When I started taking DBA didactic courses in the spring of 2022, public service motivation and psychological capital were not in my vocabulary. Early in the program, I started a list and mindmap of the topics that interested me and might be appropriate for a dissertation - things like reverse mentoring and workplace resilience. The list grew and evolved, not unlike life itself. 

For the past two decades, I’ve been blessed with a local government career filled with extraordinary experiences and amazing professional colleagues. Like many in this profession, it has also had its share of challenges and occasionally painful growth opportunities. 2020 was a year filled with more than a few of those ‘growth opportunities.’ Then 2023 came along, and if there was ever a ‘hold my beer’ kind of year, 2023 was it. 2023 tested the limits of my mental and emotional well-being and took a toll on my physical health that it’s taken nearly a year to undo and recover from.

Much of last year was spent wondering ‘why’ and ‘how’. Why do people do this work? Why do people tolerate some of the brutal experiences that are happening in this profession? How are people surviving, let alone thriving? How do the people who find success and happiness in this field do it? Those curiosities led me to PSM and PsyCap. The more I read and learned, the more I knew I had found the things I wanted to research. As I spoke with thought leaders in the profession and scholars in the respective fields, it was reaffirmed that I was indeed on to something important, interesting, and timely.