Maybe we pride ourselves on being independent. Self-sufficient. A Lone Ranger.
There’s value in being self-sufficient, but when we’re too proud to ask for help it can be costly. It can keep us stuck in hardship and delay our advances, or lead to overwork and burnout. And it can inhibit close relationships with family and friends.
“Going it alone in times of hardship is never a good idea.” -Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve
Asking for help is an important skill that can aid us in all our endeavors, from living and loving to leading and learning. We’re wise to get good at it.
How to Get Better at Asking for Help: 10 Tips
Here are 10 things you can do to develop the useful skill of asking for help:
1. Notice that nobody succeeds without the help of others. Where would you be without the help of parents, teachers, coaches, teammates, colleagues, mentors, and friends?
2. Recognize that asking for help is a sign of strength, not weakness. It means you’re committed to your goals and confident enough to show some vulnerability.
3. Realize that the alternative (not asking for help) means continuing your frustration and suffering.
4. Understand that your fears about asking for help are misplaced. Even the worst-case scenario probably isn’t so bad. Perhaps the person refuses to help or can’t right now. Maybe you feel a bit awkward or disappointed for five seconds. So what?
5. Recall that most people like to help others. It makes them feel good to contribute. Think about how you felt when you were asked for help. (1)
“How have you felt when you have helped others? I think we can agree that’s one of the great feelings, right?
Why would you deprive others of the same feeling?” -Marshall Goldsmith, The Earned Life
6. Stop waiting so long to ask. Consider how much time you’ve already spent on the issue, whether it’s something you’re good at addressing, and whether there are better uses of your time and energy.
7. Trust others toset boundaries for themselves. They can always decline or chat further about the extent of help they may provide.
8. Tally the potential benefits of getting help. Maybe you’ll get fresh ideas or greater clarity about how to proceed. And in the process you may very well deepen your relationship with the person contributing.
9. Start small when trying this out and build from there. This will make it more manageable and less likely that you’ll abandon it.
10. Be open with others that it’s hard for you to ask for help, but you’re trying to get better. This will make it easier to ask when the time comes.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.
“If I can leave you with only one piece of advice to increase your probability of creating an earned life, it is this: Ask for help. You need it more than you know.” -Marshall Goldsmith, The Earned Life
“Isolation is fatal…. The burden of going it alone is heavy and limiting—and potentially dangerous…. In fact, social isolation can take up to seven years off of your life. Isolation contributes to heart disease and depression; it influences your immune system and leads to faster aging and advanced health problems.” -Richard Leider and Alan Webber, Life Reimagined
“Economists call it the warm glow of giving, and psychologists call it the helper’s high. Recent neuroscience evidence shows that giving actually activates the reward and meaning centers in our brains, which send us pleasure and purpose signals when we act for the benefit of others. These benefits are not limited to giving money: they also show up for giving time.” -Adam Grant, Give and Take
References
(1) According to a 2022 study by researchers Xuan Zhao and Nicholas Epley published in Psychological Science, “Those needing help consistently underestimated others’ willingness to help, underestimated how positively helpers would feel, and overestimated how inconvenienced helpers would feel…. Undervaluing prosociality could create a misplaced barrier to asking for help when needed.” (Source: Zhao, X., & Epley, N. (2022). Surprisingly Happy to Have Helped: Underestimating Prosociality Creates a Misplaced Barrier to Asking for Help. Psychological Science, 33(10), 1708–1731.) There’s also research noting that helping others may promote feelings of happiness, increase social connection and self-esteem, lower stress levels and blood pressure, and promote longevity. (Source: Oliver Scott Curry, Lee A. Rowland, Caspar J. Van Lissa, Sally Zlotowitz, John McAlaney, Harvey Whitehouse, Happy to help? A systematic review and meta-analysis of the effects of performing acts of kindness on the well-being of the actor, Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, Volume 76, 2018, 320–329.)
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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One of the biggest mistakes many people make is waiting too long before taking action. Not having enough of an action orientation.
What good are dreams, visions, and plans if we don’t act on them? To live well, we must get good at taking action. We have to stop hesitating. We have to stop waiting too long before acting.
12 Benefits of Being Action-Oriented
There are many benefits of being action-oriented. For example, it:
changes our self-identity to someone with greater power and agency
helps us learn about ourselves
expands our sense of possibility
builds momentum
positions us as a doer and leader—and people respond to that.
yields better results over time and increases our probability of success
invites serendipity
gives us more chances at breakthroughs
helps us avoid the cost of regret for not trying
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
While there are many benefits to being action-oriented, that doesn’t mean it’s easy. It requires five key factors:
1. Motivation.
We must tap into our desire for a better future and summon our drive to achieve. Yes, that means getting off the couch and getting to work.
2. Courage.
Becoming more action-oriented requires a willingness to act in spite of our fears. It requires a willingness to go for it despite the obstacles and risks.
3. A willingness to pounce when opportunities arise.
Becoming more action-oriented means becoming more willing to strike, even when the picture isn’t fully clear. We must tap into our warrior spirit.
4. A growth mindset.
According to Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck, a growth mindset is a belief that we can develop our intelligence, abilities, and talents. If we have a fixed mindset, by contrast, we believe those things are static, and we’ll be preoccupied with the prospect of looking bad or being wrong and thus less likely to take action.
5. Clarity about what we want and where we’re going.
Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
“The price of inaction is far greater than the cost of making a mistake.” -Meister Eckhart, German mystic
“An ounce of action can crush a ton of fear.” -Tim Fargo, author, angel investor, and entrepreneur
“Inaction breeds doubt and fear. Action breeds confidence and courage. If you want to conquer fear, do not sit home and think about it. Go out and get busy.” -Dale Carnegie , writer and lecturer
“Often the difference between a successful man and a failure is not one’s better abilities or ideas, but the courage that one has to bet on his ideas, to take a calculated risk—and to act.” -Maxwell Maltz, surgeon and author
“Action is the foundational key to all success.” -Pablo Picasso, Spanish painter and sculptor
“The path to success is to take massive, determined action.” -Tony Robbins, author
“The world has the habit of making room for the man whose actions show that he knows where he is going.” -Napoleon Hill, author
“You miss 100 percent of the shots you never take.” -Wayne Gretzky, legendary hockey player
“Do not wait till the iron is hot; but make it hot by striking.” -William B. Sprague, clergyman and biographer
“I think the number one advice I can give is: you just have to start it. Just get your feet in the water and do it. I learned a lot from just trying it out.” -Yoshikazu Tanaka, Japanese entrepreneur
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
With all the action in sports lately, from college football championships to the NFL playoff hunt, it’s got me thinking about life lessons I’ve learned from sports.
No doubt we can learn plenty from sports about things like teamwork and group dynamics. But what does it teach us about life?
I’ve been an athlete my whole life, starting at age five on the soccer field and continuing through college athletics and beyond. I ran track in high school and played baseball, tennis, racquetball, and a little basketball while growing up. I loved running 10K races with my Dad and brother when I was growing up and dabbled in triathlon as an adult.
What are the lessons that have stuck with me from all these experiences?
There’s great power in having and pursuing a dream.
In sports, great motivation flows from the quest for a championship. And so it is in life.
What’s our quest? Our burning desire? What would be a good life for us? What motivates us down to our bones? Our dreams and aspirations can light us up and fill us up with hope and energy, prodding us to take more action in pursuit of our aims.
“Somewhere behind the athlete you’ve become and the hours of practices and the coaches who have pushed you… is a little girl who fell in love with the game and never looked back. Play for her.” -Mia Hamm, legendary U.S. women’s soccer champion
Hard work and dedication set us apart.
Growing up in southern California, I played for the Choppers, a select soccer team with players from around the area. Our coach was into fitness. Big-time. I don’t think he ever wore a shirt at practice. He was always buff and tan. And he worked us like dogs. He focused on fitness, not just skill work. We did pushups and sit-ups alongside our soccer drills. He often had us race each other to see who was the fastest and who had the most stamina and heart.
His lessons stuck with me when I played college ball. I was a good midfielder, but I prided myself on my conditioning. I knew it could give me a big advantage. Nobody would be running as hard as I would be late in the game (or in double overtime) because I had put in massive work before the season began.
There are many things we want in life, for ourselves and our family. The question is what we’re willing to do to obtain them. Hard work day after day can add up to tremendous progress and, importantly, to learning and momentum for more forward progress.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Hard work is amplified greatly by a deliberate and disciplined process and pursuit.
Do we have systems in place to get a little better each day? And to track progress?
Growing up, I always admired wide receiver Jerry Rice. He was fun to watch over his 20 seasons in the National Football League, not only because of his clutch plays but also because of his speed, stamina, athleticism, and great blocking. He retired with an amazing array of records, from most touchdowns and touchdown receptions to most receiving yards and most career points scored for a non-kicker. Not to mention three Super Bowl titles. (Check out his career highlights video.)
In the book, Talent Is Overrated, author Geoff Colvin recounts Rice’s approach:
“In team workouts he was famous for his hustle; while many receivers would trot back to the quarterback after catching a pass, Rice would sprint to the end zone after each reception. He would typically continue practicing long after the rest of the team had gone home. Most remarkable were his six-days-a-week off-season workouts, which he conducted entirely on his own. Mornings were devoted to cardiovascular work, running a hilly five-mile trail; he would reportedly run ten forty-meter wind sprints up the steepest part. In the afternoons he did equally strenuous weight training. These workouts became legendary as the most demanding in the league….”
The key, though, wasn’t just hard work. Rice, according to Colvin, was also very deliberate and strategic about the way he worked out, including designing his training to work on his specific needs (e.g., running precise patterns, evading defenders, outjumping and outrunning people, etc.) and spending as much time as possible on classroom study, conditioning, and working on specific plays.
“Today I will do what others won’t, so tomorrow I can accomplish what others can’t.” -Jerry Rice, champion wide receiver in the National Football League
The confidence that comes from dedication and hard work over a long period of time can be transformative.
One of my favorite photographs of my years on the soccer pitch is a snapshot of my high school co-captain and me posing with Coach Murph after a game. Part of it was that Lahmmy was such a character and Coach was such a great mentor, but mostly it’s that look on our faces. A look of defiant knowing and staunch assurance. We had suffered mightily in practice, with brutal “suicides” (sprints up and down the pitch) a million times. We were in the best shape our lives, and we were ready for any opponent.
Goal-Setting Template
Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.
One year, when I played for the Galaxies as a teenager, we traveled from Ohio to Florida for a soccer tournament. Late in the tournament, we were getting crushed by a strong team. They were older and much bigger. Late in the match, we were down something like 9-0, but still we hung in there. Sprinting after every ball. Tackling as hard as we could. We played with the same intensity as if we were down a goal with a minute to go. By the end of the game, even the other team’s parents were rooting for us. The crowd erupted when one of our players made a great play—a small but sublime victory of sorts.
Sir Alex Ferguson, legendary soccer coach and former manager of Manchester United, emphasized not only work ethic, emotional fortitude, and extraordinary concentration, but also “a refusal to admit defeat.” Some would say our perseverance was pointless that day. But we knew better. We were playing for ourselves that day, proving something about the kind of players we were—and the kind of team we were building.
When adversity comes, it’s a chance to rise.
One day at practice with the Galaxies, a much older player came to practice with us. As I planted my left leg for a kick, he tackled me hard and broke my femur just above the knee. As I was recovering, with six weeks in a full-leg hard cast followed by another six weeks in a soft cast, I learned that the break was right at one of my growth plates. It meant that I needed surgery on my right leg after my broken left leg healed so my legs wouldn’t be too uneven. Another twelve weeks or so for that leg, followed by physical therapy.
I was devastated. It was a test of whether I’d keep playing. I didn’t want an injury to define me, so I worked hard and came back stronger than ever.
“The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph. What we obtain too cheap, we esteem too lightly.” -Thomas Paine, political activist and revolutionary
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
We must go on the attack when it comes to the important things we want in life.
Marvelous things can happen when we go for it and put ourselves on the line in the face of potential failure. In soccer, I played center midfield in college. As a midfielder, I prided myself on diligently covering the whole field vertically, helping both on offense and defense.
My sophomore year, as I was gaining confidence, I realized that I had to take more shots, and I had to upgrade my mindset. Instead of thinking too much and worrying about whether I’d get a good shot off, or miss, I had to go into attack mode: attack the goal with a cracking shot. Let it rip.
And so it is in life: are we taking enough risks and putting ourselves out there?
“I learned a long time ago that there is something worse than missing the goal, and that’s not pulling the trigger.” -Mia Hamm, legendary U.S. women’s footballer
Urgency can light fires.
When I watch a soccer game now, one of the things I look for is what happens after a team scores. Of course, there’s the obligatory celebration by the scoring team. But much more important is what the other team does.
