There was so much in this experience to help restore energy and renew possibility: The place (Rancho la Puerta in Baja California, Mexico). The food (fresh, delicious, and plentiful). The activities (physical, spiritual, and educational).

But above all, there were the people at this gathering hosted by the brilliant Ronda Carnegie and Pat Mitchell, cofounders of Project Dandelion, a women-led global campaign for climate justice.

You couldn’t miss Pat. She was the one moving through the week’s events like a bright, beautiful apparition of grace and hope.

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The Secret Sauce of a Powerhouse

The first woman president of PBS, Pat Mitchell is the editorial director of TEDWomen, an Emmy-winning producer, and chair of the Sundance Institute and Women’s Media Center Boards, among other roles.

She is also lovely. She wears beautiful yellow dresses (and often hats). She has Georgia charm and an infectious smile, and is a master at community building and at the transformative power of storytelling.

But what intrigued me most is that she navigates challenges with grace. So, I was delighted she recently agreed to a conversation about the art of leading through times such as these.

Below are highlights, lightly edited for brevity. They include insights from her lifetime of community-building and leadership—on finding strength in connection, storytelling as a tool for change, and what savoring the world does for her.

(You can also listen to the full conversation here.)

Leading with grace. I love the concept of navigating challenges with grace, and I really hope I can do that and learn more about it every day.

Strength in connection. I get my strength from other women, and that’s why convening other women, while being in community with other women leaders, is so essential to my sense of well-being and hope, but it is also, if you will, a testament to how change happens.

Storytelling as a tool for change. Storytelling is our biggest tool for change, and that’s not just about change in the world; it’s about change in ourselves. When we bring women together, one of the first things we do is share our personal stories. That gives us a common ground, a place to start, no matter how distant our life journeys have been. Once the personal stories are told, the other stories start to emerge: experiences that have defined our work, helped us get over a bad time, or helped us achieve a goal. And then, we start to share the learning—and out of that, absolutely every time comes this deep, deep connection. That connection is what sustains us after we leave.

The value of an “OG” perspective. I’ve always had this need to do something to help ‘save the world, and you have too, clearly, and it can start to feel overwhelming when you’re living in times like this one. I sometimes despair at having to go make those same arguments for reproductive rights, for women’s leadership. But we remember when things got better. And what’s on my mind now is being one of the OG—the “Old Guard”—a term I learned from my grandchildren. I’ve been in this fight for decades, and being able to do that with energy, passion, faith, and belief that we are going to make progress does keep me going.

On young people and the need to reclaim hope. The younger generation desperately needs to reclaim hope, and I’m seeing it slowly happen. I’ve seen this generation embracing nature, wanting more time to walk among the trees, and gaining a better understanding of the connection between mental and emotional well-being and the pleasures of this bountiful Earth. And since they’re reclaiming that, or maybe seeing it for the first time, I think it’s restoring their spirits to believe that they can and must make a difference.

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To retreat is not to retreat. When I first told Mary Robinson (also a cofounder of Project Dandelion) that I was going to do the retreat in Mexico and I wanted her to come, she said, “I do not do retreats.” And I thought, of course not. She’s been the president of a country. She was a U.N. High Commissioner and former Chair of The Elders. Of course, she didn’t think there was time for or need for a retreat.

Now I realize “retreat” is the wrong word. It’s really a time of restoration because we are not retreating from the world. We are restoring ourselves to return to the world better prepared, better rested, more optimistic and hopeful, because we have had this experience of community.

Savoring the world.

Joy and problem-solving. In the new film about His Holiness the Dalai Lama (The Wisdom of Happiness), he argues that we can’t address what needs to be addressed without much more compassion and kindness, because that will give us joy. And if you’re feeling joy about what you’re doing, you’re not going to get burned out, get down and depressed, or feel overwhelmed.

Daily practices. I am trying to learn to meditate. I’m pretty much a failure so far. But I am trying because I think it’s good for me. I love to dance. If I can put on music and move, that will quickly get me from a burned-out moment to a joyful one. I’m taking singing lessons. I’m trying to do the things, as you suggest, that are about savoring life and the world a bit more, and it is when I tap into those practices that I do feel more resilient for the work. There’s no question I do.

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Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming Savor the World and coauthor of Ecoliterate with Daniel Goleman. She offers talks, workshops, and advisory relationships that support the work of mission-driven organizations.

Please reach out if you’d like to learn more—or receive the new Savor the World guide.

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It’s not that I’ve entirely lost connection to my love of life. Not by a long shot.

It has, however, too often been overshadowed by the impact of events in our world. Anger at the growing cruelty, greed, and injustice. Heartbreak over the multiplying islands of suffering. Worry about what it all means for the future. Grief over what has already been lost: in nature, community, and the principles of equality.

And perhaps above all, my love of life has been overshadowed by a deep feeling of inadequacy about my capacity to do enough—or much—about what is happening.

All this, I know, places me in a very privileged category. What has caused me distress is the emotional impact of what is unfolding in our larger world, not direct physical, legal, or financial impacts that are, for millions, a matter of survival.

When the Heaviness of the World Weighs Us Down

Yet, what happens when we—by which I mean those outside war zones and most in a position to make a difference—lose our light in dark times? What is the impact on our lives, our children’s lives, and our work on behalf of the health and well-being of the world?

The unfortunate truth is that we lose our capacity for clarity, grounding, authentic hopefulness, a sense of possibility, and the belief that we can make a difference—all qualities needed to drive positive change.

This is not, of course, to say that we can or should paper over our anger, heartbreak, or worry. That would be unrealistic and unwise. They are natural feelings in the face of what we are witnessing at this strange time in history.

And yet, to allow our vitality to be crushed by the heaviness of the world is also unwise and unhelpful.

Finding Something Truly Big Enough to Counter the Darkness and Depletion

This is one reason I have an ever-growing conviction that it is vital to embrace and strengthen our love of life right now—right amid all the messiness and tragedies of this moment. It is vital not only for us as individuals but for organizations doing critical mission-driven work.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy reported last week that nearly 90 percent of nonprofit leaders are worried about burnout. Given the torrent of challenges today, this is not surprising. Still, nearly 90 percent is extraordinary, especially when one considers what burnout leads to.

There are, of course, the direct financial costs. Employee disengagement, overextension, ineffectiveness, and burnout cost employers $3,999 to $10,824 per employee per year, according to a study published last year in the American Journal of Preventive Medicine.

There are also the added impacts on people and the missions themselves, given that those of us who are burned out or at risk of burnout are not functioning at full capacity—and human capacity is the most basic need we have in the face of today’s many towering challenges.

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A Container to Hold and Sustain Us

Which brings me back to falling in love with life again.

During one particularly tough period in my life, I found myself grieving three deeply personal things: the end of my mother’s life, the end of my marriage, and the end of my belief that we would stop climate change from coming (which felt deeply personal because I saw it as so entwined with my children’s future).

I took myself away one day to a hillside overlooking the Pacific Ocean, and there I sat alone amid the tall grasses, trying to write my way to some idea of how to move forward.

The pages before me remained blank.

But eventually, I noticed children playing and dogs running on the beach below. Birds soaring overhead. Beautiful wispy clouds being blown across the sky. Waves thunderously crashing on the shore. The sun warming my back.

And suddenly, for that instant, I saw life as bigger than I had been picturing it, and I saw that so much of it was still good.

After many twists and turns, this led to my current work on changing the narrative from “Saving the World” to “Savoring the World.” I don’t mean this as a replacement for doing everything we can to safeguard the people, places, and principles we love.

Rather, I see it as a much-needed container for that work. Something big enough to hold and sustain us in these tough times. And as our birthright, if you will—something that I do not want to miss out on, for any reason.

Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming Savor the World and coauthor of Ecoliterate with Daniel Goleman. She offers talks, workshops, and advisory relationships that support the work of mission-driven organizations.

Please reach out if you’d like to learn more—or receive the new Savor the World guide.

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These often felt like competing truths—not truths that could co-exist.

But what I have come to learn is that the art in living through complex times like these is in making space to hold it all. The good, the bad, and everything in between.

