#017 Hidden Potential – how can we all achieve greater wellbeing?

How often have you said that you are too busy to meditate/go to yoga/prepare a healthy meal/go for a walk after dinner with a friend? And because of kids/work/ageing parents/study/life etc you are all a bit tapped out at the moment?

I love the end of the year - the promise of summer (despite Canberra careening between being super hot or 3 degrees in the morning), Christmas holidays with family and friends, and looking forward to time to slow down. 

But before the slow down comes the speed up.

We need to finish off work projects, organise Christmas, catch up with people ONE more time before the end of the year – the list is endless. 

I am already feeling it. The crunch of looming deadlines, work travel, Christmas parties (for me, for my husband, for kids), Christmas shopping, 2023 photo books, working out holiday season plans, working out where kids go over school holidays. I could go on and on. Maybe you are feeling your anxiety levels spike just reading this (sorry if I added things to your list!).

The time crunch and resulting anxiety spikes can have implications for our wellbeing. While we are all super busy, I am going to ask you to do one more thing before the December crazies set in. This month, I want you to think about how you approached your wellbeing this year. 

Adam Grant, an organisational psychologist, in his latest book Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things, explores the idea that the character skills we develop throughout our lives have a much greater impact on our potential, than for instance how book smart or intelligent we might be.

It got me thinking about our potential for greater individual and collective wellbeing.

Grant argues that character skills can propel us to achieve greater things. Character is not the same as personality though:

“Personality is your predisposition – your basic instincts for how to think, feel, and act. Character is your capacity to prioritise your values over your instincts.”

Grant identifies 3 different character skills that could help unlock hidden potential (take his quiz to learn more):

·      Discomfort seeker: you love to embrace the awkwardness of learning. You don’t wait until you feel ready to take on a new challenge – otherwise you might not pursue it at all. There might not come a day where you wake up and feel suddenly prepared. You become prepared by taking the leap anyway.

·      Human sponge: you love to build your capacity to absorb and adapt. Grant argues that “Being a sponge is not only a proactive skill – it’s a prosocial skill. Done right, it’s not just about soaking up nutrients that help us to grow. It’s also about releasing nutrients to help others grow.

·      Imperfectionists find the sweet spot between being flawed and flawless. Perfectionism prevents us from seeing big problems and limits us to mastering a narrow set of skills. But we need to remember that the purpose of reviewing our mistakes isn’t to shame our past self, it’s to educate our future self.

Reading through the descriptions and examples of these different character skills in Grant’s book made me think about how we could all unlock our hidden potential for greater wellbeing. 

When we avoid discomfort, we are much less likely to try new things, for fear of looking silly or getting it wrong. There have been so many occasions in my life where I have thought, I do NOT want to do that because I will look like an idiot (dance class, step class, learning a language, public speaking, learning to ride a motorbike, teaching yoga – just to name a few of my personal favourites!). But my willingness to embrace discomfort, and recalling great advice that someone wise gave me long ago – no one will be looking at you, they will be too busy worrying about what they look like, has meant that I have tried all of the above activities. The first time definitely involved getting bits wrong, resulted in lots of blushing, and me swearing never again – but my aspiration to improve kept me going back.

When we think about wellbeing, we are often a little reluctant to try new things. Or we try something once and dismiss it, deciding that we can’t do it. I have heard “I can’t touch my toes so I can’t do yoga” or “I can’t meditate because I have too much going on in my mind” or “I can’t cook” so many times I have lost count.

Do you approach your wellbeing through a comfort or discomfort lens? Do you do the same things all the time, or are you willing to experiment?

Human sponges love to seek out information. Improving depends not on the quantity of information that you seek out, but the quality of the information you take in.

There is no lack of information about wellness and wellbeing. Google ‘wellness’ and you can tap into 3,560,000,000 sources of information. There are 68.1 million posts on Instagram that include #wellness.

The ‘wellness’ industry has been criticised in the media this year for preying on the vulnerable and being overly consumerist. Earlier this month, the Guardian took aim at the $4.4 trillion dollar wellness industry, and highlighted that we have been led to believe we can buy our way to wellbeing But according to one well-trafficked statistic, the social determinants of health – factors like air quality, domestic safety, community support and education access – account for as much as 80 per cent of health outcomes. But these realities are neatly erased from most wellness marketing.

Where do you get your information on wellbeing? And how much of it is trying to convince you to buy something?

I love Grant’s idea of embracing imperfection to enhance our potential. 

I think we often can fall victim to seeking perfectionism in attempts to boost wellbeing. How often have you thought ‘It’s too noisy to meditate/read/journal, so I will wait until it’s quiet’. Or ‘I don’t have an hour to exercise, so what’s the point?’. Too often we will wait for the perfect conditions to do something rather than just cracking on and doing our best with what we have. Embracing the concept of wabi sabi means honouring the beauty in imperfection, accepting that flaws are inevitable, and recognising that flaws don’t stop the potential for something to be a sublime experience.

Have you approached your wellbeing with a bit of wabi sabi this year – or are you still waiting for the perfect moment to roll out your yoga mat and practice for a full 90 minutes? Or for your mediation zafu to arrive in the post, so you will be able to sit ‘properly’? [note: I am guilty of both of the above!]

If you are keen to think about your approach to wellbeing this year (and I am not trying to sell you anything!), I would encourage to think about how you chose activities and ways to learn about wellbeing – as well as your approach to prioritising these.

Your quick audit might reveal some things you could focus on next year – like doing something new (or with new people), seeking out new sources of quality information on wellbeing, or just remembering to start where you are at - it doesn’t need to look perfect.

Let me know in the comments below what you are going to try out!

If you are keen to learn more:

Book: Adam Grant Hidden Potential: The Science of Achieving Greater Things

Quiz: Discovering your hidden potential

Podcast: Ten Per Cent Happier (Adam Grant talking about the ideas with Dan Harris)

Work/life – Unlocking hidden potential with Malcolm Gladwell

Be well,

Alicia