I learned this in college from my teammate, Peter. After we gave up a goal, he would haul into the back of our net, fish out the ball, and sprint like a demon possessed to the center spot.
The point was clear: We’re down one, so we need to pick it up. Way up. Forget about the goal. Let’s roll.
Too many teams wallow for precious minutes while their hopes are dwindling. Not Peter. His urgency lit a fire under us, and I never forgot it.
The same thing happens in life. Too often, when we experience a setback, we sit and wallow. We lose our momentum. Or we complain. We look for people or things to blame. Much better to get back to work right away, knowing that the game is still afoot and time is precious.
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
We learn a lot about ourselves when we hit the wall.
In high school track meets, I ran the 400-meter dash. Many of my teammates called it the hardest event in track, because of the toll it takes on your body to sprint for that long. (1)
During the race, most of us “hit the wall” somewhere on the final stretch, depending on how we had run the first 300 meters. Hitting the wall is awful—as strange as it is disorienting. Your legs suddenly feel like bricks. You have to struggle mightily to keep moving them forward. You feel your whole body starting to tense up and shut down. Every step gets harder. But still you have to finish, so you keep pushing forward.
Important questions arise when you hit the wall: Do you have the strength to see it through? How well do you finish the race? And how do you respond on Monday at practice? What do you do to get better?
“And where does the power come from, to see the race to its end? From within.” -Eric Liddell, Scottish runner and Christian missionary, from the film “Chariots of Fire”
The inner game is often where things are won or lost.
In sports, it’s easy to assume that the physical game—our skill, strength, endurance, etc.—makes all the difference. But often, the mental game is more important.
In his book, The Inner Game of Tennis, author, tennis player, and coaching pioneer Tim Gallwey notes the pitfalls of fighting the mind and letting our ego take over. On the flipside, he highlights the benefits of mastering the art of relaxed and effortless concentration and of focusing the mind properly while not trying too hard.
And so it is in life. Too often, we’re focused on the outer game of competitive jockeying, career climbing, ego stroking, and material accumulation, but it’s our inner world that we need to pay more attention to.
We have to stop becoming our worst opponent. We need to silence our negative self-talk and replace it with something that actually serves us.
“…the inner game. This is the game that takes place in the mind of the player, and it is played against such obstacles as lapses in concentration, nervousness, self-doubt and self-condemnation. In short, it is played to overcome all habits of mind which inhibit excellence in performance.” -W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
There’s always a bigger picture beyond the game we’re playing.
In sports, it’s easy to get lost in the drama of the game and boil it down only to the final score. But sports is about more than winning and losing. Recall the Olympian pledge:
“Ask not alone for victory. Ask for courage. For if you can endure, you bring honor to yourself.
Even more, you bring honor to us all.”
Sports is not only about the quest for victory but also about challenge, discipline, character, mettle, teamwork, fair play, sportsmanship, grace, and transcendence.
And so it is in life. In the end, it’s about something much larger than victory or success alone. It’s about learning, growth, development, close relationships, commitment, purpose, contribution, and love.
“The moment of victory is much too short to live for that and nothing else.” -Martina Navratilova, professional tennis champion
And, as with sports, we must prepare not only for the race or game but the years after too.
Conclusion
What are my life lessons from sports? Playing sports has shaped me in so many ways. I loved being on the field with my teammates. Training in the Texas heat and dripping with sweat. Staring down the curve of my lane from the starting line, waiting for the gun. The camaraderie and joy on the bus on the way back from a competition.
I made lifelong friends and learned so much about myself, life, and leadership. I’m thankful not only for the moments in competition but also for their strong and lasting echoes.
Reflection Questions
What have you learned from sports or other activities or endeavors that have enriched your life?
What more will you do to honor those lessons and carry them forward in your life today?
Tools for You
Traps Test (Common Traps of Living) to help you identify what’s getting in the way of your happiness and quality of life (new book in the works on this)
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Goal-Setting Template
Goals are the desired results we hope to achieve—the object of our effort and ambition. Goals are common in our life and work, but that doesn’t mean we’re good at setting and achieving them. Use this Goal-Setting Template to set your goals properly, based on the research and best practice.
Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to the Mental Side of Peak Performance (Random House, 1997)
David L. Cook, Golf’s Sacred Journey: Seven Days at the Links of Utopia (Zondervan, 2006)
David L. Cook, Greatness (Sacred, 2021)
Steven Pressfield, The Legend of Bagger Vance: A Novel of Golf and the Game of Life (Avon Books, 1996)
Fredrik Backman, Beartown: A Novel (Beartown Series, Atria Books, 2018)
Postscript: Inspirations on Sports, Life, and Leadership
“Excellence is the gradual result of always striving to do better.” -Pat Riley, former NBA basketball coach and player
“I always felt that our triumphs were an expression of the consistent application of discipline.” -Alex Ferguson, Leading: Learning from Life and My Years at Manchester United
“Hard days are the best because that’s when champions are made.” -Gabby Douglas, artistic gymnast and Olympic champion
“If it doesn’t challenge you, it won’t change you.” -Fred DeVito, fitness expert and entrepreneur
“Fighting the mind does not work. What works best is learning to focus it.” -W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
“You miss 100 percent of all the shots you never take.” -Wayne Gretzky, legendary hockey champion (a.k.a., “the great one”)
“Show me a guy who’s afraid to look bad, and I’ll show you a guy you can beat every time.” -Lou Brock, professional baseball player
“Anxiety is fear about what may happen in the future, and it occurs only when the mind is imagining what the future may bring. But when your attention is on the here and now, the actions which need to be done in the present have their best chance of being successfully accomplished, and as a result the future will become the best possible present.” -W. Timothy Gallwey, The Inner Game of Tennis
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” -Wayne Gretzky, legendary hockey champion (a.k.a., “the great one”)
“Audentis fortuna iuvat.” (“Fortune favors the bold.”) -Virgil, ancient Roman poet
“I may win and I may lose, but I will never be defeated.” -Emmitt Smith, former NFL running back and all-time leading rusher
“Every time a football player goes out to ply his trade he’s got to play from the ground up—from the soles of his feet right up to his head. Every inch of him has to play. Some guys play with their heads. That’s O.K. You’ve got be smart to be No. 1 in any business. But more important, you’ve got to play with your heart—with every fiber of your body. If you’re lucky enough to find a guy with a lot of head and a lot of heart, he’s never going to come off the field second.” -Vince Lombardi, legendary American football coach, Green Bay Packers,
considered by many to be the greatest coach in football history
(1) I always thought the 800 was worse.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
Join our rapidly growing community. Sign up now and get monthly inspirations (new articles, opportunities, and resources). Welcome!
Gregg Vanourek is a writer, teacher, TEDx speaker, and coach on personal development and leadership. He is co-author of three books, including LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives (a manifesto for integrating our life and work with purpose, passion, and contribution) and Triple Crown Leadership: Building Excellent, Ethical, and Enduring Organizations(a winner of the International Book Awards). Get his monthly newsletter. Gregg was a co-captain of his high school and college soccer teams and high school track team, First-State in high school track, and collegiate Academic All-American soccer player (Division III). If you found value in this article, please forward it to a friend. Every little bit helps!
On the costs of social isolation and loneliness, the benefits of close relationships on our health, wellbeing, and happiness, and how to develop and maintain close relationships.
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Loneliness and disconnection are big problems these days for many. This year, U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy issued an advisory on the “public health crisis of loneliness, isolation, and lack of connection.” He noted, “Even before the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, approximately half of U.S. adults reported experiencing measurable levels of loneliness.” According to a Guardian article, about 20 percent of people report that loneliness is a “major source of unhappiness in their lives.”
“Loneliness hangs over our culture today like a thick smog.” -Johann Hari, Lost Connections
Workaholism and the dramatic increase of screen time in our lives both aggravate the problem. Average daily digital content consumption is now just under seven hours, according to a recentForbes report.
If we want to address the issues, first we need to understand them clearly, so let’s begin by defining the relevant phenomena.
Defining the Problem(s)
There are several factors at work, from loneliness and social isolation to solitude.
In his book, Together: Why Social Connection Holds the Key to Better Health, Higher Performance, and Greater Happiness, Dr. Murthy defines loneliness as “the subjective feeling that you’re lacking the social connections you need.” He explains:
“It can feel like being stranded, abandoned, or cut off from the people with whom you belong—even if you’re surrounded by other people. What’s missing when you’re lonely is the feeling of closeness, trust, and the affection of genuine friends, loved ones, and community.”
Loneliness is a normal human emotion. We all experience it, but it can become problematic when we feel it too often. Researchers have identified several types of loneliness, including:
intimate loneliness: when we feel we don’t have trust and a mutual bond with an intimate partner or close confidante.
relational loneliness: when we feel we don’t have quality friendships and social support.
collective loneliness: when we feel we don’t have a network or community of people who share our interests and values.
“These three dimensions together reflect the full range of high-quality social connections that humans need in order to thrive. The lack of relationships in any of these dimensions can make us lonely, which helps to explain why we may have a supportive marriage yet still feel lonely for friends and community.”
-Dr. Vivek H. Murthy, U.S. Surgeon General
U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy and his book, Together
Loneliness isn’t the same as social isolation. Researchers define social isolation as a lack of relationships with others and little to no social contact or support. Obviously, such social isolation often leads to feelings of loneliness.
Another related phenomenon is solitude. Some people conflate it with loneliness, but that’s a mistake. Researchers define solitude as a state of being alone and note that it can be voluntary or involuntary.
Solitude, it’s worth noting, can be positive. For example, it can help us have more time to reflect (a valuable thing when many of us lack margin in our lives) and lead to greater self-awareness. Also, solitude can help us develop authenticity and become more familiar with and comfortable being ourselves. Dr. Murthy points out that, perhaps surprisingly, solitude can help protect against loneliness.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Loneliness and social isolation can have adverse consequences in our lives. According to a large meta-analytic review of the research literature over more than 30 years by Julianne Holt-Lunstad and her colleagues, “Actual and perceived social isolation” (i.e., living alone, having infrequent social contact, or having few ties with a social network) “are both associated with increased risk for early mortality.” (1)
According to researchers, loneliness and disconnection are associated with:
a rise in cortisol (a stress hormone)
increased blood pressure
elevated blood sugar levels
inflammation
worse immune functioning
poorer health behaviors (such as physical inactivity, worse sleep, and smoking)
faster aging
higher risk of heart disease, stroke, and dementia
greater likelihood of premature mortality (1)
According to the Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, poor or insufficient connection come with a 29 percent increased risk of heart disease, 32 percent increased risk of stroke, and 50 percent increased risk of developing dementia among older adults. Also, lacking social connection can increase risk of premature death by more than 60 percent. (2) It can be just as deadly as certain diseases, according to researchers.
As if the physical health effects weren’t bad enough, loneliness and isolation often contribute to mental health challenges as well. For example, the risk of developing depression among adults who report feeling lonely often is more than double the risk among people who report feeing lonely rarely or never. When it comes to children, loneliness and social isolation elevate the risk of anxiety and depression both immediately and far into the future.
“Today it’s widely understood that one of the most important factors
in preventing and addressing toxic stress in children is healthy social connection.” -Vivek H. Murthy, Together
Isolation can become a downward spiral, fostering discontent and shame, leading to further isolation. Many people have a tendency to go it alone through hard times and transitions, perhaps from their personality or upbringing. Unfortunately, that’s a recipe for more hardship.
“Protracted loneliness causes you to shut down socially, and to be more suspicious of any social contact…. You become hypervigilant. You start to be more likely to take offense where none was intended, and to be afraid of strangers. You start to be afraid of the very thing you need most…. disconnection spirals into more disconnection…. many depressed and anxious people receive less love, as they become harder to be around. Indeed, they receive judgment, and criticism, and this accelerates their retreat from the world. They snowball into an ever colder place.” -Johann Hari, Lost Connections
The Benefits of Relationships
Forming and maintaining relationships, by contrast, comes with many benefits, according to researchers. British-Swiss journalist and author Johann Hari notes that just as bees evolved to be part of a hive, so we humans evolved to be part of a tribe. It stands to reason that there’s an evolutionary basis behind our urge to connect with others and form social bonds. Doing so helps us survive and reproduce, and it helps us access support in times of danger, distress, or trauma.