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Miranda Massie, a former civil rights attorney and Founder and Director of The Climate Museum, understands this well. The museum, which is currently scaling up to a permanent location, has already been transforming visitors through temporary installations staged around New York City.

“It’s just magical to have somebody come in freaked out about climate and walk out 45 minutes later with a completely different energy: one of possibility, agency, and a determination to lean into their own circle of trust, influence, and connection,” she says.

The key is not suppressing any of it: the tough emotions or the uplifting ones. And not ignoring positive uncertainties amid so many negative ones.

“It’s painful to confront the truth of what’s happening to people, to the web of life, and to social structures,” Massie says. “If we can’t counterbalance that with cherishing what’s precious and a vision of positive futures, it’s hard to gather the emotional wherewithal to do this work on a day-by-day basis.”

[Listen to the whole conversation here. Read highlights below.]

Listen on YouTube.

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Holding Negative and Positive Emotions

Embracing the truth of one’s emotions is central to moving forward.

For Massie, that means not suppressing what is hard about facing the climate (or arguably, any) challenge—not turning away out of a sense of bitterness, even though there is plenty to be angry about.

Susan David, whose research on emotional agility has influenced leaders and organizations worldwide, found that pushing away difficult feelings doesn’t protect us. To the contrary, it undermines our resilience and our capacity to perform.

“It’s important to find ways to focus on the impact that you’re having and to savor what a gift it is to be able to help somebody find their footing and feel like more of an agent of positive change,” Massie says. “It can get you through a lot of grant rejections and broken pipes and what-have-you.”

Moreover, she adds, “if you can hold all that in yourself, and be conscious of creating space for it for other people, then you really are meeting people where they are and helping them find their own agency.”

The power is in doing both, not one at the expense of the other.

Envisioning Negative and Positive Uncertainties

If you listen to the recording of this conversation, you’ll get a sense of how much I enjoyed it. But if I had to choose one point that stayed with me the most, it is the power of envisioning not only negative uncertainties but also positive ones.

“I see climate change as completely bound up with the world economic system and as completely bound up, therefore, with questions of justice,” says Massie, “and how we can create futures that are regenerative, rebuild those relationships, and stave off the worst of climate change.”

“Any of that and all of that,” she adds, “can sound completely pie-in-the-sky, until you stop and consider how so many extraordinary events in world history would have been unthinkable even 10 seconds before they happened.”

Massie is referring to the hindsight bias, which the psychologist Daniel Kahneman explored in Thinking, Fast and Slow. Once an unlikely event occurs—David slaying Goliath, the Berlin Wall falling, the U.S. Supreme Court upholding same-sex marriage—it seems inevitable, even though we may have been unable to imagine it before.

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A 10-Second Practice: Envision a Better World

I asked Massie what simple practice she uses to sustain herself in tough times.

“When I’m doing well,” she says, “I imagine one of millions of safe and just futures that can lie ahead, and I picture myself and different people I care about—sometimes people I don’t know, often people I do know—in that world.”

“In today’s world, we can’t step away from the challenges for long,” she adds. “They’re going to come knocking soon after you’re done with your 10 seconds.” But taking that time—to counterbalance them with a vision of better possibilities—will give you a new perspective on how to tackle them.

What Massie is describing, I’d suggest, is a savoring practice: the deliberate, conscious act of attending fully to what is good, or could be.

Consider asking yourself: What are you not letting yourself feel? What grief may you be holding at arm’s length? What possibility may you be dismissing as naive? And are you making space for others to explore their truth?

Because the good and the bad are not competing truths. They co-exist. And when we let them—in ourselves and with others—we become more capable of strengthening our staying power to hard, meaningful work in tough times.

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Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming Savor the World and coauthor of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman. She is the creator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps mission-driven and purpose-led leaders and organizations strengthen the capacity to advance critical missions in today’s challenging world.

Bill was everyone’s favorite uncle. Amid all the serious and sometimes grumpy adults, he was a very smart man who often played the goofball—willing to do almost anything to make others laugh.

One day, I came home from school, and my mother told me he was dead. He’d undergone heart surgery and not survived it.

The next night in the funeral home, I heard someone laughing. Rage shot through me like a geyser. Laughter seemed so disrespectful in that context. With histrionic teenage flair, I turned to see who it was and give him my best glare. It turned out it was his brother, cut from the same cloth.

I could not have known it then, but I most assuredly know it now:

Why It’s the Bedrock of Resilience

Cultivating positive experiences is “the bedrock of resilience,” Fred Bryant, Loyola University Emeritus Professor of Social Psychology, told me last week.

Bryant is known as the father of savoring, the psychological process that underlies positive experiences. He, in collaboration with the late Joseph Veroff, was the first to name it, measure it, and show it can be taught.

Sound familiar?

If you care about—and especially if you work on behalf of—the climate, democracy, equality, the economy, or peace, you have likely felt both challenged and depleted.

Gallup provides numerous glimpses into this for the population at large:

• Nearly 40 percent of people report being very worried about the state of the world, according to their 2025 State of the World’s Emotional Health report.

• Optimism slumped to a record low in the United States in 2025.

• Only one-third of workers described themselves as thriving, according to the latest State of the Global Workplace report —and engagement, says Gallup, is “on the brink.”

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What We Do When We Can’t Control Events

When bad things happen in our world, we usually first assess whether we can control those events. And if not (as feels to be the case with so many things right now), we turn to controlling our responses to them.

Maybe we try to come to a kind of acceptance. Put things in a larger context. Look at the event as a growth opportunity. Find support in connection. Or try to get away from it all through one of the many available distractions.

But these coping strategies, as Bryant observes, only tap half the universe of options available to us: namely, managing the negative side of the ledger. What they omit is the wide array of positive experiences that serve as a counterpoint, strengthening our capacity.

“Coping is a necessity in terms of leveling the playing field,” says Bryant. That is, it lifts us from an inability to function to a kind of baseline. But it’s not enough to help us get above the line and perform or live at our best. For that, we must also give the positive its due.

Ignoring the positive, he suggests, is like only exhaling and never inhaling.

The Power of Countering the Outsized Pull of the Negative

What makes bringing the positive into the equation so important—especially in tough times—is that we’re wired to give the negative disproportionate attention, and it can easily overwhelm us.

That leads to a sense of diminished control, which research shows contributes to greater stress, lower motivation, and increased disengagement.

In contrast, increasing our sense of control over our responses tends to lower anxiety and depression, improve stress regulation, and fuel persistence and improved problem-solving—in short, the staying power we need to keep meeting today’s challenges.

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The Proof Is in the Brain Scans

“I’m working now on the neuropsychology of this,” Bryant shared, adding that he’s not a neuroscientist but is collaborating with some of the best in the world.

“There is great data that reveals that if you show people a picture of something positive and tell them not to savor it, and then you show them that same picture a day or so later and tell them to savor it, the brain just fires up. It explodes.”

Other data, he adds, shows that setting aside times to savor positive experiences—while going through hard times—is associated with even better outcomes than under more ordinary circumstances.

Scaling Up Staying Power to Keep Advancing Good Work

My work focuses on bringing savoring practices to leaders and organizations—as the first step in a research-based framework to unlock and strengthen capacity.

Developing perspective, presence, and power to meet ongoing, outsized challenges is also essential. (Learn more here.)

But here’s one simple practice Bryant recommends that you could try today.

A Practice for Today

Here’s what Bryant suggests:

1. Set aside a fixed amount of time to worry.

2. Then set aside an equivalent amount of time to find something to savor. You can bask in accomplishment. You can luxuriate with a bar of chocolate. You can give thanks.

3. Finally, consider savoring the fact that you are someone who wants to be a positive force in a world that needs plenty of us.

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Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming Savor the World and coauthor of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence pioneer Daniel Goleman. She is the creator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps mission-driven and purpose-led leaders and organizations strengthen the capacity to advance critical missions in today’s challenging world. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out.

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When she was finally released from hospitals and treatment, she made a life-changing discovery: everything around her was more “breathtakingly wondrous” than she could have imagined.

“Having a body felt like a miracle. The appreciation I felt for people was epic. I felt grateful for most everything every day…especially the gift of time and waking up to another day,” she observed.

