Passion Struck with John R. Miles
How to Flourish: The Art of Building Aliveness and Meaning | Daniel Coyle – EP 728
12 Feb 2026
Chapter 1: What does it mean to feel like you matter?
coming up next on passion struck modern experience i think to feel like you're just a cog in a machine to feel like you're not mattering i find it to be a little almost near dystopian extent normalized that kind of thing where we talk about people and treat people as if they're simply computational beings and simply machines but what it looks like is isolation what it looks like is loneliness what it looks like is anxiety and depression i think in the end
When we are social animals, we are animals made of meaning, without meaningful connection, without mattering, to use the language, without mattering, we're hollowed out. It is a core need of us to be in community and growing.
Welcome to Passion Struck. I'm your host, John Miles. This is the show where we explore the art of human flourishing and what it truly means to live like it matters.
Each week, I sit down with changemakers, creators, scientists, and everyday heroes to decode the human experience and uncover the tools that help us lead with meaning, heal what hurts, and pursue the fullest expression of who we're capable of becoming.
Whether you're designing your future, developing as a leader, or seeking deeper alignment in your life, this show is your invitation to grow with purpose and act with intention. Because the secret to a life of deep purpose, connection, and impact is choosing to live like you matter. Hey friends, and welcome back to episode 728 of Passion Struck.
In our last two conversations, we have been examining how choice culture, the mattering instinct, and inherited identity scripts shape our sense of agency, dignity, and belonging. often determining who feels significant and who quietly disappears inside modern systems. Today, we turn to a deeper question. What does it actually look like when people feel that they matter together?
This episode continues the You Matter series by exploring flourishing as a collective condition, something that emerges when environments are designed to make human presence consequential. As we move toward the February 24th launch of my upcoming children's book, You Matter, Luma!,
I've been reflecting on how early we learn, whether our attention counts, whether our voice shapes outcomes, and whether our presence changes the room. Those lessons don't stop in childhood. They follow us into teams, organizations, communities, and institutions. That's why my guest today, Daniel Cole, is so important.
Daniel is the bestselling author of The Culture Code and the author of his newest book, Flourish, The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. Daniel spent years embedded inside groups that don't just perform well, they feel unmistakably alive. From a Chilean mind collapse to a Parisian long table,
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Chapter 2: How can we transition from high performance to aliveness?
how group flow differs from efficiency or coordination, why people disengage when they feel interchangeable, and why mattering is the precondition for vitality in any system. This conversation shows how flourishing emerges when people are treated as contributors, not components. Let's continue the You Matter series with Daniel Coyle.
Thank you for choosing PassionStruck and choosing me to be your host and guide on your journey to creating a life that matters. Now, let that journey begin. Picture this. You're trying to whip up dinner after a long day, but your pans are sticking like glue, the handles are burning hot, and cleanup feels like a full workout. Sound familiar? Yeah, I've been right there.
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Plus, if you visit carawayhome.com slash passionstruck, you can take an additional 10% off your next purchase. This deal is exclusive for our listeners, so visit carawayhome.com slash passionstruck or use code passionstruck at checkout. Caraway, non-toxic kitchenware made modern. I am absolutely thrilled today to welcome Daniel Coyle, one of my favorite authors.
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Chapter 3: What is the science of presence in group dynamics?
Daniel, how are you doing today? I'm doing great, John. Thanks for having me.
I'm excited for the conversation.
Last week, I had the honor of interviewing Barry Swartz, someone whose work I have studied since he put out The Paradox of Choice. And I understand doing my research that he has had a major impact on you and your life and the books that you have written. I was hoping we might start there.
Oh, I love that. I love that. It's incredible. It's funny how the world works, isn't it? Like how serendipital is that? You would have just spoken with him when I have his words tattooed on the inside of my eyeballs for the last few years, because I bumped into them during kind of a low point.
And I was spanking getting, I guess I was in my mid fifties and looking at the career, looking at the family, got four daughters, kind of looking at the big picture. And I bumped into a quote of his that said, people mistakenly think life is a treasure hunt and it is not a treasure hunt. It's more like treasure creation. That stopped me, right? Because I think it's deeply true.
It was definitely true to my experience and it's true to how we're entrained to think about our lives. Like we think, oh, if we hunt these things down and we get them, we chase them, we achieve them, we have them, we possess them, that things will be great. And that's not true. There are so many success stories that have hollowness on the inside of them that we see. It's a treasure creation.
It's not a game. It's a garden is what he was saying that I heard, right? And it's not a game to win. It's a garden you grow. And that's what it really knocked me for a loop a bit and sent me on this journey that has me standing in front of you now that resulted in this book.
As you and I were speaking before we came on, you used that word grow. And I was telling you that I think I like the word cultivate better.
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Chapter 4: How does adversity foster deeper connections?
I think they express similar things. We can't just expect things to happen to us. And in my first book, Passion Struck, I wrote about this analogy that I think people use the concept of autopilot too much. And so I tried to redefine it.