“…like food and air, we seem to need social relationships to thrive.” -Ed Diener and Robert Biswas-Diener, Happiness: Unlocking the Mysteries of Psychological Wealth
Social bonds are not just about surviving but also about belonging and thriving. Enter what psychologists call the “belongingness hypothesis”: that we have a “pervasive drive to form and maintain at least a minimum quantity of lasting, positive, and significant interpersonal relationships.” (3) In a major review of the research literature on interpersonal attachments, researchers Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary found that our need to belong has two main features:
first, we need frequent interactions with others that are positive or pleasant (or at least mostly free from conflict)
second, we want interpersonal bonds that are stable and continuing and marked by genuine concern (and, ideally, mutual concern)
According to researchers, social relationships benefit our immune system as well as our cardiovascular and endocrine (hormone regulation) functions. (4)
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Researchers have long tied the quality of our relationships to our wellbeing, happiness, and sense of fulfillment. The connection also shows up in surveys. According to a large 2023 Pew Research Center study, 61 percent of U.S. adults say that having close friends is extremely or very important in order for people to live a fulfilling life. (5)
The research on the link between social connections and happiness is extensive and powerful. (See the Appendix.)
“The centrality of social connections to our health and well-being cannot be overstated…. One of the strongest findings in the literature on happiness is that happy people have better relationships than do their less happy peers. It’s no surprise, then, that investing in social relationships is a potent strategy on the path to becoming happier…. people with strong social support are healthier and live longer.” -Sonja Lyubomirsky, The How of Happiness
According to Dr. Sonja Lyubomirsky, Distinguished Professor of Psychology at University of California Riverside, “The causal relationship between social relationships and happiness is clearly bidirectional.” In other words, when we improve our relationships, we’re likely to experience positive emotions. Then, our enhanced feelings of those positive emotions are likely to help us attract more relationships (and ones that are of high quality). That, in turn, will help make us even happier. She calls it “a continuous positive feedback loop” and “an upward spiral.”
The Dark Side of Relationships
Though the benefits are clear, we should also note that not all relationships are positive or beneficial. Far from it.
Many people are in relationships that are poor, manipulative, abusive, or even toxic. And good people sometimes have profound flaws that not only get themselves into trouble but also hurt others. Of course, all relationships go through ups and downs, and it’s not realistic to assume that they’ll induce happiness all the time. In fact, many people get themselves into trouble by expecting too much from their relationships, as opposed to doing the inner work of intentional improvement. Researchers have noted that relationships can be extremely stressful. (6)
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
How to Maintain Close Connections and Relationships
Since relationships are so important to physical and mental health and happiness, we’re wise to reflect on what we can do to nurture them. Here are things we can do to develop and maintain our relationships:
Make time for important people in our lives and avoid the traps of perpetual busyness and workaholism that pull us away from them. Stop neglecting people and start cherishing them, starting with attention and quality time.
Be honest, trustworthy, and reliable.
Show interest in them.
Open up and share our inner life, including our hopes, challenges, and fears, with close family and friends we trust.
Demonstrate loyalty and commitment to family and friends.
Support family, friends, and colleagues during their times of need.
Show them we care with our actions as well as our words.
Show them appreciation often.
Express affection (e.g., holding hands, hugging, cuddling, massage). We humans are wired to need physical contact, and researchers have found a link between touch deprivation and many negative health outcomes, including anxiety, depression, and immune system disorders.
Manage conflict well, including forthrightly and deftly raising concerns or disagreements instead of letting them fester.
Avoid disrespect and contempt.
Don’t hold grudges.
“You can’t stay in your corner of the Forest waiting for others to come to you. You have to go to them sometimes.” -A.A. Milne, Winnie-the-Pooh
Conclusion
Our relationships with others are among the most precious gifts we can have in life. Too many people lose sight of that as they get lost in work, materialism, concerns or the day, or petty grievances.
One of the reasons that connections and relationships are so important in our lives—and such powerful contributors to our happiness—is that they get us out of our egoic shell. They get us to focus on others. It’s through our relationships that we can become better people by developing our empathy and compassion and giving part of ourselves to others.
Connect deeply and often. Do it gladly and urgently. You won’t regret it.
Reflection Questions
Are you neglecting any important relationships in your life?
Are you doing enough to develop new relationships?
Are you doing enough to maintain your existing relationships that are important to you?
Quality of Life Assessment to help you discover your strongest areas and the areas that need work and then act accordingly
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Appendix: Research on Connections and Relationships
The research on the centrality of close relationships to our health, wellbeing, happiness, and fulfillment is extensive. Here are some important studies:
Harvard Study of Adult Development
The Harvard Study of Adult Development is a massive longitudinal study of hundreds of people for their entire adult lives. The study began in 1938 and is continuing to this day (after having multiple study directors) with its “Second Generation Study.” The study has evaluated mental and physical health and wellbeing, career enjoyment, retirement experience, and marital quality via interviews, questionnaires, medical exams, and psychological tests.
When asked what he’s learned from the study, Professor George Vaillant (a psychiatrist who led the study for decades) wrote: “Warmth of relationships throughout life have the greatest positive impact on ‘life satisfaction.’… (We now have) 70 years of evidence that our relationships with other people… matter more than anything else in the world…. Happiness is love. Full stop.”
Study of the Happiest People
In a study of 222 undergraduates, screened for high happiness using multiple confirming assessment filters, researchers sought to identify the characteristics of the happiest 10 percent of people among us. They found that the main distinguishing characteristic of the happiest people was the strength of their social relationships. (7)
“Here’s the most fundamental finding of happiness economics: the factors that most determine our happiness are social, not material…. social connectedness is the most important of all the variables which contribute to a sense of wellbeing in life.
And that is true at any age…. We are each other’s safety nets.” -Jonathan Rauch, The Happiness Curve
World Values Survey
According to researchers who evaluated data from the World Values Survey, which surveyed people in more than 150 countries about their life satisfaction, the top factors that account for about three-fourths of reported well-being are: social support, generosity, trust, freedom, income per capita, and healthy life expectancy. (Note how many of these factors are social.)
The Blue Zones
Dan Buettner, explorer, author, and American National Geographic Fellow, has written extensively about the “blue zones”: regions in the world where people live, or have recently lived, much longer than average, including many centenarians. The blue zones identified are: Okinawa Prefecture, Japan; Nuoro Province, Sardinia, Italy; the Nicoya Peninsula, Costa Rica; Icaria, Greece; and Loma Linda, California, U.S.
According to Buettner, there are common patterns of behavior across the blue zones, several of which concern relationships:
“Belong”: belonging to and participating in a faith-based or spiritual community and attending services regularly.
“Loved Ones First”: putting their families first, committing to a life partner, investing in their children with time and love, establishing and maintaining family and social rituals, and keeping aging parents and grandparents nearby or in the home
“Right Tribe”: surrounding themselves with a tribe of people that they interact act with often and over their lifetimes (e.g., Okinawans created ”moais”–groups of five friends that committed to each other for life).
“The most successful centenarians we met in the Blue Zones put their families first. They tend to marry, have children, and build their lives around that core. Their lives were imbued with familial duty, ritual, and a certain emphasis on togetherness.” -Dan Buettner, The Blue Zones
Postscript: Inspirations on Relationships and Connections
“Union gives strength.” -Aesop, “The Bundle of Sticks,” 550 B.C.
“Two are better than one, because they have a good reward for their toil. For if they fall, one will lift up his fellow. But woe to him who is alone when he falls and has not another to lift him up! Again, if two lie together, they keep warm, but how can one keep warm alone? And though a man might prevail against one who is alone, two will withstand him—a threefold cord is not quickly broken.” -Ecclesiastes 4:9–12 (English Standard Version)
“The better part of one’s life consists of his friendships.” -Abraham Lincoln, lawyer, statesman, and U.S. president
“Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” -Erich Fromm, German-American social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and sociologist
“Call it a clan, call it a network, call it a tribe, call it a family. Whatever you call it, whoever you are, you need one. You need one because you are human.” -Jane Howard, Families
“We all need to know that we matter and that we are loved…. While loneliness engenders despair and ever more isolation, togetherness raises optimism and creativity. When people feel they belong to one another, their lives are stronger, richer, and more joyful.” -Vivek H. Murthy, Together
“There are two pillars of happiness… One is love. The other is finding a way of coping with life that does not push love away.” -George Vaillant, psychiatrist and Harvard Medical School professor, former director of the Harvard Study of Adult Development
“Invest in friends. There is no other instrument that pays such high returns…. We need each other, but perversely we neglect each other. Every day we have an opportunity to exercise friendship, to make huge returns on a tiny investment, but foolishly we relapse into sleep and forgetting. Please take my advice to heart—forget bonds, forget stocks, forget gold—invest in friendship.” -Ronald Gottesman, USC professor
“What often matters is not the quantity or frequency of social contact but the quality of our connections and how we feel about them.” -Vivek H. Murthy, Together
“Isolation is fatal…. The burden of going it alone is heavy and limiting—and potentially dangerous…. In fact, social isolation can take up to seven years off of your life. Isolation contributes to heart disease and depression; it influences your immune system and leads to faster aging and advanced health problems.” -Richard Leider and Alan Webber, Life Reimagined
“We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.” -Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver, Wellesley College
“Our epidemic of loneliness and isolation has been an underappreciated public health crisis that has harmed individual and societal health. Our relationships are a source of healing and well-being hiding in plain sight—one that can help us live healthier, more fulfilled, and more productive lives.” -U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Vivek Murthy
“For the first time in my life I saw the truth as it is set into song by so many poets, proclaimed as the final wisdom by so many thinkers. The truth—that Love is the ultimate and highest goal to which man can aspire. Then I grasped the meaning of the greatest secret that human poetry and human thought and belief have to impart: The salvation of man is through love and in love.” -Viktor Frankl, Man’s Search for Meaning (writing about an epiphany he had while in a concentration camp and thinking about his beloved wife, Tilly)
References
(1) Holt-Lunstad, J., Smith, T. B., Baker, M., Harris, T., & Stephenson, D. (2015). Loneliness and social isolation as risk factors for mortality: A meta-analytic review. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 10(2), 227–237.
(2) Office of the U.S. Surgeon General, “Our Epidemic of Loneliness and Isolation: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory on the Healing Effects of Social Connection and Community,” Washington, D.C., 2023.
(3) Baumeister, R.F. & Leary, M.R. (1995). The need to belong: Desire for interpersonal attachments as a fundamental human motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 117(3), 497–529.
(4) Umberson, D. & Montez, J.K. (2010). Social relationships and health: A flashpoint for health policy. Journal of Health and Social Behavior, 51(Suppl), S54–S66.
(5) Kim Parker and Rachel Minken, “Public Has Mixed Views on the Modern American Family,” Pew Research Center, September 14, 2023.
(6) Walen, Heather R.; Lachman, Margie E. Social Support and Strain from Partner, Family, and Friends: Costs and Benefits for Men and Women in Adulthood. Journal of Social and Personal Relationships. 2000; 17:5–30.
(7) Diener, E., & Seligman, M. E. P. (2002). Very Happy People. Psychological Science, 13(1), 81-84.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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It’s easy to take things for granted. We may appreciate things for a while but, sure enough, we eventually start discounting them. The unhappy result is that we can go through long stretches of our lives without noticing the good things.
The benefits of gratitude show up not only in hordes of modern scientific studies but also in centuries of shared wisdom. All the major religions encourage and celebrate gratitude. And many great spiritual teachers have been powerful exemplars of living with a grateful heart attuned to the wonders of creation.
20 Benefits of Gratitude in Our Lives
Feeling gratitude has an astonishing number of benefits. Professor Sonja Lyubomirsky from University of California, Riverside and other researchers have found that gratitude can:
1. Magnify good feelings.
2. Improve our sense of wellbeing, happiness, and overall life satisfaction.
“If you want to find happiness, find gratitude.” -Steve Maraboli, author
3. Lead to better mental and physical health, including lower blood pressure, better sleep, and a stronger immune system.
4. Boost our energy and enhance our vitality.
5. Bolster our capacity for optimism.
6. Reduce negative feelings like anger, bitterness, self-centeredness, envy, and greed—all of which inhibit our happiness—and curb our tendency to compare ourselves to others.
7. Lead to greater generosity, kindness, and helpfulness (“prosocial” behaviors).
8. Help us form closer and better relationships with friends and—and maintain them over time.
9. Expand our social network, giving us access to more friends and greater social support—while making it less likely that we’re lonely and disconnected.
10. Affect our brains in positive and lasting ways, including an orientation toward enjoying it when other people thrive.
11. Shift our attention away from negative emotions (e.g., fault, criticism, regret) and toward positive ones (e.g., benefit, abundance, joy), making it harder for us to ruminate.
12. Help us cope with and build resilience in the face of stress and traumatic events.
“…it is precisely under crisis conditions when we have the most to gain by a grateful perspective on life. In the face of demoralization, gratitude has the power to energize. In the face of brokenness, gratitude has the power to heal. In the face of despair, gratitude has the power to bring hope. In other words, gratitude can help us cope with hard times.”
