Take a square look at the crises of our day, and it’s all too easy to feel overwhelmed, unsettled, even despondent.
Look away—to all that is still good, still beautiful, still abundant and wondrous in life—and you may feel like you’re turning a blind eye to today’s harsh realities.
The great challenge (especially for those who want to help create a better world) is learning how to hold it all: the good and the bad, the kindness and the cruelty, the hopeful and the horrific.
Here, the practice of savoring is an increasingly relevant, beneficial, and accessible gateway whose time has come.
Savoring, put simply, is about enhancing or extending positive experiences through moments of gratitude, awe, wonder, reflection, or a simple pause.
But if that sounds a tad naïve in these fast-changing, crisis-filled times, consider this:
Decades of research show that savoring leads to better physical health, improved emotional well-being, and more creative solutions.
A study published by the American Psychological Association in 2023 found that savoring helps people navigate uncertainty, and that an awareness of uncertainty may even make us more prone to savoring.
Savoring can also make the critical difference between leaders and teams that are depleted or those that are energized, focused, and aligned.
Extreme uncertainty, rapid change, and ongoing crises, after all, lead to the erosion of clarity, grounding, and agency. Savoring steps in to help strengthen the capacity to restore calm, regain clarity, and embrace agency.
Applying these skills to the challenges of our day is the focus of my Savor the World workshops. But I’m also fortunate to know some leaders who naturally manifest it.
To learn more about how a Savoring the World convening could help strengthen calm, clarity, and agency in your organization, please reach out. I’d love to share more.
Case-in-point
Meet Sally Bolger, longtime environmental leader and executive director of the Ecological Workforce Initiative.
I met Sally 13 years ago at a climate communications conference I was facilitating. We encountered each other on a break and instantly dropped into deep conversation—one of many we would continue to have over the years.
She has always been a bright light, even amid towering obstacles. Recently, I asked her to talk with me about the role of savoring in her work and life.
We spoke about the opportunity she sees in this moment, how she practices savoring after being triggered by the news, and how savoring feeds her resilience, helping her respond constructively to challenges rather than react.
Watch a video excerpt of the conversation.
And read highlights below:
Focusing on the positive opportunity in this moment
“I think this moment is an opportunity love more and love deeper, to just step up and say what needs to be said…to speak love or from a loving place in every opportunity I have…And we come to love through attention and savoring.”
Taking a pause after being triggered by the news
“It’s about honoring the grief, witnessing it, being present to it, and not trying to necessarily do anything about it yet because that’s where I get stuck—when I get caught up in ‘I’ve got to do something.’ I try to come back and find my heart again, sing praise to the day, and walk out the door and take one grateful breath.
“We’re so individualistic and think that we’ve got to do something. But in that pause, in that breath, inspiration, spirit, and connection can come in. And then you can know you’re not alone and move on from that place.”
How practicing savoring feeds resilience, enhancing action.
“Even in my work in the world of ecological restoration, we’re restoring resilience to ecosystems, to land, to humans, so that we can recover from disturbance. So, like that, this is about coming back again and again because there are multiple disturbances a day.
“It may take me longer to get there when I’m particularly spun out, frustrated, or overwhelmed. But when I finally remember to go outside and notice, to just take a moment, even a moment, it settles the frenetic. And then I can access the capacity I already have.
“Just a moment of savoring clears my capacity. At the same time, I think it grows capacity. And it’s in everyone. It’s accessible. We’re always tested at the next limit, and yet: It’s what we can always come back to.”
Final thoughts
In the end—whether we identify as a leader, changemaker, parent, educator, or simply a caring citizen— savoring helps sustain us while also making us more capable of making a difference.
To learn more about how a Savoring the World convening could help strengthen calm, clarity, and agency in your organization or community, please reach out. I’d love to share more.