Over the three decades since then, she has made it her practice to live gratefully, which she describes as taking nothing for granted, especially in hard times.

I was fortunate to come to know Kristi around the writing of her book, Wake Up Grateful, and I have learned deeply from her work as an activist and former executive director of the global nonprofit, Grateful Living.

One thing I especially appreciate is that Kristi is not about “gratefulness lite.” Not by a long shot.

“Waking up grateful is not easy for me, and I’ve never had a harder time than in this past year,” she says. “This is a really challenging time for anybody who has a heart.”

It’s About Strengthening Our Staying Power

Like savoring, gratefulness cultivates what is good and, in the process, strengthens our capacity to navigate through difficulty.

In my work, this appears increasingly urgent, so mission-driven people can continue to stand for the health and well-being of people and the planet, despite the obstacles we face.

But I didn’t start out this way.

Over many years as a leader in mission-driven organizations, I believed I was among the many people trying, in one way or another, to “save the world.”

I soon discovered, however, that a “save-the-world” perspective and the burden it puts on our shoulders often lead to overwhelm, depletion, and burnout—dynamics that are increasingly common, and undermine much-needed capacity.

Eventually, I discovered a more promising route: a growing body of research about the benefits of savoring. This deliberate effort to focus as much on the good in life as the news would have us focus on the bad helps to:

• Replenish us,

• Attract others to our mission, and

• Grow interest and capacity for engaging in social good.

Living gratefully, as Kristi shared in our recent conversation, is an important part of all of that.

Six Insights for People Who Want to Keep Moving Forward

Six highlights of our conversation, slightly edited for clarity and brevity, are below, along with some suggestions for a practice you might try.

You can watch (or listen) to the conversation on YouTube.
And please consider sharing this post. It’s a conversation worth having.

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1. Mission-driven work is about love. Don’t lose touch with that.

“Those of us who have long been in the nonprofit sector, working on trying to make the world a more hospitable, equitable, beautiful place to live, are doing it because we love the world, other people, and our communities,” said Kristi.

“So, to me, the big thing is not losing touch with the love that’s the source for all of us, of the work that we do,” she added. It’s important to ask: What are the things that nourish us, and how do we stay connected to them?”

2. Neither grateful living nor savoring is about putting your head in the sand.

Kristi starts each day not with a gratitude list but with the news. Then she meditates.

“I put my attention on the news and know what’s happening in the world around me, so that I can make sense of being a human being in this time,” she said. “I have to be able to sit with what’s true.

“Then I light a candle. And I sit, I meditate, I write.”

3. None of this is easy—for anyone.

“Last month, there were a few days that I could hardly function,” Kristi said. “I was crying all the time.”

She wrote about it because, as she observed, “it’s really important for us to know those things about each other: the face that you see, that it’s all composed and put together, is not the face that’s always true.”

4. Beware of internalizing cruelty.

Reflecting on the three days when she had trouble functioning, Kristi said that she realized she had lost trust in herself.

“Right now, it feels like there’s so much distrust and so much not to trust around me. And I internalized that somehow. I was beating myself up for having a hard time. I was giving up on myself.”

That’s when she realized: If we become cruel to ourselves and to each other, cruelty wins.

5. Cultivating joy does not betray your concerns for the world.

There were times, Kristi said, when she felt she owed the world her despair as opposed to her joy. But she has come to realize it’s a both-and proposition.

“When I fill my eyes with wonder and my heart with love or joy, I do not betray my concerns for the world. I nourish my capacity to attend to them,” she said, sharing from a piece she recently wrote.

“You know, everything is about savoring for me,” Kristi added. “I never know when it will be my last meal or my last interaction with someone I love. So, I don’t take those things for granted, and I haven’t for over 32 years.”

6. Loss is a wake-up call to what’s worth savoring and saving.

Case in point: Colorado Poet Laureate and activist Andrea Gibson, who died last summer after being diagnosed with incurable ovarian cancer.

“They went from being an angry activist to an activist who focused on what was beautiful about the world and what was worth saving,” said Kristi. “Their poetry started to focus on these miraculous kinds of truths that we so take for granted about the extraordinariness of the natural world and how much we have to learn from it.”

Finally, Kristi said, “I do believe that the activism that really is most effective is an embodiment of what it is that we love and is an expression of what we love. And the opportunity of this moment, perhaps, is to really be in touch with how much we each love the world and other people and what we are committed to protecting.”

A 5-minute practice:

The next time you get triggered by a disturbing headline, consider trying this:

1. Take a few deep breaths, and rate, on a scale of 1-10, how capable you feel about contributing your gifts and goodness to the world.

2. Write down 5 things that you are truly grateful for, want to savor, and to protect for future generations.

3. Reflect again on how capable you feel and rate it. Is it more or less than before? Notice the ways in which your motivation might have shifted, and focus on this.

As Kristi says, “Unless we have an honest inventory of the things that are resources and assets in our lives—the things that we love and treasure, the things that we savor— we’re doing a disservice to the world. Only once we know what we have available to us can we do something with it.”

And so, as I like to say, we save what we savor.

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Lisa Bennett, author of the forthcoming book Savor the World, offers a “Savor the World” keynote, an invitation to flip the script on despairing times. She is also the creator and facilitator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps leaders and teams strengthen the clarity, grounding, and agency needed to keep advancing critical missions amid growing obstacles.

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.

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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.

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To fall deeply, madly in love with it again.

Perhaps we begin by remembering what first hooked us. A beloved animal. A favorite swimming hole. A glimpse of the night sky, undiluted by artificial light. The sense of being daunted by the scale of a rockface, canyon, or thunderous waterfall during a childhood trip to a national park. The friend who made us laugh. Or dreams of climbing a snowy mountaintop, trekking along a volcanic landscape, or putting on a snorkel and flippers and having our mind blown by the numberless creatures beneath the surface of the ocean.

Remembering, though, is only the beginning.

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Next comes reconnecting with what delights, moves, and stirs us now.

Today. In this very moment.

A dog’s irrepressible enthusiasm. A child’s bright, curious, innocent eyes. That human being who seems to have been placed on this planet for us to love. The kindness a stranger shows someone in need. Seeing the first Daffodils blossom in spring. A shooting star. A favorite book or painting. The moon in the dark night sky, casting the light that has been a beacon for generations before us and will continue to be one for generations to come.

To this voice, real or imagined, we must say: Of course, I know. And that is why I savor the world. Not only because it is my birthright, not only because it makes life worth living, but because savoring the world is how we save it.

Saving the world, after all, does not come from setting out to do so, with furrowed brow, a sack of worry, fear, or despair tossed over our shoulder.

That is a stressful, exhausting, and ultimately debilitating way to live.

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And how not? There is an impossibly vast chasm between the crushing challenges of our age and the limited capacity we feel as mere human beings who are briefly passing through and often distracted by needs and desires wholly unrelated to saving anything beyond ourselves.

In this, we are like ants caught under the hovering foot of a bear: a predicament that can only produce a desire to run toward the many great problems of our time, or away from them.

One road leads to burnout. The other is disengagement.

Neither helps us do what we long to do: care, do our part, give something back in return for the extraordinary gift of life we have been given to live on this inarguably majestic planet, spinning in a vast universe of universes—and do this, despite the blinding challenges of the moment.

Savoring the world also helps us and others more naturally want to safeguard it, or more reasonably, some part of it: the bees in our backyard or a distant rainforest, the spider in our bedroom, the rabbit caught in a trap, the coral reefs, the climate, the child in need.

Once upon a time, we all knew the wisdom of savoring the world. It came to us naturally. This love of life, in the context of these perilous times, drove some of us to commit, explicitly or implicitly, to “save the world.” But that is not our work to do. That puts the proverbial cart before the horse.

Our work is to savor first, trusting that what follows will lead us down a healthier path than burnout or disengagement, and it will give us staying power.

So, take it in. Tattoo it on your arm. Put it to music. Emblazon it like skywriting before your eyes for you and all to remember: We save what we savor.