I think the way so many of us are living, getting back to what Barry was saying, is we act out our lives as if we're in the game of pinball, but instead of being the player, We end up being the ball, bouncing off all the distractions of life instead of defining our path. And I really think that's what he means when he talks about this cultivation.
I couldn't agree more. I think it's deeply true. We're really taught that life is this sort of giant machine. And machines are great for certain things. They're good at being predictable, and they create measurable outcomes, and they give you results. But in the final analysis, that's an illusion. Life is, parts of life are a machine. There's definitely parts of life.
If I wanna get my meals prepped for the week, that's a machine-like activity in some ways, right? I need to get from A to B to C to D. But there's a whole nother world that opens up when you start seeing it as a garden, when you start seeing it as moments, because gardens don't work like games do. Gardens don't work like machines do.
Gardens depend on, you have to clear a space and you have to cultivate things, which means these small moments of nurture. That you're not like doing, following some script. It's where you're noticing some need and then responding to that need in real time in ways that create something bigger, like a relationship, right? And relationships aren't games and relationships aren't machines.
It's funny. I was, another walk of my life, I worked with major league baseball teams and we were interviewing a new manager candidates for a new manager. And one of the questions that came up during the conversation was, what do you do when you're isolated, alone? It's lonely at the top. What do you do? And what this candidate said was, I just, I go inside out. I look for somebody I can help.
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Chapter 5: What role does 'gardener leadership' play in flourishing environments?
And it just takes 10 seconds to make that little reversal where he goes and picks up towels on the clubhouse floor, whatever he does, looks for somebody to help. And I think that speaks to the way that we're built. We're not trying to always fix, optimize, maximize everything. We're not looking to automate things and be the best pinball ball.
What we're looking to do many times is to animate them with a sense of aliveness and connection and relationship and meaning. And that was a question that set me out writing this book is what places are really good at doing that?
We know what happens on the mountaintops of career, mountaintops of performance, but what's happening in the valleys where there are these moments of cultivation, these meaningful connections, and where there is the thing that really defines flourishing is joyful, meaningful growth that is shared. that is shared. Nobody can do it alone. You can't do it alone, but you can do it.
We need other people to bring out the best versions of ourselves. And so that's what I've found over and over again in those little moments that aren't scripted and they're not games and you can't write an instruction manual for them, but There are rules, like there are ways to cultivate gardens. And there are habits of and practices of attention and practices of action.
And that's what I just got totally fell in love with the story of that, with the story. What are those rules? That's a mystery that really captivated me for the last five years.
So Dan already named it. The book we're talking about today is his brand new book titled Flourish, The Art of Building Meaning, Joy, and Fulfillment. It's a masterpiece, just like his previous books. But I want to go into this garden theme just a little bit more. I learned servant leadership when I was in the military, and I'm going to talk to you about that here in a second.
And I used that servant leadership really well during my career as a Fortune 50 executive. Up until a point. Marshall Goldsmith has this great book, What Got You Here Isn't Going to Get You Where You Need to Go. And to tie this into the world we are living in today, I really contend that service leadership has served its cause.
But what I really think leaders need to be in the future is something I call gardener leaders. I got this from talking to General Stan McChrystal and Keith Crotch, the former CEO of DocuSign. And we were talking about eyes on, hands off leadership. And to me, that whole concept, eyes on, hands off, is what really defines someone who is gardening their people.
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Chapter 6: How can we design spaces that enhance human significance?
That the way they work with eyes on is that they give them instructions enough so that they can flourish, but then they're hands off because someone who's micromanaged isn't going to flourish. But if you give them the right ingredients, they are. Does that analogy relate to you?
absolutely i think the thing that i'm feeling most powerfully is how aligned that is with the way ecosystems actually grow so many of our models in the business world came out of the military came out of kind of machine thinking we want to execute have a plan have checkpoints and when you use that language you end up in training yourself on these mental models that it is about machines and control and prediction
And yet the world we live in is not super predictable, as we know. And the idea of having a rigid machine, our mental model of business as some rigid machine whose job it is to do like any machine, the same thing over and over again, that is controlled by an outside person, a leader who can flip the switches and get the outcome they want. I agree with you. It feels outdated.
It still works for simple stuff. If my mail shows up every day, that's great. Love that machine. That's fabulous. Let's keep it going that way.
But in a world where so many of us work in domains and live in domains where it ain't the same every day, where there are forces and everything speeding up on us all the time, and there's innovation and creativity that's required, the idea of a machine is outdated. What you really want is a greenhouse of kind of fast-growing stuff and a deep understanding of we need to grow people, first of all.
