The Value-Driven Professional -- A Three-Part Series

Join us for this special three-part series throughout the month of May, from Noon to 1 p.m. CDT, featuring Professor Grace Lemmon, from DePaul's Driehaus College of Business. 

May 9, May 15, and May 21, 2024 

Series Overview:
Effective self-leadership, including choosing where to spend your time, what direction to take next in your career, and how to challenge and expand your skillset, requires a significant amount of personal effort and investment. Understanding how to motivate yourself sustainably for this work is crucial, as well as knowing how to organize and orient yourself so that your growth feels intentional and authentic.  Using a values-based framework, this series asks you to consider your life’s most important values, which are states of living that you wish to embody, and how you might make incremental, feasible changes to support those changes. 

About the Presenter: 

Grace Lemmon, PhD, is an associate professor of management. She is a research expert on topics related to stress management, including burnout, engagement, work detachment and work recovery.  She is particularly interested in how people develop more fulfilling relationships with work through value alignment. She has published her work in the Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management, and Organizational Dynamics. She provides corporate training on topics related to stress, mindfulness, and barriers to leadership, such as perfectionism, procrastination and imposter syndrome.


Each session will be presented live via Zoom and will not be recorded. Registration is required to receive log-in details.

Session 1: Planning for Personal Change | Thursday, May 9, from Noon to 1 p.m. CDT
This portion of the series guides you through how to identify your own values, set goals that reflect those values, and project manage the resulting change so that it feels flexible and doable in the long-term.  We will discuss how to jump-start your motivation for change, as well as how to navigate conflicting feelings we have about change. 

Session 2: Change Without Burning Out | Wednesday, May 15, from Noon to 1 p.m. CDT
Armed with a sense of plan for what your change is and where you want it to take you based on our discussion in Part 1, this second portion of the series walks you through how to manage normal and inevitable internal obstacles to change.  First, we will talk about how to become more adept at managing change fatigue, a common problem among hard-driving, goal-focused professionals.  Then we will talk how to manage a mind that automatically resists change, even that which could bring us great joy and health.  To facilitate change while being mindful of its personal requirements, like your time and attention, we will conclude by talking about how to form habits that support your intended change.

Session 3: Rich Professional Life | Tuesday, May 21, from Noon to 1 p.m. CDT
Part 1 of the series established what and why you wanted to change so that you can live in a more value-aligned way, and Part 2 helped you overcome motivational barriers to executing value-driven change.  Now it’s time to optimize!  This session will help you develop skills and strategies to make sure that you have enough personal resources (e.g., time, energy, focus) to carry out change, and to make sure you protect personal resources because change is, in short, a very demanding process.  Particular attention will be paid to how you can, through an evidence-based lens, cultivate joy, happiness, and recovery when making value-aligned changes in your life.

TO REGISTER FOR THE THREE-PART SERIES, FILL OUT THE FORM BELOW.