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Lisa Bennett, author of the forthcoming book Savor the World, offers a “Savor the World” keynote, an invitation to flip the script on despairing times. She is also the creator and facilitator of the Staying Power workshop series, which helps leaders and teams strengthen the clarity, grounding, and agency needed to keep advancing critical missions amid growing obstacles.

Welcome to everyone who subscribed over the holidays. “Savor the World” explores the skills we need to live and work well in today’s uncertain world. I’m happy you’ve joined us.

What would happen if you stayed connected to purpose and possibility every day of this new year rather than becoming hooked by the chaotic developments swirling around us?

Imagine the added time, the improved focus, the deeper peace of mind, the healthier relationships at work and home, and the greater impact you could have—the ways in which you might better savor and safeguard the people and places you love and the issues you care about?

We are not, after all, wired to function effectively or happily when relentlessly exposed to this much change, uncertainty, and chaos.

And I am not referring only to the politics of the moment.

Recognizing and addressing how the dynamics of our day impact us

We live in an age of polycrisis—a period in which multiple, interconnected crises unfold simultaneously across the economy, society, the environment, and more.

This extraordinary and unprecedented reality has many consequences. On one level, it means that problem-solving is more challenging than ever because you can’t address one challenge without contending with the others.

As naturalist John Muir wrote, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” (Nature, as always, has a great deal to teach us about matters far beyond forests and farms.)

On a more personal level, life in a polycrisis also deeply affects—or, calling it as it is, undermines—our thinking, emotions, and actions.

Exposure to the degree of change, uncertainty, and complexity that is part and parcel of a polycrisis, after all, is a bit like medicine. In small doses, it can be beneficial, but in large doses, it can be dangerous.

More simply, the conditions of these times undermine the very capacities we need to rise to them. How often do you feel confused, overwhelmed, and doubtful about whether your actions will make a difference? I feel those things at least 204 times a day.

These are not personal or professional failings. They are natural consequences of the environment we’re navigating. Walk into stormy seas, and you will be thrown.

One step at a time, beginning with clarity

Living and working well amid the chaos of our times requires cultivating the skills of perspective, presence, and power that help us both rise above and stay grounded. Or loosely, in the words of the late Jane Goodall, that we develop “roots and shoots”.

This is no small task, given that most of us were not taught to navigate extreme change, uncertainty, and crises in school or anywhere else. Yet, as with all things, we must begin somewhere and take it one step at a time.

A good place to start is to focus on clarity—what helps you achieve it and what makes it seem impossibly out of reach.

Clarity, it bears saying, is not the same thing as certainty. We often long for certainty because it helps us feel we have a foothold on things beyond our reach. But plenty of people achieve, even overflow with certainty, and are dead wrong. Life is uncertain, which is something the wise tend to remember.

Clarity, on the other hand, is closer than you think. As one of the most important foundations of good decision-making, effective communication, and a purposeful life, it also does not steer us wrong.

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3 helpful insights into clarity

Many thinkers have long weighed in on the topic of clarity. In emphasizing the importance of clarity in communication, Aristotle urged precise language, orderly thinking, and knowing one's audience.

Hannah Arendt, the great political philosopher and expert on totalitarianism, observed that clarity does not come merely from exposure to information but from our own judgment about what we observe. In her words, “Judging is one of the most important activities in which this sharing-the-world-with-others comes to pass.”

And Karl E. Weick, the organizational theorist who popularized sensemaking, suggested that clarity emerges from action, or retrospectively.

My favorite insight into clarity stems from the Buddhist teaching that the mind is inherently clear. Clarity is not a capacity that must be developed but, rather, like Michelangelo’s approach to creating sculpture—chipping away what is unnecessary to reveal the angel within—clarity emerges when we remove the obstacles to it.

Or, as Pema Chödrön so beautifully put it:

In other words, clarity is the backdrop, as present and vast as the blue sky. It just becomes blocked at times by clouds—all those many things that clamor for our attention that we cannot possibly keep up with, let alone make sense of.

What is up to us is deciding what to let pass, like clouds blown by the wind, so we can access enough clarity to know where to focus our light.

One of those clouds, I would suggest, is the story we are telling about our world and our role in it now. But that’s the subject of next week’s newsletter.

P.S. Big Think published a brief piece of mine last month on savoring as a leadership capacity. If you’re interested, you can find it here.

Lisa Bennett is the author of the forthcoming book Savor the World and co-author of Ecoliterate with emotional intelligence expert Daniel Goleman. She offers a keynote talk and workshop series that helps leaders and teams develop the skills of perspective, presence, and power needed to address the outsized challenges of our times.

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There’s a question I’ve been chasing for years—for decades, in truth.

In its simplest form, it is: How are we to live now, knowing what we know about the challenging state of the world, without succumbing to despair on the one hand or denial on the other?

More personally, it’s this: How can I be a good mom, a good citizen, a good human being who responds in some way to the crises of our time and still lives a joyful life?

I’ve spoken about this with hundreds of people, experts and nonexperts alike. And I’ve learned a great deal.

Still, it nags at me.

Then, last week, the day before Thanksgiving, I joined what was called a “tea hangout with monastics.” It was part of “Zen and the Art of Saving the Planet”, an online course I’ve been taking through Plum Village, the monastery in the south of France, founded by Thich Nhat Hanh.

I must admit that I am a bit of a fan girl for the monks and nuns of Plum Village. Their kindness and wisdom—qualities seemingly so absent from life now—run deep.

So, though I generally have no problem asking questions of most people, famous or not, I felt shy.

Still, this was too special an opportunity to pass up. I waited for a few others to raise their virtual hands so I would not be first, then I raised mine. A few seconds later, a message popped up on my screen. “The host is inviting you to unmute.”

Somehow, I was suddenly on Zoom, face-to-face with three Buddhist monks in the south of France.

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I began by saying that I’d had high expectations for the course we were taking, but it had far exceeded them. Then I got to it.

I said I’d been focused on climate change for 20-odd years, ever since I realized it was about my children’s future.

Yet, I shared, I rarely could stay fully present with the experience, which I was learning was the goal of mindfulness. The feelings were so powerful that I routinely catapulted into the drive to do something, even though I knew that what I could do was wildly inadequate to what I wanted to do, and what I knew needed to be done.

It all felt quite contrary to the goal of mindful presence.

Brother Đức Phổ, a monk from the Netherlands, responded.

Dear Lisa, he began, Thank you for being a mother, and thank you for responding to climate change. Both are about caring.

Already, I felt myself begin to melt.

Although I do not have children, he continued, I have nieces and nephews, and I believe that what young people need is understanding, compassion, and models of resilience that can help them navigate difficulties now and in the future.

So that, he said, was his intention when he was with them: to be a model of how one navigates difficulty.

Brother Đức Phổ also reflected on his own mother and grandmother, saying that they, too, must have had worries about the future, yet they couldn’t know then what life would be like now—as we, too, can’t know what life will be like in a generation from now.

Uncertainty is a certainty.

Yes, he acknowledged, things may look grim. But we still don’t truly know what the future holds. We can’t.

We can, however, model compassion and resilience, model the qualities that can help others navigate difficulties.

Time will tell. But in this moment, I think, that is as good an answer to my unanswerable question as I’ve ever heard.

Lisa Bennett is an author, speaker, and coach who offers a Staying Power workshop series and talk based on her next book, Savor the World. If you’d like to know more, please connect.

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Sometime during this year of searching for answers to the question so many of us are asking—What are we to do in the face of all the suffering and injustices happening in our wondrous world? —I heard an anecdote I haven’t been able to shake.

It was about Tibetan monks imprisoned in China and viciously beaten by their captors. Their greatest fear, the story went, was not that they would die in prison or never enjoy freedom again.

It was that they would lose their humanity. That they would come to hate their captors.

For a long while, I couldn’t understand why this story had such a hold on me. On the surface, it was, of course, remarkable, and an uncomfortable reminder of how far I am from possessing anything approaching that level of integrity and equanimity.

Yet, I thought, I should be able to let that go—not, after all, being Tibetan or a monk.

Still, it stayed with me, needling me, as did several teachers who I heard speak about what is for many of us a parallel challenge: How not to hate the people responsible today for growing cruelty, suffering, injustices, and the backward momentum on critically important issues like climate change.

