, the job distress was difficult to behold, but it allowed me to see the profound
impact of work on dedicated people trying to make a difference. It also forced me to look outside the zone of manager-initiated motivation and to ask why the fire goes out in the first place. Little did I know decades earlier just how valuable my education and experience would become as my second career unfolded. At that time, I knew only that I had jumped through the last hoop and had my degree in hand. I could not know then how this research was going to guide my perception. Now face to face with employees from a broad spectrum of society, lessons came at me from every side as I listened to their plight and analyzed their predicaments. However diverse their occupations, their soul deficits seemed eerily the same. This I recognized only because my doctoral research had given me a special lens through which to make sense of all the nonsense. As a result, I was able to see where contemporary management theory ended and where my own thinking emerged. Breaking the age-old mindset about employment and getting beyond it marked the birthday of my soulful work initiatives and the eventual writing of this book: Soulful Work 2.0
What is the name of your latest book and what inspired it?
Soulful Work 2.0
Do you have any unusual writing habits?
I am a long-time quote collector and often begin a chapter with a quote that condenses deep wisdom into a single expression. 99% of my writing could be thought of as pre-writing. This involves selecting a topic, creating an outline, catching up with the current literature on a topic, gathering my own thoughts and reflections on that topic, and then creating my own concepts to advance the knowledge base. I develop vocabulary around this topic and usually gather quotes that illuminate the topic. These serve to inspire me, keep me focused, and help my readers resonate with the material. All of this happens before I ever sit down at the keyboard to compose. When, at long last, I do start typing, I begin with segments as opposed to full chapters. It’s like stringing beads to create a necklace.
While at the keyboard writing, I am surrounded by numerous lucky paperweights that
have been given to me as gifts or that I have collected over the years. This includes an array of heart shapes, a pair of bluebirds, an ancient deck prism with a fascinating history, an IR-100 Award paperweight referred to as “The Oscar of Innovation”, and many others including some natural stones thought to bring good energy to the work.
What authors, or books have influenced you?
Close to my heart are the great Russian writers: Leo Tolstoy, Anton Chekhov, Fyodor
Dostoyevsky, Alexander Solzhenitsyn, and Ivan Turgenev. I love their work because they wrote about political corruption, spiritual enlightenment via suffering, societal predicaments, and man’s inhumanity to man. They wrote with meaning and purpose about people, the state of society, and the moral imperative of their time.
Among other favorites are these:
◼ The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho because he depicts the journey of life in esoteric terms.
◼ The Rural Life by Verlyn Klinkenborg because he literally paints pictures with his words. He is a model of painting with words. On every page, the reader’s mind lights up like a
Christmas tree with images that transport, inspire, inform and call forth feelings, including
nostalgia for a slower, more eco-friendly time gone by.
◼ The Prophet by Kahlil Gibran because it speaks to the heart directly.
◼ Hard Times by Charles Dickens because it details the working conditions of the first
industrial age that are not far different from what we have seen throughout history.
◼ The War of Art by Steven Pressfield because he is a powerful model for economy of words.
◼ The Kingdom of God Is Within You by Leo Tolstoy because it explains how power corrupts.
◼ Great Expectations by Leo Tolstoy because of its moral themes and human insight.
I also adore poets through the ages from Christina Rossetti to Rumi, including Emily Dickinson, Rabindranath Tagore, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and contemporary poet, David Whyte, to name a few.
What are you working on now?
Having just published my first book, I am busy promoting my Book: Soulful Work 2.0.
This book arose organically at the confluence of 4 distinct life experiences, each like a tributary feeding into one great river current:
• Life inside a Catholic Convent gave me an inner-person orientation and a spiritual grounding. Immersion in the spiritual domain helped me to relate to the soul-deep issues that hold people back from enjoying life and self-actualizing.
• In transitioning from a mission-driven culture to a money-driven culture, I experienced
enormous cultural shock. In the first few months, I witnessed ruthless competition, people
working at a frenzied pitch, one-upmanship, winning at any expense, betrayals, bullying, and
rapid occupational burnout. I entered a culture of product over people, self-importance over
the common good, and public victory at the price of personal defeat. The humanizing culture of my past was displaced by the dehumanizing culture that destroyed many from the inside out. Still, now, it is painful to witness all of the self-destructive, soul-stultifying behaviors that are part of the workplace equation – and all this in the name of so-called progress.
• My educational leadership experiences offered a window into the lives of working people
from all walks of life: teachers, students, support staff, and parents in the wider educational
community, all struggling with quality-of-life issues relevant to their work. With doctoral
studies underway mid-career, this was more than a job. It became a qualitative study of the
working masses still leading lives of quiet desperation while working double duty to merely
keep up appearances.
• My doctoral dissertation research on the quality of work-life was followed by decades of
research and development focused on the nature of work, the history of work, the hazards of work, and the future of work in the coming Age of Artificial Intelligence. I studied from a
spiritual perspective, a practical perspective, and an academic perspective.
I’ve had a lifelong fascination with work: how we work, why we work, and how we can engage in a radical rethink of an employment model that is reducing interest in work altogether. All four dimensions of my life come together nicely to educate, inspire, lighten the heart, and help us envision a way forward. They represent a multi-faceted approach to the problem of an oppressed workforce that could be ascertained in no other way.
What is your best method or website when it comes to promoting your books?
You can learn more about my book at https://unlimitedloveinstitute.org/directors.php
Do you have any advice for new authors?
1) Write for the right reason.
2) Give voice to the voiceless. – Martin Luther Kind
3) Write one true sentence. – Hemingway
4) Wield your word power in constructive ways.
5) If you can dream it, you can do it. – Walt Disney
6) A goal is a dream with a deadline. – Napoleon
7) They can conquer those who believe they can. — Virgil
What is the best advice you have ever heard?
◼ Know Thyself. – The Temple at Apollo at Delphi
◼ In the spiritual realm, great pressure is a great power.
◼ A loving heart is the truest wisdom. – Charles Dickens
◼ There is a voice that doesn’t use words. Listen. – Rumi
◼ It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is truly essential is invisible to the
eye. – Antoine de Saint-Exupery
◼ Every wall is a doorway. – Ralph Waldo Emerson
What are you reading now?
I continue a deep dive into the work of Dickens and of Tolstoy, who both wrote about the social predicaments of their time. I am also reading portions of the international bestseller: The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying.
What’s next for you as a writer?
In the Hopper is another book on Why We Suffer and How to Suffer Properly. All of us suffer but very few of us know the transformational value of suffering and how to benefit from the pain so that it is endured in service to us and for us.
If you were going to be stranded on a desert island and allowed to take 3 or 4 books with you what books would you bring?
1) The Odyssey by Homer – the life story of one man and all men (and women)
2) The Alchemist by Paulo Coelho – the story of how the universe conspires to help the seeker.
3) The New Testament – a lesson in brotherly love and a source of spiritual comfort.
4) Soulful Work 2.0 – my own book, so as to reflect further on its larger significance
Author Websites and Profiles
Jo-Ann Triner Author Profile on Smashwords
Jo-Ann Triner’s Social Media Links