-Dr. Robert Emmons, Professor of Psychology, University of California, Davis
13. Help us become more forgiving.
14. Enhance our sense of self-worth. (We feel more capable and confident when we realize how much others have done for us or how much we’ve accomplished.)
15. Reduce our tendency to complain and feel like a victim since it focuses our attention on what we value and appreciate.
16. Help us maintain a broader and better perspective in which we can place our challenges in the larger context of abundance and privilege.
17. Address the problem of “hedonic adaptation,” in which we tend to grow rapidly accustomed to the things we wanted and got.
18. Help our children and youth. According to research, more grateful adolescents and college students show keener interest in school, do better academically, have better social relationships, and enjoy their educational experience more.
19. Help people facing drug and alcohol addiction.
20. Provide some degree of protection against depression and suicidal ideation.
What will you do to start bringing more gratitude into your life, starting today?
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We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
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Postscript: Inspirations on the Benefits of Gratitude
“Gratitude is one of the sweet shortcuts to finding peace of mind and happiness inside.” -Barry Neil Kaufman, author
“Opportunities, relationships, even money flowed my way when I learned to be grateful no matter what happened in my life.” -Oprah Winfrey, entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author
“It is not happiness that makes us grateful. It is gratefulness that makes us happy.” -Brother David Steindl-Rast, Catholic-Benedictine monk and scholar
“Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more. It turns denial into acceptance, chaos to order, confusion to clarity. It can turn a meal into a feast, a house into a home, a stranger into a friend. Gratitude makes sense of our past, brings peace for today, and creates a vision for tomorrow.” -Melody Beattie, author
“When you appreciate the good, the good appreciates.” -Tal Ben-Shahar, teacher and writer
“Living in a state of gratitude is the gateway to grace.” -Arianna Huffington, Greek-American entrepreneur and author
“Gratitude opens the door to the power, the wisdom, the creativity of the universe. You open the door through gratitude.” -Deepak Chopra, spiritual teacher and author
“Acknowledging the good that you already have in your life is the foundation for all abundance.” -Eckhart Tolle, A New Earth
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What is a vision of the good life? Why is it hard to create one? What are the benefits of having a vision of the good life? How to craft a vision of the good life?
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Working hard but lacking energy and motivation? Busy but feeling depleted? Not sure what you want anymore—or what direction to take? Feeling overcommitted, juggling too many things?
These are common feelings these days, even among high achievers and committed parents and citizens. The problem is that, if we let them go for too long, things can start unraveling. We begin to see a gap between where we are now and where we’d like to be. And then the gap grows.
These are signs that we’re lacking a clear vision for our lives—or that we’ve lost sight of it. Sometimes, we find ourselves living someone else’s vision.
“Ester asked why people are sad. ‘That’s simple,’ says the old man. ‘They are the prisoners of their personal history. Everyone believes that the main aim in life is to follow a plan. They never ask if that plan is theirs or if it was created by another person. They accumulate experiences, memories, things, other people’s ideas, and it is more than they can possibly cope with. And that is why they forget their dreams.’” -Paolo Coelho, The Zahir
What Is a Vision of the Good Life?
A vision is a bold and vivid picture of a better future. Many organizations have a vision statement. But vision isn’t only for organizations. It’s for us too.
In the context of our lives, a vision of the good life should clearly describe who we want to become, what we want to do, and where we want to go. A vision of the good life is the dream destination of our lives.
“Vision is a clear mental picture of what could be, fueled by the conviction that it should be.”
-Pastor Andy Stanley, Visioneering
In essence, our vision statement is an authentic rendering of how our purpose and core values can play out in the world. A personal vision statement asks:
Who do we want to be? What do we want to do and contribute in life? Who do we want to share it with?
Why Vision Is Hard
Crafting a vision of the good life can be difficult for many. There are many obstacles that can get in the way.
For starters, we’re constrained by what researchers call “presentism”: Harvard University professor Daniel Gilbert notes that our “imagination cannot easily transcend the boundaries of the present…. Most of us have a tough time imagining a tomorrow that is terribly different from today.”
Many of us have what’s called “status quo bias”: a preference for maintaining our current state of affairs. There’s also the fear factor. It takes courage to confront obstacles and still envision a better future.
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Some people resist or struggle with the idea of having a vision of the good life because it sounds abstract and distant. But neither “vision” nor “good life” has to be complicated. A vision, as we’ve seen, is simply a picture of our desired future. And authors Richard Leider and David Shapiro define the good life simply and crisply:
“living in the place you belong, with the people you love, doing the right work—on purpose.”
Keep in mind that vision is different from purpose and goals. Our purpose is our reason for being, and we should think of it as timeless. Our goals are the objectives we want to accomplish, and they’re best thought of in shorter increments (e.g., today or this month or year). By contrast, our life vision is a vivid description of what we aspire to do with our lives. It’s best thought of over a lifetime (or at least a decade). (Obviously, people can choose to have a three-year vision, a five-year vision, etc. if they wish.)
The Benefits of Having a Vision
Having a vision of the good life can be catalytic. It can help us:
develop a clear sense of direction
get recentered when we feel lost
put our precious time and energy into what we really want
reclaim a sense of agency and control over our lives
know where to focus our attention and energy—and which detours to avoid
connect the dots between the different aspects of our lives
get back in the driver’s seat of our lives
make decisions and select which opportunities to pursue
set and enforce personal and professional boundaries
craft our goals, since they should flow naturally from our vision
get our motivation back, even during difficult times
reduce our feelings of overwhelm because we’re clearer about what matters
get help from others because we have a clearer sense of what we want
live more proactively and intentionally
improve our performance
Personal Values Exercise
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There are many ways to approach crafting a vision of the good life. Different approaches will work for different people. Here are some suggested approaches:
Begin by looking back to our childhood dreams. Many of us had dreams when we were younger—dreams, for example, of being an astronaut or an athlete, an author or a ballerina, a teacher or a firefighter. Many times, those dreams don’t so much point to the profession we actually choose as they do contain certain clues about our deeper make-up as a person—clues like wanting to explore, be active, create, make beauty, or help others.
Get in the habit of thinking more about the future we want, including who we want to be and how we’ll go about making it happen.
Think not just about big accomplishments but also about what we’d like everyday life to be like. Think about our normal days in the future. A vision of the good life isn’t only about aspiration and accomplishment. It’s also about peace and joy.
Look inward to capture our authentic essence. Our articulation of where we want to go should be grounded in who we are. Many people don’t look inward before projecting outward.
“Your vision will become clear only when you look into your heart.
Who looks outside, dreams. Who looks inside, awakens.”
-Carl Jung, Swiss psychiatrist
Clarify not only the mental picture of our desired future but also how we seek to feel in that desired future. That can include the feeling we want to bring to that future as well as the feeling we want to get in it.
Reflect on our view of the good life. What would living a good life mean for us and those we love?
Ensure the vision covers the important areas of our lives. A well-designed vision paints a picture of our desired destination across all the important aspects of our lives: family, work, health, education, service, community, hobbies, travel, and perhaps more.
Think also about an audacious aspiration for our life—something that’s challenging but would be amazing if we could make it happen.
“Fortune favors the audacious.” -Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus
Dutch Christian humanist, theologian, and philosopher
Now take inputs from the points above and turn them into a vision statement draft. Start with statements or bullet points, and then form them into a paragraph or a page or two about our vision of the good life. It works best when we think ahead and put ourselves in it, writing in the present tense, noting what kind of person we are, where we are, who we’re with, what we’re doing, etc.
Think about how we’d like to be remembered by loved ones and others at the end of our life. What would be a life we’d be proud of?
Get clear on what would provide the most value to the people we’re committed to serving. How are we best positioned to help, given our strengths and passions, and which groups or causes?
Get clear on the things that provide the most meaning in our lives and build those into our vision, including what’s important to us and what would be worth spending our time on. It’s a good sign if we’d do it even without getting paid for it.
Share an early draft with trusted friends and colleagues and seek their input—and help. Revise it based on their input, but only the input we wholeheartedly agreed with. After all, this is our vision of the good life, not theirs.
Consider working with a coach or mentor to help with the vision crafting process. Often, it’s helpful with an outside perspective.
(See the Appendix for other options if these approaches aren’t working for you.)
Criteria to Use in Crafting Our Vision
For some, the vision crafting process will be one of the most valuable things they ever do. Given that, we should have a high standard for the output and a good process for developing it intentionally.
As we craft a vision for our lives, we should ensure that it’s:
Clear and vivid in its description
Aligned with our true authentic essence, unique to us, including our purpose and core values
Unbounded by the status quo
Distant enough that we have to work toward it (a lifetime, or at least ten years in the future)
Broad enough to encompass all the major aspects of our lives (including personal, professional, and relationships)
Motivating and inspiring to us, flooding our heart with palpable emotion and fueling us with conviction
Our life vision should fill us with energy and raise our sights for what we can do with our days on Earth.
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There are many potential pitfalls in the vision crafting process, so some cautions are in order.
Though clear and vivid, our vision shouldn’t be prescriptive. It should be directional but not tactical, not interloping into how we will get there (the realm of strategy and tactics). Also avoid making it vague and generic. Someone who knows us well should recognize us clearly in our vision.
Our vision can change over the years, and that’s okay. But if we’ve done it well, it shouldn’t change too often. That would be jarring and confounding.
Our vision statement doesn’t have to be perfect. View it as a draft—as a work-in-process that can and should change over time.
Watch out for too much focus on ego or material possessions in our vision. We know those are false friends destined to disappoint in the final analysis. Better to focus instead on connection and contribution.
Our vision is worthless without action. What’s the point if it just sits in a drawer? We’re wise to read our vision statement regularly (e.g., every month or quarter) and get to work on making it come alive.
Making Our Vision a Reality
It’s unrealistic to expect that we’ll travel a linear path to realize our vision. Stuff happens. Circumstances change. But we’re wise to hold fast to our vision and keep working to bring it to life.
“A vision without a plan is a delusion.”
-Neil Kurtz, CEO of Golden Living
We’re especially wise to clarify what knowledge and skills we need to develop now to be able to live into that desired future—and then block out time to get them.
We should start taking action now on things that will bring us closer to our vision—and do that every day.
“First say to yourself what you would be; and then do what you have to do.”
-Epictetus, ancient Greek Stoic philosopher
Conclusion
In the end, our lives are short. Many people find themselves late in life with deep regrets. Why not set a marker now for how we’ll live and then pursue it with abandon?
Reflection Questions
Do you have a vision of the good life?
To what extent are you clear about what a good life would be for you?
Is it informing the choices you make and actions you take on a regular basis?
Passion Probe to help you find the things that consume you with palpable emotion over time
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
The visioning process is challenging for many. What works for one person may not work well for another. With that in mind, here are some other options for the vision crafting process:
Start with a “mind map.” Take a blank sheet of paper and a pencil, then write the word “Vision” in the middle of the page. Then add words, phrases, or images all around the page with things that may be included in your envisioning of a good life. Don’t edit. Just write or draw.
Use a vision board. Gather an array of photos, images, inspirational quotes, or other symbolic representations of your idea of a good life. Place them on a large poster sheet that can be displayed prominently in your home or office as a visual reminder of what you’d like your life to be like.
Consider drawing your vision of the good life. (Some way want to start with this.) The point isn’t artistry but rather creative symbols that represent your deepest aspirations. Have fun with it. Aristotle observed that “the soul never thinks without a picture.”
Consider journaling as a place to start to gather ideas. Sometimes starting more informally with private thoughts can help break the logjam of self-consciousness.
Clarify how you define success in different areas of your life, including both personal and professional. Build the most salient aspects of your desired success into your vision of the good life.
Write a letter from the future. Imagine yourself at the end of your life, having lived a good life. Write a letter from that future version of you to the you of today, describing what life is like, who you’ve become and what you’ve done, and how it feels.
