The Need Beneath All the Other Needs
Here’s a question worth sitting with: when was the last time you felt like you truly mattered? Not that you were useful, or productive, or needed — but genuinely valued for who you are, and confident that you have real value to offer?
If that question gives you pause, you’re in good company. And you’re exactly who Jennifer Breheny Wallace wrote this book for.
Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose is an instant New York Times bestseller that introduces a concept so simple and so fundamental that it’s a little startling no one has put it this clearly before: mattering — the feeling that we are valued and have an opportunity to add value — is a core human need, as essential to our well-being as food and water. And in today’s world, for a lot of us, it’s going quietly unmet.
We’re recommending it for every woman in our community who has ever ended a week feeling busy, accomplished, and somehow still a little hollow.
Who Is Jennifer Breheny Wallace?
Wallace is an award-winning journalist who began her career at CBS’s 60 Minutes and is a contributor to the Wall Street Journal and the Washington Post. She is also the author of the New York Times bestseller Never Enough: When Achievement Culture Becomes Toxic — and What We Can Do About It — a book that will ring painfully familiar to any high-achiever who has wondered why getting everything she aimed for still didn’t feel like enough.
Mattering is in many ways the next chapter of that conversation: once we understand what achievement culture costs us, what do we build instead?
So, What’s It Actually About?
Wallace’s central argument is that beneath the loneliness, burnout, and lack of purpose so many of us experience today lies a single, underdiagnosed problem: an erosion of mattering. We’ve built lives that are full of productivity and thin on genuine connection — and the two aren’t the same thing.
The village still exists, Wallace argues, but it’s behind a paywall. Our relationships, which should be transformational, have become transactional. When every need becomes something we can hire out — childcare, caring for elderly parents, getting a ride to the airport — it enables us to get some needs met, but it doesn’t give us the social proof that we matter.
The book is built around what Wallace calls our “mattering core” — four essential elements: recognizing your impact, being relied on (but not too much), feeling prioritized, and being truly known and invested in. She weaves together research and real stories from burned-out employees, overwhelmed caregivers, and people navigating significant life transitions, showing how lives are transformed when people are reminded — in small and intentional ways — that they are valued and have value to offer.
Critically, Wallace also shows how to create that feeling for others: in your relationships, on your teams, and in the communities you’re part of. This isn’t a passive read. It’s a call to action with a concrete blueprint attached.
What You’ll Take Away
- Feeling valued and being useful are not the same thing. This distinction is one of the book’s most clarifying contributions — and one that will resonate with high-achieving women who are relied upon by everyone and still somehow feel unseen. Wallace names the difference precisely, and shows how to close the gap.
- Your “mattering core” can be built, not just found. The four elements Wallace identifies aren’t fixed personality traits or lucky circumstances. They’re conditions you can actively create — for yourself and for the people around you. The book gives you a framework for doing both.
- Burnout is often a mattering problem in disguise. Wallace’s research connects the dots between feeling invisible at work and the kind of exhaustion that no amount of vacation fixes. If you’ve ever returned from time off and wondered why you still feel depleted, this section will make a lot of things click.
- Giving mattering to others replenishes your own. One of the book’s most counterintuitive — and ultimately hopeful — findings is that human energy doesn’t necessarily operate like a bank account. Investing in others’ sense of mattering tends to strengthen your own. It’s one of the few places in life where generosity is genuinely self-reinforcing.
- This applies at work as much as at home. Wallace covers both domains with equal depth. For leaders especially, the workplace implications are significant: how you make people feel seen, relied upon, and known isn’t a soft culture consideration. It’s one of the most powerful tools you have for building teams that are resilient, engaged, and loyal.
Why We’re Recommending It
The CFW community is full of women who are very good at making other people feel like they matter. This book is a reminder that the same care deserves to flow inward — and that building a life where you genuinely feel valued isn’t indulgent. It’s essential.
Mattering is warm, rigorously researched, and quietly urgent. Read it for yourself. And then think about one person in your life who needs to feel it too.
Get the Book
Mattering: The Secret to a Life of Deep Connection and Purpose is available now wherever books are sold, including Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and Books-A-Million.
Learn more about Jennifer Breheny Wallace and her work at jenniferbwallace.com.