Part of me felt irritated every time I heard someone talk about this. Some not-so-quiet voice in me screamed, but they are the ones inflicting so much harm! Why should we take our precious time to heal our disdain? To calm our most assuredly merited outrage?

Intellectually, I knew that my emotional turmoil did me or anyone else little good. Quite the contrary, it made me feel off kilter, spun out, exhausted, and miserable.

I didn’t want to read the news, but I also wasn’t comfortable ignoring it. So, I developed a habit of looking at it askance, more briefly, more guarded—through the lens of Tina Brown’s wonderfully named Substack, Fresh Hell.

It didn’t help much.

Enter Tara Brach

Then I participated in a teaching by psychologist and meditation teacher Tara Brach, author of Radical Acceptance and other books.

Brach spoke about “bad othering” as a kind of limbic trance: something that those who demonize immigrants or people of color or LGBTQ+ people engage in, and something that those of us who demonize those perpetuating the suffering do, as well.

When we go into a limbic trance—or narrow, emotional reactivity that fuels a sense of ourselves as separate from others—we fail to recognize another’s humanity, beneath all their, like our, greater or lesser flaws.

We fail to see the causes and conditions that led them to act as they do. We forget that happy people don’t inflict cruelty and suffering on others. We fail to see what, in their lunging after others, entraps them.

And we are cut off from the vastness of our own hearts.

That last one—being cut off from the vastness of our own hearts—is the one that cracked things open for me because that is not how I want to live, no matter what is going on in the world around me.

The U-Turn

Navigating this isn't easy when we are, as we are, triggered daily.

Brach, however, offered a simple practice for working with the experience: First, pause. Then, look at what’s going on—what we’re feeling—beneath the outrage or disdain.

When she has worked with this, Brach said she has seen the following progression of emotions beneath the surface:

• First, anger.

• Then, under the anger, fear.

• Then, under fear, a sense of powerlessness.

• Then, under the powerlessness, grief.

Finally, there in the heart of the grief, she sees clearly what she most cares about. In her case, she said, it is often about what it also almost always is for me: a desire to protect.

So, what do we do then?

Brach’s advice is this: Ask what love would ask of us now and act on it, knowing our action need not be a grand one but that the act itself matters.

As she said, action absorbs anxiety.

Our Greatest (and Most Important) Challenge

As we continue to confront the numerous challenges of our times—attacks on equality, the environment, justice, decency, truth, and more—perhaps this is the overriding challenge that, when we rise to it, will help us better address the rest.

In the words of Thich Nhat Hanh:

“This, my dear, is the greatest challenge of being alive: to witness the injustice of this world and not allow it to consume our light.”

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Could you or your team use some encouragement to end the year strong? I’d love to tell you more about my “Savor the World” keynote and “Staying Power” coaching and workshops.

In the Crack-Up—as good a title for these times as any—F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote:

“…the test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in the mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function.”

Here are two such opposing ideas we are challenged to hold today:

1. We are dangerously close to societal and environmental collapse. The powers that be are accelerating that process. And even though many good people are fighting the good fight, many of us would agree, in the words of the Magic 8 Ball, “Outlook not so good.” Plus, most of us are flat-out exhausted.
   

2. Hope is essential. Good things can emerge from terrible ones when we respond with courage, creativity, and compassion. Or as the Buddhist teaching says, the Lotus flower blooms most beautifully from the deepest and thickest mud. So, we must, in the words of Churchill, “Never give in. Never, never, never, never…”

Ah, yes. But how do we hold both seeming truths?

When facing financial pressures, the emotional strain of navigating excessive uncertainty, or the difficulties of achieving clarity of purpose and direction when everything is turned upside down, this can be deeply challenging.

And there are, to be sure, no simple solutions.

I know because I’ve tried. Many times, in many ways, for many years, while trying to find my own way through our mixed-up world with the help of hundreds of excellent teachers and role models.

What I’ve learned is that, rather than any mere hack (which feels increasingly clueless given what we’re up against), it is more helpful to focus on a personal and collective process of learning how to rise to outsized challenges.

This is how we reignite the capacity to make the world a better place after the cataclysmic shocks of 2025.

After decades of study, I have distilled my learnings about what helps people rise to great challenges into what I call the Savor the World framework.

Why focus on savor rather than save? As the illustration suggests:

1. The drive to save the world ultimately leads to a sense of strain that depletes us. This is true in ordinary circumstances. In extraordinary ones like today’s, it is even more pronounced.

2. Depleted people need time to recover and find a healthier way to move forward. This is where many of us are at right now.

3. Finally, we recommit to making the world a better place, but not based on the drive to “save the world” because we know where that leads. Rather, my invitation is to do so based on a mindset of savoring the world.
   
   This means opening up to its many wonders and possibilities, and then extending those positive feelings. This, as a growing body of research attests, makes us more, not less, capable of doing what the world needs from us, and doing so in a sustainable way.

More specifically, the Savor the World framework is based on nine discrete skills, ranging from grounding ourselves to reclaiming our agency in the world as it is. For teams and organizations, it leads to greater alignment, conviction, and mobilization.

But strange as this is to say, being a lover of words as I am, the true power in this framework is in the experience of coming together, in person or online, and sharing in an open-minded, open-hearted way about the process of moving from today’s sense of strain and depletion to recovery and a mindset of savoring that will help us do what we wanted to do in the first place: make the world a better, brighter place.

After all, the first step in reigniting our capacity involves grounding, and one of the best ways to do that is in the company of other good people doing hard things in tough times.

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She told me about how early in her career she took many odd jobs to sustain herself and her love of writing. And then she became pregnant, which brought with it insomnia. So, living in a one-room apartment with her husband, she went into the closet at night and wrote.

What she wrote turned out to be The Bean Trees, and it changed her life, making her one of the most beloved novelists of modern times.

I’ve always loved that story for the possibility it represents—how a single life and many other lives can be changed for reasons we would never have anticipated.

There is another thing she told me that I also often remember: Writers tend to have the same obsessions that they write about, over and over and over.

I’ve found this deeply true for me—my obsession being how we live well, by which I mean become as courageous, kind, helpful, and happy as we can be—in uncertain times.

The nature of the times has changed dramatically over the years that I’ve been mulling this over. One issue, however, has remained at the forefront for me, the same one that is paramount for many: namely, our changing climate.

This year’s reversals of hard-won progress on that front—indeed, the efforts to seemingly pretend climate change does not exist—have been deeply distressing, to say the least.

What Jane Goodall Implored Us Not to Do

But, as the extraordinary late Jane Goodall said, we cannot become people who give up hope, leaving young people to navigate these profound challenges without us.

They need to know, now more than ever, that people are doing everything they can to make the world a better place, even against daunting odds.

For most of us, however, we don’t just stumble into becoming those people. It requires some deliberation.

What It Takes to Maintain Hope and Staying Power

1. Ground in connection.

Grounding in conversation and connection is the first step—not just politically, economically, technically, or in any other way intellectually. I mean, above all, emotionally, because how we feel is the most significant influence on what we do.

After all, the feelings many of us experience today—of fear and anxiety, frustration and anger, grief and sadness, and hopelessness and despair—can lead to mindsets that drain our capacity.

But giving voice to these feelings, in a safe, constructive space, helps us move through them.

2. Develop a mindset and “heartset” for these times.

In my work, I have identified many strategies for doing this through the process of attuning our mindsets and heartsets (or inner compass) to match the needs of these times.

There is much to this, from cultivating our capacities for emotional awareness to that of courage and connection.

But is this enough to help us find our way through these tough times? I have found there is something else that is critical.

3. Cultivate wonder as counterpoint to worry.

I believe what we need, above all, is to cultivate something big enough to offset the significant challenges we face. And hundreds of interviews and decades of research have led me to this: what helps is cultivating wonder as an orientation toward openness, curiosity, humility, reverence, and meaning.

Wonder reminds us that, just as the insomnia that led Barbara Kingsolver to write a novel that changed her life and the lives of many others, we can be surprised by good turns in life.

By possibility.

