Self-Awe: 10 Evidence-Based Coaching Practices
Describe almost anything you are working through and IX Coach finds the practices whose real-world fit is closest. For Self-Awe, these are the strongest matches in the current practice library.
About 2 minutes
Try it here: list three things that fill you with awe
Write down a few things, big or small, that make you feel part of something larger than yourself.
What fills you with a sense of awe?
Practices that may help
- 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. - 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 - 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 - Deliberately invoke the small-self shift
Seek an encounter with something genuinely vast to let your personal concerns be re-proportioned.
Awe and the Small Self - 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 - 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 - 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. - Courting the small self
Seek experiences that make you feel small in a good way — and notice the relief in it.
Awe Walks, and the Science of Wonder - 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 - Cultivate oceanic or cosmic feeling through awe practices
Regularly seek encounters with what is vast, ancient, or radically beyond human scale.
Maslow’s Self-Transcendence, Made Practical
Does this sound like the set of challenges you might be facing?
- In the moments something vast cracks me open, I feel this soft pull toward everyone and everything
- I feel small and stuck inside my own head, looping on my own problems, and I want something vast enough
- My own problems have swollen up to fill my entire world and I can’t see past them
- For a little while right after something takes my breath away, the stuff I’d been stressing about genuinely feels smaller and farther off
- The few times I’ve been swept up in something huge in a crowd
Related concerns
- Feeling Small In A Big World
Seek an encounter with something genuinely vast to let your personal concerns be re-proportioned.
Deliberately invoke the small-self shift
- Small Self Awe
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 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.
- 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 And The Small Self When Overwhelmed
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 And The Small Self With Friends
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.
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