Changing One’s Relation with the Natural World: Awe
Dacher Keltner (2023, p. 13) writes about inspiring natural Awe. Micro-awe is to be found in a coaching session while walking through a forest or visiting an art gallery together. I was coaching someone who came to my home in Maine. We walked out to the rocky shore of the Atlantic Ocean (Land’s End) and did some powerful coaching at this awe-some location. The Awe provides an Interlude for the generation of both content and affective state. For instance, at the content level, I might ask my coaching client to consider: “How does the power of this wave or this surge of water relate to a moment in your own life when you felt powerful?” “These trees are all interconnected and support one another through good and bad times. How might you build and maintain a similarly supportive ‘human forest’ in your organization?”
At the affective level, I might ask my client to take a deep breath (high levels of oxygen at the edge of the ocean or in a deep forest) and relax. We find a painting or statue that impacts my client. And then we pause to see what this impact produces (coming from my client’s unconscious life). I know, personally, that the Winged Victory of Samothrace, located at the Louvre in Paris, had a strong emotional impact on me, as did the nave of the cathedral in Salisbury, England, and the labyrinth located in the nave at San Francisco’s Grace Cathedral. I found many important images and themes emerging during my time at the Louvre and both the Salisbury and Grace Cathedrals. I wish I were accompanied by a coach on these three occasions. We could have sat outside this museum and majestic religious structure to process what had occurred inside these facilities. The micro-awe becomes the basis for effective micro-coaching.
From Turbulence to Learning: The Intersection of Flow and Awe
Life on the white-water river that seems to align with our daily life experiences of the mid-21st Century can be both enthralling and terrifying. This white-water environment can provide an Interlude that is either overwhelming or filled with challenging but safe insight. As Peter Vaill has noted, a turbulent white-water environment is filled with surprises, novel problems, and ill-structured issues (messes) (Vaill, 1996, pp. 10-12). Costly and annoying issues emerge and are often recurrent (Vaill, 1996, pp.12-14). Confusion abounds (Vaill, 1996, p. 178):
“Another word for permanent white water is confusion–the problem of what to believe; whom to trust; what events, technologies, groups and organizations, and laws and traditions can serve as anchors of meaning. In the modem world, meaninglessness derives not only from an absence of sources of meaning but, ironically, also from a surfeit, a cacophony of competing meanings as offered by this or that guru, this or that ‘total system,’ this or that self-improvement program. The incredible variety of competing sources of potential meaning acts back on our consciousness, adding to the confusion we feel. We often hear criticism that people tend to go from one “solution” to another, to jump from bandwagon to bandwagon without ever touching solid ground.”
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