Feeling Disconnected at Work? Reconnect With Wonder

Humans learn early on to efface our own needs and experiences to win the approval of others. It’s a defense mechanism from childhood, the humanistic psychologist Scott Barry Kaufman has pointed out, and the resulting disconnect can have real psychological consequences.

This is especially true in the workplace. For most of us, the bulk of our waking hours is spent at work. Driven by the competing needs and expectations of bosses, coworkers, and clients, we can quickly lose touch with our own experiences — and with our full, best selves — leading to burnout, dissociation, and discontent. Stanford researchers found that workplace stress contributes to at least 120,000 deaths a year and costs up to $190 billion in health care expenses.

You might be experiencing this disconnect from your work. Maybe you’re even edging into the territory of burnout. One counter-intuitive yet evidence-based antidote, I would suggest, is to deliberately reconnect with your own experiences by cultivating a practice of wonder.

How wonder reconnects you to work

Have you ever found yourself in a flow state at work, allowing your curiosity to follow threads in pursuit of solving a problem? Have you felt the spark of excitement when the pieces click into place while brainstorming with coworkers? This is what happens when you open yourself up to wonder.

Experiences of wonder can improve your ability to solve problems by expanding your mental models and encouraging new ways of thinking. As researchers at UC Berkeley found, when we have an awe-inspiring experience, it forces us to revise previously held beliefs or ideas. This process of accommodating new experiences of awe keeps our minds agile and creative.

Opening ourselves to wonder and awe can also improve our relationships with our coworkers. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum of the University of Chicago suggests that wonder leads to compassion and love, suspending our judgment and opening us up to connect with others. When we find wonder in the space between us, it improves our capacity for empathy and allows us to authentically connect with others in our work, which in turn deepens our collective potential.

At the same time, it reduces our own sense of ego, which can often get in the way of doing our best work. In a series of six studies, researchers found that experiencing awe causes individuals to speak of and draw themselves smaller than before the experience and that when our sense of self is diminished we’re more engaged in the collective good.

Building wonder into the workday

Wonder fosters the curiosity that engages you in your work and renews your energy. Wonder fuels the creativity that helps you think outside the box. And wonder builds connections between yourself and your coworkers. Begin cultivating that sense of wonder at work by building “wonder interventions” into your workday.

Pay special attention to the times when you’re feeling closed down, fatigued, hungry, and reactive. That’s a signal that your frontal cortex has been overtaxed, and you need to stop focusing.

Taking breaks to relax throughout the day has been linked to greater concentration and lower levels of strain and fatigue. But rather than reaching for your phone, try a wonder intervention to help you actively unfocus, recharge, and return to your task as your best self.

Wonder Walk. Recharge with a 10-minute “wonder walk.” Head outdoors without a destination, absorbing the sensations around you and finding delight in noticing mundane details.

Pause-Gaze-Praise. On your wonder walk, or even while you’re sitting at your desk, take 10 breaths to pause. Look away from what you’re focusing on, letting your gaze fall upon something ordinary. Simply let your eyes soften and receive the thing without thinking about it. Then, take a moment to formulate a few words of praise for that object.

Reflective intervention. Pause, write down, and share three highlights from the day. They could be small, seemingly marginal moments, such as a sensory detail, or something someone said that shifted something for you. This is a good practice to have at the end of the workday.

Improving team connection through wonder interventions

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Wonder interventions are a powerful tool for strengthening alignment, collaboration, and productivity within a team. Particularly now, when so many of us are working remotely.

In my work with teams, one entry point is for us to design three structured wonder interventions throughout the day, ending with the reflective intervention. When teammates participate in wonder interventions at the same time, it fosters communication and connection that transcends the level of work duties and conflict.

Reflection and sharing such moments are important. Much of the data we’ve gathered shows that when participants in team experiences and Wonder Labs take time to think back to such experiences, they derive more meaning from their work and from their days than only focusing on task completion and goal achievement.

When teams share such experiences, they also make it a normal part of the workplace culture.

Taking even 10 minutes to experience wonder each day helps each of us to reconnect with our work and be our best — for our own sake, and for those of our coworkers.