Coaching practices for Awe and Well Being During a Big Change
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Awe and Well Being During a Big Change, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- For a little while right after something takes my breath away, the stuff I’d been stressing about genuinely feels smaller and farther off
- My partner is going through a huge change right now
- I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough
- Going through this health scare has shaken loose how I think about my body and how much time I actually have
- In the moments something vast cracks me open, I feel this soft pull toward everyone and everything
Practices that may help
- Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical
Awe — the emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges your current mental frameworks — reliably reduces self-focused thinking, lowers inflammatory markers in some studies, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the perceived sense of time available. Dacher Keltner’s research shows awe is more accessible than people think and can be deliberately cultivated without waiting for once-in-a-decade peak experiences. - Write from a small-self perspective after awe
After an awe experience, write briefly from the perspective of someone whose personal concerns feel appropriately small.
Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical - Update your love map after major life changes
When life shifts, assume your map is outdated and ask new questions.
Love Maps: Knowing Your Partner's Inner World - Seek out awe as a broadening and self-transcending emotion
Awe expands perceived time, reduces self-focused thought, and increases prosocial behavior — and it can be deliberately accessed.
Broaden-and-Build, Made Practical - Use benefit-finding specifically for illness-related adversity
The research on benefit-finding is strongest in the context of medical illness — use these practices during or after health challenges.
Benefit-Finding in Adversity, Made Practical - Use awe to reconnect with something larger than yourself
When awe makes the self feel small, follow the natural impulse toward belonging — toward community, nature, or humanity at large.
Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical - The last chance before a transition
Before a major life change, fully inhabit what is ending, rather than only anticipating what comes next.
The Last Time Meditation - Look for genuine benefits without forcing them
Authentic benefit-finding — identifying real ways the experience changed you — aids adjustment; manufactured benefit-finding does not.
Meaning-Making Coping, Made Practical - Identify and anticipate upcoming transition windows
Treat approaching life changes as scheduled opportunities for habit installation — plan before the transition, not after.
The Habit Discontinuity Effect - Use a life transition to break old environment-behavior links
Major context changes (a move, a new job) create a rare window where old habits are disrupted and new ones are easier to form.
Environment Design for Behavior Change
Related concerns
- Awe And The Small Self During A Big Change
Dacher Keltner’s research shows that awe — the response to something vast that exceeds our current frame — reliably produces the "small self": a felt diminishment of individual concerns that is experienced as expansive rather than deflating. This shift reduces self-focused rumination, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the sense of available time. The core effects are well replicated; the neural and downstream health claims are more preliminary.
- Awe Experience Wellbeing
Awe — the emotion triggered by encountering something vast that challenges your current mental frameworks — reliably reduces self-focused thinking, lowers inflammatory markers in some studies, increases prosocial behavior, and expands the perceived sense of time available. Dacher Keltner’s research shows awe is more accessible than people think and can be deliberately cultivated without waiting for once-in-a-decade peak experiences.
- Hara Hachi Bu During A Big Change
Hara hachi bu is the Okinawan practice of eating until you are about 80% full rather than stuffed — a cultural rule of mindful moderation, not a clinical protocol. The evidence is observational and cultural: it is one habit associated with longevity in the Okinawan "Blue Zone", which makes it suggestive rather than proven cause and effect.
- Holding Space During A Big Change
Holding space means staying present with another person’s emotion without trying to fix it, judge it, or make it about you — offering a steady, non-reactive presence so they can feel what they feel and find their own way through. It works because a regulated, accepting presence helps co-regulate the other person’s nervous system; the term itself is practitioner language rather than a studied construct, but its components draw on solid clinical practice.
- Inhabit Life Transitions
When your social group changes, use the transition to adopt the behavioral norms of the new group rather than carrying old ones.
Use social transitions to change the norms around your behavior
- Nature And Movement During A Big Change
Treat approaching life changes as scheduled opportunities for habit installation — plan before the transition, not after.
Identify and anticipate upcoming transition windows
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