Coaching practices for Collective Identity Awe

Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Collective Identity Awe, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.

Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?

  • The few times I’ve been swept up in something huge in a crowd
  • In the moments something vast cracks me open, I feel this soft pull toward everyone and everything
  • When something strikes me as beautiful I almost always keep it to myself, even with someone right beside me
  • I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough
  • I think I’d need a grand vacation or some once-a-year spectacle to feel genuinely moved, so I just don’t

Practices that may help

  1. Seek awe in collective rituals and shared experience
    Experience something vast alongside others to amplify both the awe and the connection.
    Awe and the Small Self
  2. 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
  3. Sharing awe with others
    Experience and talk about wonder together to deepen both the awe and the bond.
    Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder
  4. 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
  5. 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.
  6. Seek out awe
    Regularly expose yourself to vast, complexity-expanding experiences — nature, art, music, ideas — that trigger awe.
    Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical
  7. Seek moral beauty as a source of awe
    Let acts of extraordinary courage, kindness, or virtue stop you the way a mountain does.
    Awe and the Small Self
  8. Awe and the Small Self
    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.
  9. Attend to moral beauty as an everyday awe source
    Notice and dwell on acts of extraordinary virtue, skill, or dedication — a common awe trigger that most people overlook.
    Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical
  10. Use documentary and large-scale art to trigger awe
    Watch content that conveys genuine vastness — deep space, ecosystems, historical scale — with full attention rather than as background.
    Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical

Related concerns

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