I know all too well what it means to survive.
For more than two decades, I served on the front lines of some of the hardest work there is, showing up for people on the worst days of their lives, carrying stories I couldn’t put down, giving everything I had to everyone but myself. I told myself exhaustion was proof that I cared. I wore survival like a badge of honor. Then one day my body sent me the bill I had been refusing to pay. I collapsed. Not long after, my blood pressure climbed to the edge of a stroke, and I spent months relearning a lesson I wish someone had handed me twenty years sooner.
Here is that lesson, and I believe it belongs to our entire state: surviving is not the same as living, and getting by is not the same as flourishing. New Jersey does not simply have a money problem. It has a mindset problem, and until we change how we think, not just how much we earn, nothing else will hold.
The mindset that keeps us stuck
We have built a culture that measures worth by output. Work harder. Push through. Sleep when you’re dead. We hand people the slogan “believe in yourself,” but never the tools to manage themselves when the pressure hits. And so, we produce a state full of people who are technically employed, technically functioning, and quietly falling apart.
Changing that requires a shift on three fronts at once: financial, mental, and emotional. Ignore any one of them and the other two collapse. A raise cannot fix a nervous system stuck in fight-or-flight. Therapy cannot pay a rent that keeps outrunning the paycheck. And neither one lasts without the inner skill to sustain it. Flourishing is not one door. It is three, and they only open together.
The financial reality: meet ALICE
Start with the money, because it is the part people can measure.
Across New Jersey, more than a million households work hard and still cannot get ahead. United Way calls them ALICE — Asset Limited, Income Constrained, Employed. In 2024, 39% of New Jersey households, over 1.05 million families, could not afford the basics, even while working. A family of four in our state now needs roughly $115,872 just to cover essentials — nearly four times the federal poverty line. These are our neighbors: they earn too much to qualify for help, and too little to reach the middle class. They are not lazy. They are not failing. They are running a race that keeps moving the finish line.
But here is what the balance sheet never shows. That kind of sustained financial strain does something to the mind and the body. It narrows thinking, floods the system with stress, and steals the very clarity a person needs to climb out. Poverty is not only an empty wallet. It is a full nervous system.
The mental and emotional reality
Money is only half the story.
In 2024, nearly one in four New Jersey adults, about 23.4%, experienced a mental illness in the past year. An estimated 248,000 adults were living with serious mental illness, and more than a quarter of us reported symptoms of anxiety or depression. Behind those numbers are teachers, nurses, first responders, parents, and public servants — the very people holding this state together, carrying a weight no paycheck was ever going to lift.
We keep treating these as separate crises. They are not. Financial stress fuels mental strain; mental strain erodes emotional capacity; and a person with no emotional capacity cannot make the steady, long-view decisions that build a better financial life. It is a cycle, and you cannot break a cycle by pulling one lever. You have to change the mind at the center of it.
What a Flourishing Mindset actually is
A Flourishing Mindset is the decision to stop measuring your life by how much you can endure, and to start building the inner capacity to genuinely thrive.
It is a journey with stages. It moves from surviving — stuck in fight-or-flight, just making it through the day- to progressing — steady enough to build, to learn, to reach- to flourishing — whole, grounded, and able to lift others as you rise. Most of us were never shown that map. We were told to work harder, when what we actually needed was a way forward.
And here is the liberating truth: flourishing is not luck, and it is not a personality you’re born with. It is a set of skills — and skills can be taught. That is the part nobody told us. Confidence gets you to the door. Emotional intelligence is what you do once you walk through it.
The tools: the seven pillars of SEI MORE
I created the SEI MORE framework so emotional intelligence stops being an idea and becomes something you can practice under pressure. Seven pillars form the inner infrastructure of a flourishing life:
S — Self-Awareness: Knowing your emotions, triggers, and patterns — because you can’t manage what you won’t look at.
E — Emotional Regulation: The pause between what happens and how you respond: acting on purpose instead of reacting on impulse.
I — Intentionality: Living on purpose and aligning your actions with your values instead of your fears or habits.
M — Motivation: Staying connected to your “why” so it carries you when your mood and circumstances say quit.
O — Ownership of Impact: Accountability without shame, owning how you land on others, and the choices that shape your life. It’s where helplessness turns into agency.
R — Relational Awareness: Reading and honoring the people around you, the foundation of trust, of asking for help, and of the relationships that lift you.
E — Emotional Influence: Setting the emotional temperature of every room, leading through warmth rather than force, so one changed mind becomes a changed community.
These are not “soft skills.” They are the hard skills that decide whether a person can hold onto a job, a relationship, and a life — the mindset New Jersey has to build.
Why New Jersey — and why now
New Jersey is uniquely positioned to lead this. We are where the ALICE research was born; we named the struggle before anyone else did. We are diverse, resilient, and full of people who make a way out of no way. What we have not yet done — what no state has fully done — is treat economic mobility as what it truly is: not only a jobs problem, but a human one. You cannot lift a life you haven’t first helped to heal and steady.
That conviction is why we are building something new — a way to bring this financial, mental, and emotional shift to people across the state. For now, know this: it is coming, and it is built on the belief that our people deserve more than to merely survive.
The invitation
I nearly paid the ultimate price for pouring from an empty vessel. I do not want that for my fellow New Jerseyans, and I do not want it for this state.
So, this is my invitation. Change the mind, and you begin to change everything it touches. Learn the skills nobody taught you. Choose, on purpose, to become the author of your own life. And let us build a New Jersey where flourishing — financial, mental, and emotional — is not a luxury for a few, but the birthright of us all.
Because I know all too well what surviving costs. And I know, just as surely, what is waiting on the other side of it.
Dr. Donnette P. Green is an Emotional Intelligence Strategist, professor, and the creator of the SEI MORE framework. She is the CEO of Distinctly Guided LLC and has spent more than 22 years on the front lines of New Jersey’s most demanding human-serving work.
