Jennifer Breheny Wallace

Appreciation is the next ingredient.

That is feeling

feeling appreciated for who you are inside, not just what you do.

So for example, if you have a friend who buys you a sweater, you can say to them, thank you for this beautiful sweater, or you can feed their sense of mattering by appreciating them for who they are.

Thank you for always being the most generous and thoughtful friend.

I am so lucky to have someone like you in my life.

The next ingredient is invested in.

It's the idea that there are people in our lives who are invested in our goals and who are there to support us through setbacks.

And the last ingredient is feeling depended on or relied on.

Are there people in your life

who depend on you.

We live in such a hyper individualistic culture that we often don't signal to people how much we rely on them or depend on them.

And so what I would say to anybody listening is to let the people in your life know that you rely on them.

And you can do it in simple ways.

You could send a simple text to someone saying, if it weren't for you, dot, dot, dot.

You know, if it weren't for you, I wouldn't have had the courage to go for that job interview.

Thank you for believing in me before I could even believe in myself.

So the SED framework really narrow in on the main ingredients to mattering.

So Jennifer, I imagine everybody has times in their life where they feel like they don't matter to anybody in particular.

That's exactly right.