Postscript: Inspirations on Vision
“There is no favorable wind for the sailor who doesn’t know where to go.” -Seneca, ancient Roman Stoic philosopher
“I’ve seen the promised land.” -Martin Luther King, Jr., minister, activist, and civil-rights leader
“Where there is no vision, the people perish.” -Proverbs 29:18
“I learned to organize my life around my dream, rather than try to force my dream into my chaotic life.” -Sonia Choquette, spiritual teacher and author
“See things as you would have them be instead of as they are.” -Robert Collier, author
“Connecting with one’s dreams releases one’s passion, energy, and excitement about life…. The key is uncovering your ideal self—the person you would like to be, including what you want in your life and work.” -Daniel Goleman, Richard Boyatzis, and Annie McKee, Resonant Leadership: Learning to Lead with Emotional Intelligence
“…people stop dreaming because they got caught up in the hustle and bustle of surviving. And once we stop dreaming, we start to lead lives of quiet desperation, and little by little the passion and energy begin to disappear from our lives.” -Matthew Kelly, The Dream Manager
“All mean dream: but not equally. Those that dream by night in the dusty recesses of their minds wake in the day to find that it was vanity: but the dreamers of the day are dangerous men, for they may act their dreams with open eyes, to make it possible.” -T.E. Lawrence, Seven Pillars of Wisdom: A Triumph
“It is not true that people stop pursuing dreams because they grow old. They grow old because they stop pursuing dreams.” -Gabriel Garcia Marquez, novelist
“The happiest people in life operate out of their imaginations and dreams, not their histories.” -Ed Mylett, The Power of One More
“Everyone is inspired by those who follow their dream.” -Maria Nemeth, Founder and Director, Academy for Coaching Excellence
“Be strong on vision, but flexible on detail.” -Jeff Bezos, founder and executive chairman, Amazon
“Despite the myth of the heroic visionary leader, there is little about developing and pursuing a vision that should be a solo endeavor.” -Christopher Gergen and Gregg Vanourek, LIFE Entrepreneurs
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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In the world of personal development, passion is one of the things that’s most misunderstood. “Follow your passion” is common advice.
But is it right?
The answer may surprise you.
What Is a Passion?
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. They’re the things we love so much that we’re willing to suffer for them. Researchers have defined passions as strong inclinations toward activities we value and like or love, and in which we invest our time and energy. (1)
Author and coach Curt Rosengren calls passion “the energy that comes from bringing more of you into what you do. In essence, passion comes from being who you are.” Our passions are connected with our intrinsic motivation (our impulse to do something because of the inherent satisfaction of doing so and not the desire for a reward for it)—and with our innate talents and abilities.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
We can have passions in different domains of our lives. What are the signs of passion at work? The signs include loving our work, wanting to talk often about what we like about our work, or finding ourselves working extra hours even when we don’t have to, mainly for the inherent satisfaction.
To what extent are people passionate about their work?
“Passion is the driver of achievement in all fields.”
-Sir Ken Robinson, author and advisor on education in the arts
Passion is also contagious. People pick up on our enthusiasm, and it can inspire them to find and work in their areas of passion as well.
There’s also a flip side to this: there’s much lost when we don’t have passion for what we’re doing. When we’re not living and working with passion, we’re much more likely to lack enthusiasm and “phone it in.” Over time, this can put us on a downward trajectory.
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
Passion can be tricky because it often gets confused with other things, including hobbies and interests. Passion is related to these things, but there are important differences.
A hobby is something we do for pleasure or relaxation and not as our main occupation.
An interest is a feeling of wanting to be involved in something or to learn more about it, or something that attracts and holds our attention.
A passion, as noted above, is something that consumes us with palpable emotion over time.
A key difference, then, between passions and hobbies and interests is the degree to which we’re emotionally invested in the activity. And this can change over time. A hobby can turn into a passion, and vice versa.
How to Know What Our Passions Are
To determine our passions, we can take assessments and/or observe our own experiences and ask ourselves questions like the following:
What things bring me joy?
Which subjects interest me the most, continually drawing me in?
What would I keep doing enthusiastically even if I didn’t get paid for it?
What am I continually curious about?
What things do I get excited about doing or discovering?
What fills me up with energy and makes me come alive?
What activities do I lose myself in, losing track of time?
What problem(s) do I feel compelled to solve?
What am I curious about or fascinated with?
Is there something I long to master?
Is there a person, group, place, or cause that I feel compelled to help (e.g., youth, my hometown, endangered species, the planet)?
What lit me up when I was a child?
We can also ask for feedback from others (e.g., family, friends, colleagues, mentors) about what they observe about our passions and how we can integrate them into our life and work.
Finally, we’re wise to experiment and explore possibilities—to try things.
Passion and Grit
Angela Duckworth, University of Pennsylvania Professor and co-founder of the Character Lab, notes that a passion isn’t about just obsession. It’s also about consistency over time—about how steadily we work on certain things with sustained and enduring devotion.
In her book, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance, she writes that a passion isn’t just something we care about and enjoy intrinsically, but something we care about “in an abiding, loyal, steady way.” She ties passion to what she calls “grit,” which is a combination of “passion and perseverance for very long-term goals.”
Passions Can Develop and Deepen over Time
Professor Duckworth notes that passions tend to be developed more than they’re discovered. In other words, there’s an important time dimension that tends to proceed with certain components, including interest, experimentation, discovery, development over time, practice, purpose, and persistence.
It begins, she notes, with interest—with intrinsically enjoying what we do. She notes that interests are typically “triggered by interactions with the outside world” and experimentation, and not discovered through introspection or analysis. Then, she writes, “what follows the initial discovery of an interest is a much lengthier and increasingly proactive period of interest development. Crucially, the initial triggering of a new interest must be followed by subsequent encounters that retrigger your attention—again and again and again.” In other words, the fire will go out if not tended to.
For the passion to blossom, it should be an activity that we practice—with “the daily discipline of trying to do things better than we did yesterday”—ideally leading to mastery.
For the passion to ripen, she reports, it should be connected to our purpose (our reason for being), with a conviction that our work matters. That means not only connecting to our personal interests but also to how we can serve or contribute to the wellbeing of others.
For us to maintain a passion, we must persevere with it through the inevitable challenges and setbacks.
In a nutshell, Duckworth recommends focusing not on following our passions but on fostering them intentionally and systematically over time.
“…here’s what science has to say: passion for your work is a little bit of discovery, followed by a lot of development, and then a lifetime of deepening.”
-Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
How to Integrate Our Passions into Our Life and Work
It’s one thing to know what our passions are (which isn’t straightforward for everyone), while it’s another thing to integrate them into our life and work.
For one thing, there are practical challenges. We live in the real world, with bills and mortgages to pay and retirements to save for. So, for starters, many people have given up on this game from the get-go. That’s understandable, but it warrants a second look.
Here are 8 steps we can take to integrate our passions into our life and work:
Of course, we must begin by knowing what our passions are. (See above.)
Challenge beliefs that aren’t serving us well. For example, reconsider a belief that that it’s not realistic to have passion in our life or to be passionate about what we do for a living.
Evaluate how much time we’re operating in the area of our passions. Are we in the passion zone frequently, or rarely?
Set goals that align with our passions. For example, if we have a passion for learning, we can set a goal of reading one nonfiction book every month or taking a new course every year.
Decide what actions we’ll take and habits we’ll adopt to operate more in the areas of our passions. For example, we can choose one or two things that we do regularly as part of our morning, mid-day, or evening routine. Calendarize them and evaluate how it’s going regularly.
Determine what we’ll do to reduce the amount of time we’re working on things outside our passions.
Find others who share our passions and engage with them often.
In this process, it may also be helpful to have a coach or mentor because we may not have clarity about our passions or how we can use them more.
As we go forward, we must remember to be patient. It can take a while to right the ship.
Myths and Misconceptions about Passions
There are many myths and misconceptions about passions. For starters, the idea that following our passion(s) will automatically lead us to success is prevalent and even a bit of a cliché.
It’s not wrong, but it’s only partly true.
It’s not enough to follow our passions. In this competitive world, our passions need a business model. We need to do things that others are willing to pay us for. And not all passions are well-suited to being our primary occupation that brings in our required income.
Many people don’t know what their passion is—and they may be intimidated by the thought. For many of us, our passions don’t come to us in a flash that’s crystal clear and that instantly changes our lives. Many of the people Angela Duckworth interviewed told her they spent years exploring several different interests, and the core passion wasn’t recognizable at the beginning.
In his book, Deep Work, Georgetown University computer science professor and author Cal Newport notes the flawed thinking that “there are some rarified jobs” that fuel passion—”perhaps working in a nonprofit or starting a software company—while all others are soulless and bland.” He argues that we don’t need a rarefied job; rather, what we need is a rarefied approach to our work. More on that below.
Some people may not want to have their passion incorporated into their job, as it may risk soiling it or leading to burnout. Also, we don’t necessarily have ONE PASSION. We can have many, and they can change over time.
There’s also a lot of confusion about the interplay between passion and purpose. For starters, many people use these terms interchangeably. Big mistake. A passion, as we’ve seen, is something that consumes us with palpable emotion over time. By contrast, our purpose is why we’re here, our reason for being. Stanford University professor William Damon defines it as “a stable and generalized intention to accomplish something that is at the same time meaningful to the self and consequential for the world beyond self.”
Ideally, we bring them closer together, tying our passions to our purpose and in the process redirecting our passions toward something more meaningful and significant.
“What ripens passion is the conviction that your work matters.
For most people, interest without purpose is nearly impossible to sustain for a lifetime.”
-Angela Duckworth, Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance
Our passions, like pretty much anything in life, are at risk of dwindling over time. We can exhaust them or burn them out if we’re not careful. Two things can help here. The first is purpose. By connecting passions to purpose, we’ll attach them to a renewable source of energy. The second is novelty. Creatively finding new ways to use our passions—and with new people and different settings—will help keep the fire burning.
Mindsets about Passion
In his book, So Good They Can’t Ignore You, Cal Newport points out that “When it comes to creating work you love, following your passion is not particularly useful advice.” He explains:
“The conventional wisdom on career success—follow your passion—is seriously flawed. It not only fails to describe how most people actually end up with compelling careers, but for many people it can actually make things worse: leading to chronic job shifting and unrelenting angst when one’s reality inevitably falls shorts of the dream.”
The idea here is that if we have unrealistic standards about what work will be like, we’re likely to become disappointed and perhaps even cynical. Part of the problem, Newport notes, is that we have this fantasy of a perfectly right dream job waiting for us out there. We only need to find it. This is often naïve. People may have a dream job for a while, but things have a tendency to change, with new managers, organizational transformations, industry shifts, and changes in our own lives. Great work is more of a mindset and pursuit than it is a destination.
Newport distinguishes between two different mindsets about work. The first is the “passion mindset.” The idea here is that if we do what we love, the world will make us succeed. This mindset (which is common) is focused on what the world can offer us. The problem: it’s too simplistic, and it’s misleading.
The second is the “craftsman mindset” (a craftsman is skilled at a certain trade, perhaps working skillfully with his or her hands to make things with exquisite attention to quality and detail). This mindset is focused on what we can offer the world, not on what the world will do for us.
Newport urges us to adopt the craftsman mindset, not the passion mindset—and get good at something. Really good. And really good at something via developing “rare and valuable skills.” With this mindset, we can build up “career capital,” which will give us a strong base for crafting a career of great work that’s also generous with freedom and autonomy, ideally tied to a compelling purpose.
Passion Probe
Our passions are the things that consume us with palpable emotion over time. We love doing them and talk about them often. Take this self-assessment to find the ones that resonate most with you.
In the end, it’s not so much about following our passions as it is about discovering, developing, and deepening them over time—and creatively integrating them into our life and work.
Ideally, we know not only our passions but also use our strengths (the things we’re good at, based on our innate talents, knowledge, and skills) to serve groups or causes we’re motivated to support in line with our core values. That’s a powerful approach to living honorably and living well.
Reflection Questions
What are your passions?
To what extent are you integrating your passions into your life and work (relationships, health, work, education, community, activities)?
What more could you do?
Is there anything preventing you from doing so and, if so, what will you do about it?
What will you do differently, starting today?
Tools for You
Passion Probe assessment to help you find the things that consume you with palpable emotions over time
Strengths Search Tool to help you identify your core strengths and integrate them more into your life and work
“Allow yourself to be silently guided by that which you love the most.” -Rumi, 13th century poet and Sufi mystic
“The only way to do great work is to love what you do.” -Steve Jobs, co-founder, Apple
“If there is any difference between you and me, it may simply be that I get up every day and have a chance to do what I love to do, every day. If you want to learn anything from me, this is the best advice I can give you.” -Warren Buffett, legendary investor
“Passion is energy. Feel the power that comes from focusing on what excites you.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, author, and philanthropist
“One of the huge mistakes people make is that they try to force an interest on themselves. You don’t choose your passions; your passions choose you.” -Jeff Bezos, founder and CEO, Amazon
“Paul and I, we never thought that we would make much money out of the thing. We just loved writing software.” -Bill Gates, co-founder, Microsoft
“I did it for the buzz. I did it for the pure joy of the thing. And if you can do it for the joy, you can do it forever.” -Stephen King, writer
“People who are connected to their passion can be spotted from a mile away.” -Mark Shearer, Executive Vice President, Pitney Bowes
(1) In the academic literature, researchers distinguish between “obsessive passions” and “harmonious passions” in what’s called the “dualistic model of passion.” With obsessive passions, we’re consumed with an activity and have a hard time letting it go. It can lead to conflicts between this activity and other important things in our life—and potentially injury, burnout, or other adverse consequences (e.g., when we keep dancing even when we’re injured). The problem occurs because we tie things like self-esteem or social acceptance to the activity, so we persist at it rigidly and develop uncontrollable urges to continue engaging in it.
