Coaching practices for Dacher Keltner Awe

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

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

• I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough
• The few times I’ve been swept up in something huge in a crowd
• I get this sudden lump in my throat when I see someone be quietly, extraordinarily good
• I half-believe I’m just not a wonder person because I never get anywhere grand, but every so often a song or a turn of phrase or the light hitting something just right genuinely stops me
• My weeks have gone grey and going-through-the-motions, and what I miss most is that warm, chest-swelling pull I get watching someone pour themselves into something with real heart

Practices that may help

1. 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.
2. 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
3. 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.
4. 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
5. 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
6. Build a personal catalog of micro-awe triggers
   Identify the small, reliable stimuli in your everyday environment that reliably produce a mild sense of wonder — and use them deliberately.
   Awe and Well-Being, Made Practical
7. 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
8. Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder
   An awe walk is an ordinary walk taken with attention deliberately turned outward toward things vast or wondrous — sky, scale, intricacy, beauty. Doing so reliably shrinks self-focus and lifts mood in controlled studies; the effects are real but modest and depend on actually directing attention outward rather than walking lost in thought.
9. Seek out awe
   Regularly expose yourself to vast, complexity-expanding experiences — nature, art, music, ideas — that trigger awe.
   Building Positive Emotions, Made Practical
10. Use awe to expand your felt sense of time
    An awe experience reliably makes time feel more abundant — use it before a rushed, pressured day.
    Awe and the Small Self

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