Coaching practices for Everyday Awe

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

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

  • I walk every day but it’s either head-down exercise or me chewing on my problems the whole way, and I get back having noticed nothing
  • 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
  • I keep thinking wonder is something that only happens at a mountain or a grand canyon, so I save it for some trip I never take
  • I think I’d need a grand vacation or some once-a-year spectacle to feel genuinely moved, so I just don’t
  • I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough

Practices that may help

  1. The awe walk
    Take a regular walk with attention deliberately turned outward toward the vast and the wondrous.
    Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder
  2. 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
  3. Micro-awe in the ordinary
    Find wonder in small, intricate things when you cannot get to a grand vista.
    Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder
  4. Seek out awe
    Regularly expose yourself to vast, complexity-expanding experiences — nature, art, music, ideas — that trigger awe.
    Building Positive Emotions, 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 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
  7. 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.
  8. 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
  9. 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
  10. Audit your life for access to vastness
    Map your environment for how much genuine vastness it contains — and adjust it.
    Awe and the Small Self

Related concerns

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