From Saving the World to Savoring It

This is why I’ve changed my focus from what I long thought was the work of “saving the world” to “savoring the world.”

Because when we savor—that is, extend the positive feelings associated with the always-present wonders of this life—we strengthen our wellbeing and our capacity to make a difference.

Prioritizing savoring, in short, makes the saving more likely.

And to invoke the late great Jane Goodall again, the problems we face today are the result of the separation of head and heart. Moving forward now with clear eyes and full hearts will serve us well.

One Simple, Nourishing Practice

Here’s one practice I’ve been trying recently, inspired by Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh.

Take a walk, if you can, in nature or however close to it you can get. Try to let go of thoughts about the past or future and fully arrive in the present moment. Then, as you breathe in, take three steps, saying “Yes, yes, yes.” After this, take three steps, breathing out, and saying “thank you, thank you.”

Or, if you wish, you can use the words Thich Naht Hanh used when he taught walking meditation to children: Say “oui” on the inbreath and “merci” on the outbreath.

Like kissing the Earth with our feet, it is, as he explained, a simple way to establish calm within us and allow ourselves to be nourished by the wonders of life.

If you’d like to learn more about my “Savor the World” talk or “Staying Power” workshops for mission- and values-driven people, please reach out. I’d love to share more.

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He told my four-year-old to jump in at the deep end and swim to the wall, which was about 25 feet away, although he had no prior experience or lessons. This wasn’t my understanding of what we’d signed up for. It was much too much of a challenge based on too little experience.

I stood up, ready to walk over. Then I sat down again. He was doing it. Not happily, I later learned, but, with fierce determination, he was swimming to the wall.

Fierce determination can serve us all well from time to time. But in times like these, I believe (and research suggests) we need more than grit. As challenges rise, we need different skills and a different mindset. A sense of capacity equal to the obstacles we face.

Defending against disengagement

Without this, if we feel just daunted, we’re vulnerable to disengaging—at work, in the community, with family and friends. And so are the people we need to advance the work we know is important: creating a healthier and more just world, not a lesser one.

I have spent most of my adult life studying how people rise to extraordinary challenges, and there appear to be as many ways in as there are people. But some things are universal. One of these is this:

Being triggered by events that feel threatening—especially those that seem, in many ways, beyond our control—does a number on our nervous systems, after all. It undermines our clarity, can cause fear and anxiety, and can lead us to question whether we can do anything at all.

Taking a bigger perspective changes things

That is what reconnecting with wonder and leading with wonder—even amid everything happening right now, especially amid everything happening now—does.

The practice of wonder reminds us that life is infinitely bigger than whoever may be wielding undue power in this moment.

It helps us take the weight of the world off our shoulders and improves our well-being, which makes us more capable of rising to the challenges we face.

And it makes us more open to unseen possibilities.

The research on this is clear—and growing.

For example, studies by Michelle Shiota Anderson, a professor of psychology at Arizona State University, and others demonstrate that wonder can improve mood and reduce symptoms of anxiety and depression, acting as a mental and emotional reset.

But what does this look like in practice?

A question you may wish to reflect on

In my talks and workshops, I share stories and strategies that bring this to life. But here is one thing you might like to let rumble around in your head and heart:

It’s something I’ve heard mentioned a few times at a women’s sustainability retreat in Mexico, where I am now. It originates from the Lakota people who, I have learned, offer this idea as a way to help people “lean into the future with a hopeful heart.”

As challenging as it may seem in this moment, this strikes me as a question worth living into:

What if our best days are still ahead of us? How might that change how we think and feel about things now—and, in turn, what we do?

I’d love to hear what you come up with.

My Lead with Wonder talks and workshops are designed to help values-driven people move from worry to wonder, elevating clarity, vitality, and impact in complex times. They blend storytelling and insights from more than 20 years of studying how people rise to great challenges. If you’d like to learn more, please reach out. I’d love to chat.

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This tends to happen when I think, write, or talk about something related to hope, wonder, or possibility.

The world, after all, looks like a giant shitshow at the moment, and that’s not, as politicians and publicists might say, just optics.

It’s life in a polycrisis: a time in which many crises are unfolding at the same time, across economics, society, politics, healthcare, technology, and the environment.

These are massively complex issues with significant consequences. They feel threatening to our health and well-being—to our ability to care for ourselves and the people we love.

They also feel, disturbingly, almost completely out of our control.

The Natural Reactions I Want to Defend Against

What happens in times like these—when humans feel both at risk and relatively powerless to do something about it—is that our focus tends to narrow.

We think short-term, not long-term. We concentrate more on survival, less on things like kindness, compassion, and collaboration. And we tighten our circles, becoming mistrusting of others.

It’s human nature. It also fuels polarization, authoritarianism, and other responses that make problem-solving ever more difficult.

But this is not all there is to human nature.

The Qualities I Want to Cultivate

There is also hope, wonder, possibility, kindness, compassion, collaboration, and more.

And far from naïve, these qualities are essential counterpoints to a narrowing of focus and help us navigate the extraordinary challenges of our times.

That is why every time I see someone criticized for saying or writing something positive or uplifting, my heart sinks.

We don’t need more reminders of the challenges we face. They already weigh us down.

But we desperately need more reminders of what can lift us and others up.

I don’t mean a manufactured optimism, a dreamy fantasyland, or wishful thinking that everything will work out in the end.

I mean a mindset suited to this moment.

A Mindset for This Moment

After many circuitous adventures, reconnecting with wonder has helped me get there. Remember that childhood feeling of the world being an amazing place? Being something so much bigger than us? Being full of possibilities?

Many of us learn, to our detriment, to step away from natural experiences of wonder, even though the world still is an amazing place that is much bigger than us and full of possibility.

But reconnecting with wonder lends spaciousness when we feel time-starved, expansiveness when we feel constrained by challenges, and a reminder that there is more to life than the troubles of this moment.

All of this not only eases my nervous system; it fuels my staying power.

And, importantly, this is not just my experience.

More Than a Feel-Good Strategy

A growing body of research is revealing that hope, optimism, and positive reframing are not just feel-good strategies. They are powerful tools that sharpen our thinking, boost resilience, and enhance both well-being and problem-solving capacity.

For example, a 2024 study from Australia found that when people imagined a positive future related to climate change and economic equality, it led to greater support for collective action in both cases.

So, perhaps for the many of us who care deeply about creating a healthier, kinder world, it’s a good time to stop worrying about whether we come off as naïve when we focus on possibility and know the true limitation occurs when we don’t.

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I offer Lead with Wonder talks and workshops designed to catalyze inspiration and impact in these complex times. They blend storytelling and insights from more than 20 years of studying how people rise to great challenges. If you’d like to learn more, I’d love to chat.

Please join me for a free 45-minute introduction to Leading with Wonder on Thursday, September 4, 2025, at 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT. Register here.

I’ve spent most of my adult life obsessed with how we make the world a better place. How we tackle inequality of all kinds. How we become better stewards of nature.

This work—the work countless values-driven people do every day—has never been easy. But today, it clearly is not for the faint of heart. Bearing witness to an about-face on so many issues that are about protecting the well-being of people and the planet is heartbreaking.

That is why many of us find ourselves in a state of fight or flight: seeking a way to rally against the many prevailing misdirections, or attempting to check out to preserve our sanity and well-being.

Up against what we’re up against, these can seem the only two options, daunting and unsatisfying as both may be.

Better than Fight or Flight

There is, however, a third way that is no mere compromise but a force powerful enough to sustain us in our efforts to keep making the world a better place and protecting our sanity and well-being.

That pathway is wonder, something that Maria Papova recently described as "our best means of loving the world more deeply."

In words I want to emblazon on a scrim before my eyes, she writes:

This so beautifully encapsulates the many threads I have pursued in recent years, as I have sought a healthier way to engage in the world. Courage. Befriending uncertainty. Openness. A willingness to be transformed. Above all, love of the world.

Worry Depletes Us. Wonder Sustains Us.

There is, of course, plenty of cause for worry. But worry depletes us. And in the context of our times, it is all too easy to feel too small to make a difference.

Wonder, on the other hand, enlarges us. Enlivens us. Sustains and uplifts us. And all of that makes us more, not less, likely to make a positive difference.