We need our people to be continually learning. to be what i've heard described i think accurately as an arlo an adaptive resilient learning organization where you are continually at real time adapting to the shifting ground in which you live and so a leader's job in that place is very it couldn't be more different than the machine leader right you need to continually be
Creating conditions where you can generate awareness, agency, new ideas, give people opportunities to develop. Embrace messiness, I think. That's one thing about ecosystems and gardens. If you're a gardener, you get dirty. Everything around you gets a little dirty. And that's not a bad thing, actually.
I don't think you would trust or appreciate a gardener who looked like he was from a laboratory somewhere.
having that embrace of imperfection which actually just helps create cohesion and trust and understanding all the research would absolutely support that it's these moments of embracing the mess that create the cohesion that great groups embody but i'm drawn to your term and i've heard it it might interest you that i heard it at one of the baseball teams i was visiting just the other day they said we need to think like gardeners we need our coaches to think like gardeners we need our managers to think like gardeners because
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Chapter 7: What lessons can we learn from the Chilean miners' experience?
And so all the stories that we have, I think, in business, in sports, in technology, when you really scratch the surface of a lot of success stories, what you find is a thriving community. They're growing new people all the time. They're trying new stuff. They're adapting. They're making a little mess sometimes. They're not perfect. And their leadership is not serving, as you say.
Their leadership is creating conditions. And sometimes that condition is complete and hands-off. But they're creating conditions where things can grow in the right direction. So providing a clear horizon, providing guardrails, you don't want your garden to just grow anywhere. You want it to be here and not over there.
So creating guardrails, creating agency, and creating really a clear horizon to go toward ends up being, I love that, eyes on, hands off.
Dan, I've heard that several professional sports teams have started reading my book And in chapter 12, I wrote this whole chapter on Gardner leadership. Oh, that's so cool. Hopefully there's some connection there between the two. I know Jim Murphy, who wrote Inter Excellence, was taking my book to some of the teams that he works with.
And also golf coach Sean Foley uses it with golfers he coaches. So maybe the ideas are expanding.
Yeah.
That's nice. Well, in sports ends up being a beautiful place to test this stuff out. Because I think, because performance is so transparent, because camaraderie is so transparent, because growth is so transparent, where in some business domains, it's harder to see. So the fact that sports try stuff out first, I think is promising and great.
Dan, I want to take this whole concept that we've been having and now take it to one of the groups that you've worked with closely, which is Navy Special Warfare, or SEAL teams as many people know them. I myself didn't go to BUDS. I had hoped I could have gone to BUDS, but I got injured my senior year at the Naval Academy playing rugby.
My father is actually UDT class of 16, so he preceded me, which made me want to do it. But I ended up serving the National Security Agency, and I got really lucky because at the academy, we have sponsor families, and my sponsor dad ended up getting promoted at NSA.
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Chapter 8: How do community and connection drive personal fulfillment?
In fact, he was the top civilian leader at the National Security Agency. He asked me to take this concept of inserting integrated teams into the SEALs, So I went from the unit that I was stationed at and got reassigned to Naval Special Warfare Unit 10. What I observed when I did that switch is that in the SEAL teams, there's this concept of the brotherhood that you hear them often talk about.
And I found that in their groups, it wasn't that they just perform well, but they felt unusually alive, which is something that you really capture in Flourish. And this is fundamentally different from high performance. And I was hoping you might be able to explain it.
The depth, it's so interesting because I think what the SEALs are really, they're obviously good at breaking down doors. They're obviously good at collaborating to do these incredibly intricate, very difficult operations together. But one of the skills that I think is underrated is their ability to create meaning.
create meaning together, have these moments where they stop and really connect and where they also express what being a SEAL means. You notice, we know there's obviously other groups that do special warfare, right? There's Delta, there's Rangers, there's all these different other groups that are basically the same thing, these small teams that do stuff.
But the SEALs seem to have a unique ability to express what that connection means. They're really good. For example, they have a lot of mantras in the SEALs. Like we do three things. We shoot, move, and communicate. And We're the quiet professionals. Yeah, right. And the only easy day was yesterday. All these like little things and they're cheesy.
And yet, having that kind of shared language creates these moments of deeper connection and deeper meaning. They're very strict about keeping the team small and there's something about that number. Yeah. a very small number of people on a team creates places where every voice can be heard, where you can have these conversations.
And one thing they're especially good at, I think even better than some of the other groups is having these hard meetings called an AR, where as you're familiar, like it's an after action review and it's right after you finish an operation or a practice run and you circle up and you ask three really hard questions together, right?
And it's usually led not by the commanding officer, it's usually led by an enlisted person. And it would be like, what went wrong? What did we do wrong? What did we do right? And what are we going to do differently next time? And that's hard to do. Like that shared vulnerability that they have, they're really good at it.
And I guess the other thing that I've noticed with them that's unique is just the sheer amount of hanging out time, downtime, empty time, where maybe you're working out, maybe you're Maybe you're just shooting the breeze, but you're waiting around. So all of these moments of stillness where they're creating meaning, where they're creating connection, where they're creating relationships.
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