With harmonious passions, by contrast, we freely accept the activity as important to us and engage in it willingly but don’t attach contingencies to it and don’t feel compelled to continue it. We’re able to leave space for other important things in our lives. Such passions lead to higher work satisfaction and don’t lead to those kinds of conflicts—or to burnout. Source: Vallerand, Robert & Paquet, Yvan & Philippe, Frederick & Charest, Julie. (2010). On the Role of Passion for Work in Burnout: A Process Model. Journal of personality. 78. 289-312.
(2) Mark Allen Morris, “A Meta-Analytic Investigation of Vocational Interest-Based Job Fit, and Its Relationship to Job Satisfaction, Performance, and Turnover,” PhD dissertation, University of Houston, 2003.
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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How spirituality and the good life are related, including the benefits of having a spiritual practice and examples of it.
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We all want to live a good life, but are we living in such a way as to make it likely? In many cases, the cultural influences around us aren’t helping. Think about it.
How many of us feel anxious and stressed much of the time? To what degree are we influenced by cultural messages and forces related to consumerism and materialism, status and ego, fear and greed, manipulation and division? How many of us feel time-starved and struggle with numbing or workaholism? These are common traps, and they take us away from a life we’ll be proud of.
“The disastrous feature of our civilization is that it is far more developed materially than spiritually.
Its balance is disturbed.” -Jean-Paul Sartre, French novelist and philosopher
When we focus on material circumstances, what happens when things change for the worse, as they’re wont to do? What happens when we’re shaken up with a health scare, relationship wound, or job loss? Do we really want to let our happiness depend solely on how things are going in our life, given that change is inevitable and that we all experience ups and downs regularly?
Enter spirituality. To some, it’s a loaded word, because it comes with baggage. But to many, it’s a powerful centering practice that adds depth, richness, and meaning to their lives, whether through prayer, worship, meditation, or other means.
Those who avoid spirituality for whatever reason may want to give it a second look, because it can be an important and powerful part of human experience.
“If a man is to live, he must be all alive, body, soul, mind, heart, spirit.” -Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, and social activist
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Part of the problem is that there’s no widely accepted definition of spirituality, and many people conflate it with religion or dogma. We can think of it very simply as having to do with the human spirit, as opposed to material things. Here are some ways to think about it:
“Spirituality is the measure of how willing we are to allow grace—some power greater than ourselves—
to enter our lives and guide us along our way.” -Mastin Kipp, author of Daily Love: Growing with Grace
“Spirituality is the process of living out a set of deeply held personal values,
of honoring a presence greater than ourselves.” -Peter Block, author
“Spirituality for me is recognizing that I am connected to the energy of all creation, that I am a part of it and it is always a part of me. Whatever label or word we use to describe ‘it’ doesn’t matter. Words are completely inadequate.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author
Many people view spirituality as an age-old quest for inner peace and liberation, for awakening and enlightenment. It can include a search for self-transcendence—or rising above and beyond our ego (what some people call “ego death”).
Spirituality tends to involve asking fundamental questions (e.g., Who am I? Where do I come from? What’s my place in this vast universe? Is there a higher power? What, if anything, gives life meaning?). For many, it entails a recognition of our interconnectedness, and perhaps a quest to reach a higher level of consciousness or experience a sense of oneness with all.
Spiritual routines can range from daily practices to weekly services to personal prayer or faith. They tend to evolve as we age, grow, and have different life experiences.
For some, spirituality is about faith and forgiveness, or ministry and service, or peace and joy. For others, it’s about a search for meaning and purpose, appreciation of truth and beauty, or reverence of the sacred. It can entail connecting with nature, the cosmos, or the divine. And for some people, it’s about mystery, miracles, and revelations—or deeply held aspirations for heaven or nirvana. For most, compassion and love are at the heart of it.
Paul Anderson, University of Minnesota professor emeritus, noted in a scholarly article that the word “spirit” comes from the Latin word spiritus, meaning “breath,” and is defined as “the vital principle or animating force traditionally believed to be within living beings; one’s essential nature.” The definition of the word “soul,” Anderson wrote, is comparable: “The animating and vital principle in the human being, credited with the faculties of thought, action, and emotion.”
Author and social forecaster Patricia Aburdene noted five hallmarks of spirituality: meaning or purpose, compassion, consciousness, service, and wellbeing. According to her, “The quest for spirituality is the greatest megatrend of our era.”
“We suffer when we don’t find ways to allow the concerns of the soul to manifest into our lives.” -Rabbi Mordecai Finley
The Difference between Spirituality and Religion
Some people equate religion and spirituality, but that’s a mistake. They’re related but not the same. Here’s how the Dalai Lama described it:
“Religion I take to be concerned with faith in the claims of one faith tradition or another, an aspect of which is the acceptance of some form of heaven or nirvana. Connected with this are religious teachings or dogma, ritual prayer, and so on. Spirituality I take to be concerned with those qualities of the human spirit—such as love and compassion, patience, tolerance, forgiveness, contentment, a sense of responsibility, a sense of harmony—which brings happiness to both self and others.” -Tenzin Gyatso, the 14thDalai Lama, in Ethics for the New Millennium
It’s been said that religion is an institution while spirituality is an experience. The way many people think about spirituality today often includes a sharper break from traditional religious institutions than in the past, and spirituality sometimes comes with an interesting blend of things (e.g., humanistic psychology and mystical traditions, or yoga and workplace wellness).
“Every religion is the product of the conceptual mind attempting to describe the mystery.” -Ram Dass, psychologist and spiritual teacher
Quality of Life Assessment
Evaluate your quality of life in ten key areas by taking our assessment. Discover your strongest areas, and the areas that need work, then act accordingly.
The Benefits of Having a Spiritual Practice in Our Lives
Spiritual practice—and living in accordance with deeper truths and our highest values—can transform our lives by bringing us a sense of unity, interconnectedness, awe, mystery, abundance, eternity, unboundedness, lucidity, tranquility, liberation, transcendence, flow, and presence.
“The spiritual life is not a special career, involving abstraction from the world of things. It is a part of every man’s life; and until he has realized it, he is not a complete human being, has not entered into possession of all his powers.” -Evelyn Underhill, English Anglo-Catholic writer and pacifist
A deep and lasting spiritual practice can help us realize that we’re whole regardless of the circumstances we happen to find ourselves in—and that we don’t need anything from anyone or the world to be and feel whole. A healthy spiritual practice can:
be a source of hope and comfort in hard times
provide a sense of meaning
give us inner peace
enhance our ability to cope with anxiety and stress as well as with difficult conditions or experiences
give us a state of expanded awareness and a more pure form of consciousness
lead to a clearer and more accurate understanding the nature of the world and universe as it really is, not as we’re conditioned to view it
give us a better sense of perspective and help us look beyond ourselves and our petty preoccupations and concerns
help us make sense of our life experiences and tribulations
help us tap into our inner strength and resilience
connect us with a spiritual community that provides not only solace and support but also companionship and joy
help us discover our purpose and core values—and build them into our daily lives
help us stop reacting so negatively to external events and stop being triggered by the same people and situations over and over
help us drop the yoke of judgment—of constantly judging ourselves and others
enhance our happiness and fulfillment
fill us with a deep and lasting joy
“…scientists have found, again and again, that those with a spiritual practice or who follow religious beliefs tend to be happier than those who don’t. Study after study has found that religious people tend to be less depressed and less anxious than nonbelievers, better able to handle the vicissitudes of life than nonbelievers. A 2015 survey by researchers at the London School of Economics and the Erasmus University Medical Center in the Netherlands found that participating in a religious organization was the only social activity associated with sustained happiness—even more than volunteering for a charity, taking educational courses, or participating in a political or community organization. It’s as if a sense of spirituality and an active, social religious practice were an effective vaccine against the virus of unhappiness.” -Bryan Walsh, “Does Spirituality Make You Happy?” TIME, August 7, 2017
Examples of Spiritual Practices
Some people have never been exposed to spiritual practices, so they don’t know where to begin. Others may have had negative experiences with religious institutions (often involving shame or guilt) that they wish to avoid. So, it’s important to understand our options. Here are some common spiritual practices:
Experiencing nature—even just walking and being present with the sights and sounds around us—and savoring it
Reading things that engage our heart and soul
Creating things (via art, music, writing, film, dance, etc.)
Being in community with others where we feel each other’s presence, engage in deep dialogue with trust and vulnerability, and avoid judging or trying to fix each other. (Author Parker Palmer notes that “inner work, though it’s a deeply personal matter, is not necessarily a private matter: inner work can be helped along by community.”)
Engaging in rituals (e.g., christening, bar mitzvah) or services (e.g., funerals)
Embarking on a spiritual retreat or pilgrimage
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Connection and connectedness are fundamental aspects of spirituality. In her book, The Gifts of Imperfection, researcher Brene Brown writes, “The heart of spirituality is connection.” To her, spirituality is “recognizing and celebrating that we are all inextricably connected to each other by a power greater than all of us, and that our connection to that power and to one another is grounded in love and compassion. Practicing spirituality brings a sense of perspective, meaning, and purpose to our lives.”
Martin Buber, an Austrian-Israeli philosopher, once observed that “When two people relate to each other authentically and humanly, God is the electricity that surges between them.” “True compassion,” wrote Buddhist teacher Pema Chödrön, “does not come from wanting to help out those less fortunate than ourselves but from realizing our kinship with all beings.”
“We’re all just walking each other home.” -Ram Dass, psychologist and spiritual teacher
Spirituality and Ego
One of the challenges with modern living is that, if we’re not careful, we can get to caught in our ego, which causes us to focus excessively on things like material possessions, image, or success—all of which lead only to fleeting pleasure for most. In this way, our ego keeps us from living from our heart and soul.
In his book, Reinventing the Body, Resurrecting the Soul, spiritual teacher Deepak Chopra distinguishes between the nature of the ego and the soul. The ego, he writes, tends to be rejecting, critical, opposing, clinging, agitated, resentful, selfish, conflicted, and judgmental. By contrast, the soul is accepting, approving, cooperating, detached, calm, forgiving, selfless, peaceful, and nonjudgmental. He notes that the ego and soul have two very different visions of fulfillment. See the table below.
The ego’s vision of fulfillment:
The soul’s vision of fulfillment:
I have everything I need to be comfortable.
I am everything I need.
I am serene because bad things can’t come near me.
I am secure because I have nothing to fear in myself.
Through hard work, anything can be achieved.
The flow of life’s abundance brings me everything.
I measure myself by my accomplishments.
I do not measure myself by any external standard.
I win much more often than I lose.
Giving is more important than winning.
I have a strong self-image.
I have no self-image; I am beyond images.
Because I’m attractive, I win the attention of the opposite sex.
Other people are attracted to me as soul to soul.
When I find the perfect love, it will be on my terms.
I can find perfect love, because I have discovered it first in myself.
A key part of spirituality is living more from our soul and less from our ego.
“When the ego dies, the soul awakes.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
Conclusion
For many people, spirituality is an essential aspect of living a good life. There are many different spiritual traditions and practices. For many of us, a disciplined spiritual practice can be powerful and transformative as we take the focus off ourselves, give thanks, stand in reverence, and come back to our true nature, wholeness, and divine source.
Reflection Questions
Are you too caught up in the hustle and bustle of modern life?
Do you have a spiritual practice that enriches your life?
What more will you do to live from your heart and feed your soul?