It is also not just a nice-to-have for other people. It is vital for people doing the critical work of protecting people and the planet in today’s challenging climate.

So, how do we lead with wonder amid the onslaught of everything else?

Creating Space for It

We begin, as always, by creating space. This requires momentarily stepping away from the overdrive pace of modern life and remembering and re-experiencing the deep, nourishing, limitless sources of wonder.

As children, we did this naturally. As adults, it takes slowing down, looking, and appreciating.

I had an experience of this recently while visiting with a lovely group of women in Vermont: as we stood in a river talking, as we learned from a naturalist how to decode the signs of animals in the woods, and as I reveled in the good things all of them were doing in the world.

There is no shortage of paths to wonder. And there is no shortage of benefits to its sustaining powers.

Deeply loving the world is, of course, what mission-driven and purpose-led people do through our work. My point is simply this:

In times as challenging as these, we need to protect ourselves from depletion. Explorations and experiences of wonder ensure that we can continue to fight for what is good and right—without burning out and in ways that inspire others.

Please join me for a free 45-minute introduction to Leading with Wonder on Thursday, September 4, 2025, at 1:00 PM ET, 10:00 AM PT. Register here.

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Then I come to my boulder.

My boulder is a magical place. It cradles whoever lies there. I imagine its subtle cradle shape may even have been formed, at least in part, by people lying here over thousands of years, back when this river was the place along which ice was shipped before refrigeration. Back when the Washoe native people fished and made their homes here.

Imagination is a lovely respite from what I had been doing before arriving here—thinking about these crazy times we live in and how we navigate that wise middle place between checking out and spinning out. How we find our small, honest way to make a difference.

I lay on the boulder and look up at the blue sky, the towering tree branches, and the shadows on the still larger boulder in front of me. I listen to the sound of water moving over rocks. I watch my dog standing above me, thankfully, this time, not dripping wet. And I feel at peace.

I stay for only a minute or two. But when I get up and begin the walk back to return to work, I am in a different state—more calm, clear, and centered in quiet, humble conviction.

People who want to keep showing up and making the world a better place in times like ours need experiences like these. I don't mean only respites from thinking or reading the news.

We need experiences of being at least momentarily held—physically, emotionally, or otherwise—by a partner, a mentor, a coach, a friend, a colleague, or nature.

It settles the nervous system. It makes us capable of more. It helps us rise to great challenges.

Do you have a place, person, or experience that supports you in this way? I may not know you personally. But I know this: You deserve it.

Lisa Bennett is an author, speaker, coach, and facilitator who helps people strengthen the skills and spirit needed to keep showing up and creating a better world. She is the founder of the Staying Power Framework.™

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I once had the privilege of covering a visit the Dalai Lama made to Ithaca, New York, home to Cornell University.

I watched him as he chatted about life with students, talked politics with professors, and walked across a campus as hundreds of people waited to catch a glimpse of him.

It’s that last bit I remember most because I was walking close to him—and from my vantage point, I could see the change that took place as people saw him. It was as if their stress melted away, replaced by a welcome sense of ease and peacefulness.

There are, of course, many things that make people respond to the Dalai Lama the way they do, most of which we could never achieve.

But his benevolence—or, simple but profound kindness—is a relevant and widely accessible quality for us in these brutal times.

I believe this applies whether you are:

• A leader of a stressed, despondent, or burned-out team,

• A parent who wants to inspire anxious or worried children, or

• Among the countless numbers of us who simply want to have some positive impact in our little corner of the world.

Why Kindness Matters More in These Uncertain Times

Someone told me last week that she has found herself going out of her way to be friendly to strangers lately. It was her way of countering the decidedly less-than-friendly dynamics swirling about us.

Many of us have found ourselves doing that in small ways, whether in the supermarket, on subways, or on the street.

However, when it comes to the work of defending and advancing critical issues and missions we care about—from climate action to democracy and equality—several factors can cause us to neglect simple acts of kindness.

Among them: the stress of it all and the gross misperception that kindness is a sign of weakness.

Yet, history and abundant research show that benevolent leadership, or simple acts of kindness, help reduce fear, improve decision-making, and boost resilience —things that are more important than ever in these times of uncertainty.

Explorer Ernest Shackleton famously demonstrated the power of this when his ship was crushed by ice, stranding him and his crew for some 20 months in the Antarctic.

As a leader, part of Shackleton’s job was, of course, strategizing what to do next. However, he equally prioritized his crew's morale, offering warm cups of milk, organizing music and games, and carefully controlling the information he shared to protect his crew from unnecessary fear.

Making It Real

What does this look like today?

Former New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has been a modern exemplar of benevolent leadership, something she discusses in her new book, A Different Kind of Power.

Of course, some see kindness as naïve, perhaps even more so in our current climate, as she observed in a New York Times interview last month. But she doesn't buy it. When we demonstrate our humanity, as she observes, it fosters trust rather than fear.

It also helps ease stress, grief, and anxiety—the whole wide range of emotions that weigh many down these days—and thereby paves the way for bold and courageous action, as Ardern’s tenure also demonstrated.

But, perhaps needless to say, benevolent leadership must be genuine. People can smell inauthentic displays of kindness and find them worse than consistently bad behavior. It also must be balanced. Research shows that too little benevolence undermines psychological safety and increases disengagement, and too much can undermine performance.

Leaders who are kind and clear, supportive and strong, inspire the greatest resilience and creativity among their teams.

This is part of the critical work of our times, and what I focus on as a leadership coach, speaker, and workshop facilitator: strengthening the skills and spirit we need to keep showing up and creating a better world.

If this sounds like it could be helpful, I’d love to chat. Learn more and find contact info here.

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A great deal has been written about the ‘firehose effect’ over the past six months. I’m referring, of course, to the dynamic of witnessing numerous, rapid-fire attacks on vital missions and worthy causes, ranging from democracy and equality to education, healthcare, and climate action.

But what do we do about it?

To break the spell, I suggest considering three high-level points, whether you’re navigating 2025 as an individual, a team member, a parent, a community activist, or an organization leader. (Many have recognized the first, but the second and third are most important now.)

1. Grasp what it is and how it works.

The nonpartisan, nonprofit RAND Corporation popularized the term in the context of disinformation with its 2016 report, “The Russian ‘Firehose of Falsehood’ Propaganda Model.”

“The Russian propaganda model operates like a firehose,” the authors wrote, “—fast, continuous, repetitive, and loud, with no commitment to objective reality.”

Its impact, Dan Rather put best: “The idea is that by swamping us, we won’t be able to keep up, and so we stop trying.”

2. Recognize that understanding this is not an adequate defense.

Being on the wrong end of a firehose—whether of words or actions that have crippling financial, political, or other impacts—is overwhelming. Knowing that is its effect is not enough to neutralize it.

3. Create something powerful enough to match it.

This is the power of elevating, purposeful, some might say, audacious aspirations.

I know, today’s tough realities can make talk of elevating aspirations seem hopelessly naïve.

It is no easy feat to envision a healthy climate, a vibrant democracy, and equality and justice for all when these ideals have been so fiercely undermined by funding, policy, and political changes that have set back important causes by years, if not decades or more.

Easy, however, is not the point. Picking ourselves up and moving forward is the point. And this is the gift that aspirations give us.

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Call them a moonshot, a North Star, a skyhook, or whatever works for you; elevating aspirations is essential to the process of lifting ourselves back up and carrying on in the best possible direction we can.

Norman Fischer, in The World Could Be Otherwise, discusses the role of ideals in a similar vein.

“All ideals are imaginative projections,” he writes. “Though we can conceive of them, they can’t exist in this imperfect world. Yet they are valuable nevertheless. We need ideals to propel us forward into better futures, to inspire us to be better people in a better world.”

Without them, Fischer adds, "we slowly lose energy. We become boring, small-minded, and eventually depressed, as life’s natural entropy overcomes us.”

Ideals, in contrast, he concludes, lift us. The same is true of aspirations.

By their nature, however, aspirations are not supposed to be things we can achieve this week, this month, this quarter, or perhaps even this year.

