The Sunrise Effect: How Savoring Can Elevate Your Leadership Game
As go-to methods to increase positivity and wellbeing, mindfulness and gratitude are the rage these days. Savoring is another one of these practices—simple, pleasant, and surprisingly effective. A great addition to an effective leader’s toolbox.
Image by Boonyachoat
I'm known to interrupt conversations on the way to drop my daughter off at school in the morning whenever the sky turns that astonishing pink and orange of sunrise. In April, when the magnolias bloom, I slow down every time I drove by, pointing them out to anyone in the car, sometimes stopping altogether to admire them.
This practice of focusing and deeply feeling the positive emotions of a pleasant experience has a name: savoring. It involves becoming intensely aware of the experience, slowing down, and making it last. Then it becomes easier to bring these emotions back whenever you want.
The research says it can improve overall wellbeing, relationships, and quality of life. It’s win-win.
What is Savoring?
According to University of Arizona researcher Maggie Pitts, "Savoring is prolonging, extending and lingering in a positive or pleasant feeling. First, you feel something pleasant, then you feel pleasant about feeling pleasant, and that is where savoring comes in. It's not just feeling good; it's feeling good about feeling good, and then trying to trap that feeling."
In Savoring: A New Model of Positive Experience, Fred B. Bryant and Joseph Veroff describe it as the counterpart to coping, which involves dealing with life’s negative experiences.
Bryant and Veroff define different kinds of savoring:
Luxuriating, which is when we enhance the feelings of pleasure.
Marveling, which is linked to awe, experiences that inspire us to stop and take notice.
Basking, which prolonging feelings of accomplishment, pride, and self congratulations.
Thanksgiving, which is all about being grateful for what is good (more on that here).
Savoring can also be describe by its timeframe:
Reminiscing is savoring the past.
Anticipating is savoring the future.
It can be deliberate or spontaneous. We can savor an experience or a conversation. We love to savor mysteries, because we try to give them meaning which intensifies our focus and emotional response. We are particularly good at savoring food, when we share it with good company and make time for it.
And I've found there is a particular kind of savoring that comes from not doing something for a long time and then doing it again. And it helps to have a mindfulness practice.
How to Increase Savoring
I like to think of savoring not as a single act, but as a practice. Here are a few ways to savor more.
Designing a savorous environment. We can add cues that encourage savoring, create spaces to focus, and eliminate distractions, which kill savoring.
Delaying pleasure. When we delay, first of all, we can savor the anticipation, and if we put it after after a stressful or less pleasant moment, we can enhance the experience by way of the contrast.
Dragging out an experience. Savoring takes time.
Planning and setting limits. Like anything else, if it's not on the schedule it doesn't get done, so it could help to set aside undisturbed time for savoring.
Sharing with others. We're naturally gregarious when it comes to savoring. It can be contagious and builds bonds.
Savoring complexity. The more stimuli we have to process, the longer the experience will enthrall us. We can also try to focus on the minute details to recall them later for reminiscing.
Raising ephemeral awareness. The more we think about how fleeting and/or rare an event is, the more we actually savor it.
Engaging the senses. When we pay particular attention to the sensory experience we can increase our experience of savoring.
Adding physical expressions of positivity. Smiling, laughing, dancing will feed into the enjoyment loop.
What Not to Do
Overwhelm sucks up our ability to savor. You actually need to have the cognitive juice to notice that something pleasant is occurring.
Thinking in "should be doing" terms kills savoring too. If you need an excuse to savor, know that enjoying short-term pleasurable activities that have zero connection to long-term goals contributes to a happy life.
Take Aways
When I gave myself permission to savor the minute details of life, it literally changed my daily level of happiness. Savoring seeped in on and eventually overtook all that focus on the shit that had happened or was happening. I'll never go back. As naive as it sounds, I aspire to this lightness of being daily, a state where beauty springs from the cracks, where flavors explode, where the unexpected is a source of joy, and where imperfections hold the seed of excellence.