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
“Little by little, wean yourself. This is the gist of what I have to say. From an embryo whose nourishment comes in the blood, move to an infant drinking milk, to a child on solid food, to a searcher after wisdom, to a hunter of invisible game.” -Rumi, 13th century poet and Sufi mystic
“We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience.” -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest and scientist
“But you are not your bank account, or your ambition. You’re not the cold clay lump you leave behind when you die. You’re not your collection of walking personality disorders. You are Spirit, you are love, and even though it is hard to believe sometimes, you are free. You’re here to love, and be loved, freely.” -Anne Lamott, writer, teacher, and political activist
“The ultimate source of happiness is within us. Not money, not power, not status. Some of my friends are billionaires, but they are very unhappy people. Power and money fail to bring inner peace. Outward attainment will not bring real inner joyfulness. We must look inside.” -Tenzin Gyatso, 14th Dalai Lama
“One of our problems today is that we are not well acquainted with the literature of the spirit. We’re interested in the news of the day and the problems of the hour…. When you get to be older, and the concerns of the day have all been attended to, and you turn to the inner life—well, if you don’t know where it is or what it is, you’ll be sorry.” -Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myth
“Our souls are not hungry for fame, comfort, wealth, or power. Our souls are hungry for meaning, for the sense that we have figured out how to live so that our lives matter, so that the world will be at least a little bit different for our having passed through it.” -Harold Kushner, rabbi, author, and lecturer
“As we become more obsessed with succeeding… we lose touch with our souls and disappear into our roles.” -Parker Palmer, A Hidden Wholeness
“Everyone has a calling, which is the small, unsettling voice from deep within our souls, an inner urge, which hounds us to live out our purpose in a certain way. A calling is a concern of the spirit. Since a calling implies that someone calls, my belief is that the called is God.” -Dave Wondra, executive coach
“Do not lay up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy and where thieves break in and steal; but lay up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where neither moth nor rust destroys and where thieves do not break in and steal.” -Matthew 6:19-20
“God takes our willingness and leads us mysteriously down the path where our deepest longings will finally be met in relationship with him and others.” -John Burke, founder and lead pastor of Gateway Church
“The deepest desire of our hearts is for union with God. God created us for union with himself: This is the original purpose of our lives.” -Brennan Manning, author and priest
“We are already one. But we imagine that we are not. We have to recover our original unity.” -Thomas Merton, American Trappist monk, theologian, mystic, and social activist
“Fulfillment is not a matter of self-improvement. It involves a shift away from the ego’s agenda, turning from externals to the inner world. The soul holds out a kind of happiness that isn’t dependent on whether conditions outside are good or bad.” -Deepak Chopra, spiritual teacher and author
“…our purpose for being alive is fulfilled by moving more and more deeply into our spiritual hearts and experiencing the presence of love.” -H. Ronald Hulnick and Mary R. Hulnick, Loyalty to Your Soul
“And be not conformed to this world: but be ye transformed by the renewing of your mind, that ye may prove what is that good, and acceptable, and perfect, will of God.” -Romans 12:2, King James version
“My religion consists of a humble admiration for the Superior Spirit who reveals Himself in the slight details we are able to perceive with our frail and feeble minds….” / “There has to be something behind things, something deeply hidden.” -Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist
“The first gulp from the glass of natural sciences will make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the glass, God is waiting.” -Warner Heisenberg, German theoretical physicist
“The God of the Bible is also the God of the genome. He can be worshiped in the cathedral or the laboratory. His creation is majestic, awesome, intricate, and beautiful.” -Francis Collins, The Language of God: A Scientist Presents Evidence for Belief
“Amidst all the mysteries by which we are surrounded, nothing is more certain than that we are in the presence of an Infinite and Eternal Energy from which all things proceed.” -Herbert Spencer, English philosopher and psychologist
“Invoked or not invoked, God is present.” Vocatus atque non vocatus, Deus aderit. (Latin inscription over the entrance to Carl Jung’s home in Switzerland)
“God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.” -Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish diplomat
“And then the knowledge comes to me that I have space within me for a second, timeless, larger life.” -Rainer Maria Rilke, Austrian poet and novelist
“Man’s aim in life is not to add to his material possessions, but his predominant calling is to come nearer his Maker.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
“…the kingdom of God is within you.” -Jesus Christ to his disciples in Luke 17:21
“…spiritual truth is diametrically opposed to the values of our contemporary culture and the way it conditions people to behave…. The collective disease of humanity is that people are so engrossed in what happens, so hypnotized by the world of fluctuating forms, so absorbed in the content of their lives, they have forgotten the essence, that which is beyond content, beyond form, beyond thought. They are so consumed by time that they have forgotten eternity, which is their origin, their home, their destiny.” -Eckhart Tolle, spiritual teacher and author
“Human history is the long terrible story of man trying to find something other than God which will make him happy.” -C.S. Lewis, British scholar, writer, and lay theologian
“…underneath the level of physical appearances and separate forms, you are one with all that is.” -Eckhart Tolle, The Power of Now
“Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” -St. Catherine of Alexandria, princess, scholar, and Christian saint
“Joy is the most infallible sign of the presence of God.” -Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, French priest and scientist
Gregg Vanourek’s Newsletter
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These days, it’s easy to become self-involved. So much is coming at us so quickly. We live in a world of speed and busyness in an age of social media, celebrities, and influencers.
These cultural influences are strong, pulling our egos toward a certain way of living that can become superficial and materialistic. We can be obsessed with climbing professionally, with chasing success. And we can take all that we have for granted, as we’re so focused on chasing more.
This may keep us occupied (if not overloaded), but it’s not a recipe for good living. In all the chase, with all its focus on success, we can miss out on one of the great gifts and joys of life: serving.
Service is a remarkable thing because it allows us to help others while also helping ourselves.
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
There are many benefits of serving and helping others, according to the research. Here are some of the main ones:
Helping others feels good. Researchers call it a “warm glow.” Even small acts of kindness can bring emotional rewards to the helper. (1)
“I don’t think there’s anything as wonderful in life as being able to help someone else.” -Betty Ford, activist, former U.S. first lady, and founder, Betty Ford Center
Service is a powerful contributor to our happiness, fulfillment, and overall life satisfaction. According to a large and growing body of research, helping others is often associated with and can lead to higher levels of happiness. Volunteering leads to a boost in our mental health and happiness, especially among people who volunteer more often (e.g., at least once a month), and people who volunteered in the last year were more satisfied with their lives.
Service can help our life and work be more meaningful. And it can help us discover our purpose and core values.
Serving others can help us discover who we are. It’s an important part of what I call “discover mode”: learning about who we are (including our core values, strengths, passions, and aspirations) and what we can do in the world.
“The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.” -Mahatma Gandhi, Indian lawyer and transformational leader
Helping others can help us transcend our egos. When we’re helping others, it’s hard to remain preoccupied with our own petty dramas.
Serving people can help us feel more grateful for what we have. We may begin to glimpse how fortunate or privileged we’ve been. It may give us a sharper perspective.
Serving others can be a powerful source of motivation. If we take the time to discover our core values and excavate our convictions, we’ll find that we long to contribute to some people, groups, or causes. We have a lot of energy to activate if we’ll only get started on it.
Serving other people with commitment and skill can help boost our confidence. As we help and have impact, we develop a greater belief in our capacities and conviction that we can add even more value.
Helping others builds our character. It may help us develop generosity, humility, empathy, trustworthiness, responsibility, loyalty, and even moral excellence.
Helping people can help us heal from deep wounds and traumatic experiences. There’s an intriguing expression: “When you feel sad, serve.” Too often, we get lost in our own wallowing and don’t see how readily we could change the dynamic if we’d only reach out and try to help someone else.
“…if you’re hurting, you need to help somebody ease their hurt. If you’re in pain, help somebody else’s pain. And when you’re in a mess, you get yourself out of the mess helping somebody out of theirs. And in the process, you get to become a member of what I call the greatest fellowship of all, the sorority of compassion and the fraternity of service.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author
Serving people can bring us out of isolation and back into relationship and a sense of belonging in community. This could include spiritual communities that promote service or a focus on something larger than the self.
Serving others can help us create new or stronger friendships. We can befriend the people we’re serving or the people we’re serving alongside. These can become some of the most important relationships in our lives.
Helping others can warm up our cold hearts. Our hearts sometimes take a beating in today’s world. Our heart may be asleep, closed, or cold from pain, suffering, or isolation. Enter the warm glow of serving others.
Service can help us redeem some of the wrongs we’ve done and some of the pain we’ve inflicted on others. Let’s face it: we’ve all made mistakes and hurt people, including our loved ones. Too often, those are the ones we’ve hurt the most. Service can be an agent of redemption in our lives.
Helping others can have positive effects on our own health. According to the research, it can lead to lower stress and inflammation, reduced pain, healthier hearts, and even protection against anxiety, burnout, and depression.
Service can be inspiring and contagious. When people see someone serving others, it summons their better angels and makes them want to join in or follow suit. As this phenomenon spreads, it can help uplift communities.
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Service doesn’t have to be complicated. In fact, it’s often best when we keep it simple, heart to heart. Still, here are a few tips for going about it:
Developing self-awareness can be a great place to start. If we know our strengths, we can look for ways to use them when serving others, giving us a double win because it feels good to use our strengths on something important. The same holds true for our purpose, values, and passions.
If we pause to consider how we’re uniquely or powerfully qualified or positioned to help some people, groups, organizations, or causes—based on our knowledge, skills, experiences, or even our wounds—it can help us target our service efforts more effectively.
When we take time to discover what people, groups, or causes we feel called to serve, it can elevate our motivation and make it more likely we’ll stick with it.
Pervasive Service
In our book, LIFE Entrepreneurs: Ordinary People Creating Extraordinary Lives, Christopher Gergen and I wrote about something that intentional people who integrate their purpose and passions do well: “pervasive service,” which is “an ethic of contribution as a defining feature of our lives.”
Can we build service into our daily habits? Can we creatively find ways to serve—in ways big and small—our spouse or partner, family, friends, neighbors, colleagues, workplace, and community? What if we walked around with our helping antenna up, scanning for ways to respond to needs around us?
Service and giving shouldn’t be relegated to an occasional good deed—or to an annual tax write-off. What if we looked to bring them into each of our days—thus adding up to a lifetime of contribution? Viewed this way, service can become an organizing principle of our lives, a habit that permeates our personal lives and work and community endeavors.
Ideally, our acts of service evolve into deeper commitments that ripen us and enhance our inner life.
“There are occasions and opportunities for service that will vary throughout anyone’s life. The initial gate is that you understand that that’s a piece of being a full person. It’s a matter of saying yes to the opportunity when it appropriately appears. Every day is a preparation for serving something.” -Buie Seawell, attorney and professor, University of Denver
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As with many things in life, there are some important nuances and even potential traps here.
First, let’s not make this about giving and expecting something in return. Not everything has to be transactional or come with an expectation or obligation. That just cheapens it.
Second, serving others doesn’t make us better than them. We all have dignity and potential. And we all have ups and downs and our unique context and challenges.
Third, there’s an ego risk that can come with serving. Let’s not let serving morph into a savior syndrome, and let’s not become self-righteous and smug about it.
Fourth, let’s watch out for the trap of being too focused on others—and giving ourselves away in the process. As the flight attendants wisely advise, let’s put on our own oxygen masks first. (See my article, “Are You Focusing Too Much on Others’ Needs.”)
“If takers are selfish and failed givers are selfless, successful givers are otherish: they care about benefiting others, but they also have ambitious goals for advancing their own interests…. Selfless giving, in the absence of self-preservation instincts, easily becomes overwhelming. Being otherish means being willing to give more than you receive, but still keeping your own interests in sight, using them as a guide for choosing when, where, how, and to whom you give.”
-Adam Grant, Give and Take
Conclusion
Service, while remarkable in its own ways and often uplifting, as we’ve seen, doesn’t have to be grandiose and world-changing. Our little acts of contribution can make a real difference day to day and add up over time to big sums.
So, yes, let’s dedicate ourselves to worthy and mighty causes, if we can. Let’s follow in the footsteps of great servants through the ages, if we can. But let’s also focus on what’s right in front of us: Raising our kids as best we can. Holding the door open for someone. Being kind to people we encounter on the street. Thanking the barista with a kind word and a smile. Stopping to see if someone needs help. Giving someone a ride. Checking in on a friend or colleague.
We’re likely to regret it if we don’t build service into our lives. If we do serve and serve often, it’s a beautiful gift both to the world and ourselves—and a way for us to honor the lives we’ve been given.