Aspirations Take Time

The greatest aspirations take time. But they give us something invaluable: a horizon to shoot for.

It took more than 70 years of organized activism for slavery to be abolished in the United States, 72 years for the women’s suffrage movement to secure women's right to vote, and nearly 100 years for India to gain independence from Britain.

Not all aspirations take quite so long. Nine years after Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., took on a leadership role in the civil rights movement, the Civil Rights Act was signed into law. Four years after Nelson Mandela’s release from prison, South Africa transitioned to democracy. And one year after the Arab Spring, dictators fell in Tunisia and Egypt.

So, what then might such elevating inspirations be—at the individual, organizational, or community level—in 2025 and beyond?

I don’t pretend to have the answers to this because, among other reasons, they depend on the individual, organization, and community considering them.

But I know these are conversations worth having.

A Few Reflection Questions

Here are a few questions you might consider reflecting on to see what comes up for you or your team.

1. What do you want your life to stand for, no matter what is going on around you?

2. What mission will your organization remain committed to, no matter what?

3. What kind of world do you believe is possible and desirable? What would it take for that to become a reality? And, instead of accepting a lesser alternative, are you willing to continue to aspire to it, no matter what?

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I help values-driven individuals and organizations build psychological resilience, reduce emotional exhaustion, and reconnect to purpose and each other so they can continue doing their vitally important work. Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about my facilitated workshops, talks, or coaching.

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I could provide a long list of reasons why, but we already know many of them. Bad news—about everything from the dismal state of American politics to climate change—is everywhere.

And if we learn even a little about the state of our world, it's difficult to avoid the conclusion that we have entered an era of seriously tough times. Times in which the relative stability we have come to count on is coming apart at the seams, like a threadbare coat.

Of course, countless good people are working to address the world's growing crises. But whether they will succeed is anyone's guess.

So, what I want to know is how, in these times of great uncertainty, can we resist feeling powerless despite the many messages that encourage us to do just that? How do we avoid despair despite the unprecedented complexity of the global challenges before us? How do we reject the temptation to retreat into denial or distraction despite the fact that both sometimes seem like the only sane thing to do?

How, in short, can we use the harsh reality of these times to live a better quality of life right now? And by quality of life, I do not mean a higher standard of living but a more genuine, meaningful, and balanced practice of living that has been out of our reach for some time.

I first wrote these words more than 15 years ago. I was the mother of two young boys and had only recently woken up to climate change, which terrified me. Never in a million years could I have anticipated the world-shaking challenges that would multiply and grow as they have since then.

But one thing has remained the same in all this time: my quest to discover a healthy, wise, and, above all, loving way to navigate the storm.

What I have learned, with a now unshakeable conviction, is that the answer to meeting today's extraordinary challenges rests on two things: cultivating a strong inner life to help us meet outer challenges and collectively joining together to create a better world.

At this moment, of course, many of us are afraid, angry, anxious, and even despairing about the reckless destruction of lives, shared values, and the health of the earth on which everything depends.

Many of us are also disheartened by the absence of the kind of leadership people need in challenging times; indeed, it is all too easy to feel that leadership, at least from some powerful places, is against us.

This means good change is up to us. The big us. The collective us. The unbreakable us. The us that may not feel like we have that kind of strength within.

Previously unimagined potential, however, is often precipitated by crises. And so, this power of possibility is with us today. Possibility without power, however, will not get us far. At least not far enough.

That's why I'm introducing a new series based on what the past 15+ years of experience and interviews with hundreds of people have taught me, specifically about owning our inner and collective power to meet the towering challenges of our day.

I have, to my surprise, collected more than 250 pathways to developing inner strength in a complex world. But fear not, I'll not subject you to them all!

Instead, I’ll offer one and perhaps eventually more A-Z guides, exploring topics such as the power of action and diversity, of the only FOMO that counts, of humility and kindness and justice, of lilies in the mud and of limits and limitlessness, of meaning and mindset and mission, of presence and purpose, of regeneration and ripples, of self-trust and shared power, of surfacing the unspoken and thresholds, and of vision, warriorship and wonder.

I'll kick the series off next week with one or more of the many possibilities that begin with the letter A—and how many there are! (This is why the A-Z ordering is helpful.)

Among them: the power acceptance, action, adaptability, admitting disappointment, adventures, agility, alchemy, alignment, altruism, anger, antidotes, anxiety (as a signal and goad to something better), appreciation, archetypes, asking the right questions, attending to challenging emotions, attention, attitude, authenticity, awareness, and awe.

If you have a preference, please let me know!

As the great theologian, mystic, and philosopher Meister Eckhart observed some 700 years ago, “Truly, it is in darkness that one finds the light, so when we are in sorrow, then this light is nearest of all to us.”

May it be so for us now.

Lisa

P.S. Yes, I changed the name of this newsletter, again. The focus remains the same.

I help values-driven individuals and organizations build psychological resilience, reduce emotional exhaustion, and reconnect to purpose and each other so they can continue doing their vitally important work. Please reach out if you’d like to learn more about my coaching, workshops, and talks.

But in times like these, we need to do more to strengthen ourselves, both individually and collectively.

After all, as we face towering challenges from the outside, we also face exhaustion, sky-high burnout, and even despair within.

Reconnection is a profoundly helpful way to restore ourselves: reconnection to our sense of purpose, our sense of strength, and each other in our shared mission to safeguard the Earth and all its people.

This is always true. However, in tough times, it can be easily overlooked.

It's not unlike what mindfulness practitioners have observed: When we're under stress, we're less likely to practice, even though it's the most critical time to do so.

Here are three things I have found helpful:

1. Take some time to reflect on whether your sense of purpose has changed since the world was turned upside down in 2025. Mine certainly has.

After many years spent focused on advancing climate action and environmental sustainability, I am now motivated by the equally vital need to support the people doing this work in ways that build psychological resilience, reduce emotional burnout, and foster connection.

I think of it as "sustaining the sustainers."

Recognizing this shift has helped calm me, however distressed I may be by the setbacks, because I feel aligned with a great need of the moment that I can respond to.

How about you?

2. Ask yourself who you feel most connected with, or want to feel more connected with, as your tribe writ large. I don’t mean “tribe” only in the usual sense of friends or colleagues who understand you, share your values, and support you.

If you’re willing to go out on a limb with me (I live in California, after all), I also mean, who is in your “inner tribe”? I came to think about this after hearing a talk by Dr. Larry Ward, co-founder and executive director of the Lotus Institute, who speaks about connecting with our “inner community.”

He recommends: “Name and recognize…who are the voices of kindness, courage, resilience within you that stand by you when you’re afraid or uncertain?”

Maya Angelou said something similar, commenting that before giving a talk, she visualized bringing along with her “everyone who has ever been kind to me. I say, ‘Come with me. I need you now.”

One special characteristic of an inner tribe is that its members need not be among the living. My mom, for example, still tops my list, though she passed more than a decade ago. I also find a seat in my inner tribe for inspiring leaders from history.

Who is there for you?

3. Reconnect with people who care about the same issues as you in ways that allow you to feel restored.

We can do this with friends and family through a dedicated commitment to real talk. We can do so in workplaces through facilitated sessions, such as the community-building one I led last week at the California Academy of Sciences.

We might also take a lesson from the U.S. healthcare industry, which had to contend with massive burnout after facing the outsized challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Turnover was rising. People were exhausted. And traditional wellness perks were not cutting it. (These are risks many mission-driven organizations face today.)

As a result, several healthcare systems, including Mass General Brigham, Sutter Health, and NYU Langone, invested in initiatives such as peer-support circles and facilitated groups where team members could decompress and reconnect.

In this fraught moment, when grants are being canceled, long-fought-for policies are being overturned, and constitutional rights are being challenged, facilitating deep reconnection opportunities may seem like a luxury we can ill afford.

However, considering the alternatives of burnout and exhaustion, I believe we owe it to the good people doing important work in these hard times to create the most natural source of restoration there is: reconnection.

I help mission-driven professionals and organizations build psychological resilience, reduce emotional burnout, and reconnect to purpose and each other so they can continue doing their vitally important work. Please reach out if you’d like to chat.