Strengths Search Tool to help you identify your core strengths and integrate them more into your life and work
Take the Traps Test
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Tom Rath, Life’s Great Question: Discover How You Contribute to the World
Billy Shore, The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back
Adam Grant, Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success
Stephen Trzeciak and Anthony Mazzarelli, Wonder Drug: 7 Scientifically Proven Ways that Serving Others Is the Best Medicine for Yourself
Postscript: Inspirations on Serving Others
“Life’s most urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
“It is high time the ideal of success should be replaced with the ideal of service.” -Albert Einstein, German-born theoretical physicist
“Service is the very purpose of life. It is the rent we pay for living on the planet.” -Marian Wright Edelman, activist for civil rights and children’s rights
“…taking care of others, helping others, ultimately is the way to discover your own joy and to have a happy life.” -Dalai Lama
“Not everybody can be famous. But everybody can be great, because greatness is determined by service. You don’t have to have a college degree to serve. You don’t have to make your subject and verb agree to serve. You don’t have to know about Plato or Aristotle to serve. You don’t have to know Einstein’s theory of relativity to serve. You don’t have to know the second theory of thermodynamics in physics to serve. You only need a heart full of grace and a soul generated by love.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
“…the only ones among you who will be really happy are those who have sought and found how to serve.” -Albert Schweitzer, humanitarian, philosopher, and physician
“…when you choose the paradigm of service, looking at life through that paradigm, it turns everything you do from a job into a gift.” -Oprah Winfrey, media entrepreneur, philanthropist, and author
“A growing body of evidence suggests that the single greatest driver of both achievement and wellbeing is understanding how your daily efforts enhance the lives of others.” -Tom Rath, Life’s Great Question
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
“Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” -John F. Kennedy, former U.S. president
“I slept and dreamt that life was joy. I awoke and saw that life was service. I acted, and behold, service was joy.” -Rabindranath Tagore, Indian poet, writer, and social reformer
“Every now and then I think about my own death, and I think about my own funeral. And if you get somebody to deliver the eulogy, tell them not to talk too long…. I’d like for somebody to say some day that Martin Luther King Jr. tried to give his life serving others…. I just want to leave a committed life behind.” -Martin Luther King, Jr.
“The old… should, it seems, have their physical labors reduced; their mental activities should be actually increased. They should endeavor, too, by means of their counsel and practical wisdom to be of as much service as possible to their friends and to the young, and above all to the state.” -Cicero, De Officiis
(1) Serving others is a form of what researchers call “prosocial behavior” (including giving money to charity, volunteering, sharing food, donating blood or an organ, or otherwise voluntarily helping others). Researchers have discovered that people derive pleasure from helping others. Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans found that it matters how people go about helping. Looking at the evidence on helping using self-determination theory, Aknin and Whillans discovered that prosocial behavior is more likely to lead to happiness when people have autonomy and choice over who and how they help, when they see the impacts of their help, and when they have opportunities to connect with people while helping. (Source: Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans, “Helping and Happiness: A Review and Guide for Public Policy,” Social Issues and Policy Review, Vol. 15, No. 1, 2021)
“Human beings are exceptionally prosocial.
Not only do we go out of our way to help other people, but we often feel good when we do.” -Lara B. Aknin and Ashley V. Whillans
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We humans have been journaling, writing diaries, or otherwise writing down our thoughts, feelings, and experiences for centuries. It’s a practice that dates back to the ancients. And it’s a tool that’s been used by pilgrims, explorers, soldiers, inventors, entrepreneurs, and artists.
People journal for different reasons. Some people journal to engage in deeper reflection, while others do it to help manage stress or process difficult experiences. Some journal as a way to reinforce their strengths or accomplishments; others focus on gratitude. Many therapists, counselors, and coaches recommend journaling, and many teachers assign it in schools.
Those who journal are in excellent company. People known to have engaged in some form of journaling include: John Quincy Adams, Marcus Aurelius, Lewis Carroll, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Darwin, Joan Didion, Thomas Edison, Albert Einstein, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Anne Frank, Benjamin Franklin, Arianna Huffington, Thomas Jefferson, Franz Kafka, Frida Kahlo, Martina Navratilova, Anais Nin, Sylvia Plath, Seneca, Susan Sontag, Leo Tolstoy, Mark Twain, Queen Victoria, Leonardo da Vinci, George Washington, Oscar Wilde, Oprah Winfrey, and Virginia Woolf.
“I hope I will be able to confide everything to you, as I have never been able to confide in anyone,
and I hope you’ll be a great source of comfort and support.” -Anne Frank’s first entry in her journal, 13th birthday, June 12, 1942
Anne Frank writing at her desk at school, 1940
Different Types of Journaling
There are different types of journaling. One common form is “expressive writing.” It involves writing continuously about an issue in our lives, including our deepest thoughts and feelings. According to James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, authors of Opening Up by Writing It Down, it can include different variations, including writing about a problem we’re facing, journaling about our worries and concerns, or doing a word association around a certain word (e.g., “stress”).
Another common form is “gratitude journaling”: writing about positive experiences that we’re thankful for.
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According to the research, journaling is associated with lowered blood pressure, better sleep, and fewer stress-related doctor visits and less time spent in the hospital. It’s also associated with improved function of our immune system, lungs, liver, and memory as well as reduced symptoms of chronic diseases. In addition, it can help with recovery from traumatic events, in part because it allows us to process our experiences and emotions.
Journaling can also benefit our brain and cognitive capacity.
“The practice of writing can enhance the brain’s intake, processing, retaining, and retrieving of information… it promotes the brain’s attentive focus … boosts long-term memory, illuminates patterns, gives the brain time for reflection, and when well-guided, is a source of conceptual development and stimulus of the brain’s highest cognition.” –Judy Willis, board-certified neurologist and teacher
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
Journaling is not only inexpensive and straightforward to engage in but it also avoids the need for having people there to listen every time we want to get something off our chest. The pages are always there for us, and they never interrupt or misunderstand. As Anne Frank once wrote, “Paper has more patience than people.”
Benefits come not only from journaling itself but also from going back and reviewing what we’ve written some time later. This review process can help us recapture forgotten stories or experiences and see patterns.
Note that there can be downsides of journaling for some people—or of journaling in certain ways. For example, it’s not always a pleasant experience, since it sometimes involves dredging up painful feelings.
How to Journal: Best Practices
When it comes to how we should journal, there’s of course no single formula. Different people will approach journaling in different ways. The key is to find what works for us. Still, here are some tips:
Remember that journaling is for us and us alone, not for an audience. If we’re self-conscious as we write or concerned about judgment from others, it can reduce or eliminate the value of journaling.
Start small. For many, it’s best to begin with only a few minutes on a manageable topic (e.g., a recounting of the day or a single incident).
Try journaling in different ways. Try writing in a bound journal or spiral notebook. Or try using a digital writing app or voice recording app. (Note, though, that writing by hand comes with real benefits that can easily outweigh the slight loss of speed compared to typing or speaking.) Experiment and see what works.
Try different frequencies. There’s a debate about the ideal frequency of journaling. Some people swear by the practice of daily journaling, in part because it builds a healthy habit, while others warn against the monotony that can come from having a regular cadence. In the end, we should find out what works for us and do that.
Find a quiet and peaceful space without interruptions and distractions. Going deep into our thoughts and feelings requires focus and concentration.
Choose a time of day that works best—the time when our thoughts and reflections flow most naturally. Many people swear by morning journaling. Others prefer to wait until they feel inspired or troubled.
Be sure to include both feelings and thoughts. This helps us avoid unhealthy rumination and makes it more likely that we’ll see patterns and themes. Start with expressing feelings first and then move on to thoughts and thinking patterns.
Be forthright in expressing exactly how we feel without any editing or filtering.
“Fill your paper with the breathings of your heart.” -William Wordsworth, English Romantic poet
Bear in mind that journaling may bring up painful feelings or some anxiety, and that’s okay. Feel free to take a break and come back to it later. Keep in mind the strong potential for long-term benefits if we stick with it.
“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.” –Natalie Goldberg, writer
Don’t get caught up in written rumination—in rehashing difficult things over and over. That can actually be counterproductive.
“One of the interesting problems of writing too much, especially if you’re going through a difficult a time, is that writing becomes more like rumination and that’s the last thing in the world you need.” -Dr. James Pennebaker, social psychologist
Feel free to draw in the journal. We don’t have to limit ourselves only to text. But researchers advise against drawing only, as it can lead to worse moods.
Try journaling prompts, especially if we’re not sure where to begin. Examples: things that bring us joy, what we’re feeling or noticing right now, people who or places that make us feel the happiest, dreams we have about the future, or what deserves our best attention now.
“…one thing journaling has taught me is that the mind is a surprising place, and you often don’t know what it may be hiding until you start knocking around in there. In other words: Writing in your journal
is the only way to find out what you should be writing about.” –Hayley Phelan, “What’s All This About Journaling?” New York Times, October 25, 2018
Personal Values Exercise
Complete this exercise to identify your personal values. It will help you develop self-awareness, including clarity about what’s most important to you in life and work, and serve as a safe harbor for you to return to when things are tough.
Many leaders have noted how journaling has helped them become a better leader and grow as a person. These days, many leaders are time-starved and deluged by inputs and information, so having a simple process that facilitates thinking, reflection, and analysis can be powerful.
Leaders can use journaling to process difficult events, think through important decisions, prepare themselves for upcoming challenges, vent their frustrations, or document their journey and see progress and patterns. And they can use it to reconnect with their inner voice when they’re flooded with outside inputs.
Journaling can help leaders be more mindful and present with their colleagues—and empathetic toward their struggles. It can also help them make better decisions and unearth important insights about vexing situations, including innovative ideas that may otherwise have been lost. Importantly, journaling can serve as a pressure valve that allows leaders to process difficult emotions and release some of the stress and pressure associated with the job. Finally, it can help steel them for tough battles ahead.
“I can shake off everything as I write; my sorrows disappear, my courage is reborn.” -Anne Frank
Journaling for Creativity and Innovation
British entrepreneur Richard Branson keeps notebooks full of questions as part of his creative process. Journals can be a great tool for entrepreneurs to capture their ideas about new products and services to launch, based on observing customer problems and spotting market gaps.
Julia Cameron, author of The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity, advocates a distinct form of journaling as a way to recover our creativity and reconnect with our own inner spiritual guide. With her “morning pages,” as she calls them, she advocates writing three pages of strictly stream-of-consciousness, longhand writing every morning—simply writing down whatever comes to mind, jumping from topic to topic, no matter how banal or bizarre—until the three pages are filled. She explains:
“Nothing is too petty, too silly, too stupid, or too weird to be included… Nobody is allowed to read your morning pages except you…. Morning pages are nonnegotiable. Never skip or skimp on morning pages. Your mood doesn’t matter…. If you can’t think of anything to write, then write, ‘I can’t think of anything to write.’”
Conclusion
With our busy lives and frenetic work schedules, journaling can be a great way to slow down and reflect, reawakening a rich inner life. There’s a reason so many different types of people have been doing it through the ages.
“How noble and good everyone could be if, at the end of each day, they were to review their own behavior and weigh up the rights and wrongs. They would automatically try to do better at the start of each new day and, after a while, would certainly accomplish a great deal. Everyone is welcome to this prescription; it costs nothing and is definitely useful.” -Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Reflection Questions
Are you using journaling as a practice for personal development, emotional expression, gratitude, creativity, or leadership?
If you’ve tried journaling before but not kept up with it, will you give it another try using some of the tips above?
We all fall into traps in life. Sometimes we’re not even aware of it, and we can’t get out of traps we don’t know we’re in. Evaluate yourself with our Traps Test.
“Keep a notebook. Travel with it, eat with it, sleep with it. Slap into it every stray thought that flutters up into your brain.” -Jack London, novelist, journalist, and activist
“Start writing, no matter what. The water does not flow until the faucet is turned on.” -Louis L’Amour, American novelist and short story writer
“Write hard and clear about what hurts.” -Ernest Hemingway, American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist
“Writing is medicine. It is an appropriate antidote to injury. It is an appropriate companion for any difficult change.” -Julia Cameron, American teacher, author, and artist
“Listen. The more faithfully you listen to the voice within you, the better you will hear what is sounding outside.” -Dag Hammarskjöld, Swedish economist and diplomat
Resources on Journaling
Nancy J. Adler, Leadership Insight Journal
Julia Cameron, The Artist’s Way: A Spiritual Path to Higher Creativity
Hal Elrod, The Miracle Morning Journal
Anne Frank, The Diary of a Young Girl
Ryan Holiday, The Daily Stoic Journal
James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth, Opening Up by Writing It Down: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain
Five Minute Journal (app)
Appendix: Why Does Journaling Work?
Based on a large body of research over time, we know that journaling comes with many benefits. It’s less clear, though, why that’s the case. Here are some of the most likely reasons why it’s so beneficial for so many. Journaling:
helps us get distance from painful or confusing experiences, seeing them in a fresh light without the pressures of the moment
can facilitate emotional release of unconscious conflicts
helps us avoid the problem of stuffing our emotions down (it’s healthy to acknowledge, express, and label our feelings about difficult events)
facilitates the process of mentally organizing our experiences, allowing us to examine root causes and formulate a coherent story
helps us uncover new insights about ourselves and the way we’re suffering or experiencing the world
can lower our emotional inhibition
gives us a heightened sense of control over our emotions and our lives
involves a powerful combination of both recording and processing, of both remembering and reflecting
can provide a sense of emotional catharsis
(1) Northwestern University psychologist Dan McAdams notes the importance of “narrative identity,” an internalized story we create about ourselves. It helps us form a coherent story of our lives, which in turn can help us view our lives more holistically and positively.
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