The Practice of Groundedness: A Transformative Path to Success That Feeds--Not Crushes--Your Soul

by Brad Stulberg

I’ve come to call this heroic individualism: an ongoing game of one-upmanship, against both yourself and others, paired with the limiting belief that measurable achievement is the only arbiter of success. Even if you do a good job hiding it on the outside, with heroic individualism you chronically feel like you never quite reach the finish line that is lasting fulfillment.

Signs You May Be Suffering from Heroic Individualism

We need to stop spending so much time worrying about our metaphorical overstory, our high-hanging branches, and instead focus on nourishing our deep and internal roots. The stuff that keeps us grounded throughout all kinds of weather. The foundation. The principles and practices that we often overlook, that get crowded out in a too-busy life focused on the relentless and all-too-often single-minded pursuit of outward achievement.

Groundedness is unwavering internal strength and self-confidence that sustains you through ups and downs. It is a deep reservoir of integrity and fortitude, of wholeness, out of which lasting performance, well-being, and fulfillment emerge.

Studies show that happiness is a function of reality minus expectations. In other words, the key to being happy isn’t to always want and strive for more. Instead, happiness is found in the present moment, in creating a meaningful life and being fully engaged in it, right here and right now.

Meanwhile, the emerging field of performance science is revealing that any kind of lasting success requires a solid base of health, well-being, and general life satisfaction. Without this foundation, someone can perform well for a short period of time, but they

inevitably break down and burn out, and usually after only a few years at most.

Finally, decades of research on motivation and burnout shows that striving toward a goal is most sustainable and fulfilling when your drive comes from deep within. Not from the need—or for some, the addiction, and a hard one to shake—to receive external validation.

Accept Where You Are to Get You Where You Want to Go. Seeing clearly, accepting, and starting where you are. Not where you want to be. Not where you think you should be. Not where other people think you should be. But where you are. Be Present So You Can Own Your Attention and Energy. Being present, both physically and mentally, for what is in front of you. Spending more time fully in this life, not in thoughts about the past or future.

Be Patient and You’ll Get There Faster. Giving things time and space to unfold. Not trying to escape life by moving at warp speed. Not expecting instant results and then quitting when they don’t occur. Shifting from being a seeker to a practitioner. Playing the long game. Staying on the path instead of constantly veering off.

Embrace Vulnerability to Develop Genuine Strength and Confidence. Showing up authentically. Being real with yourself and with others. Eliminating the cognitive dissonance between your workplace self, your online self, and your actual self so that you can know and trust your true self, and in turn gain the freedom and confidence to devote your energy to what matters most. Build Deep Community. Nurturing genuine connection and belonging. Prioritizing not just productivity, but people, too. Immersing yourself in supportive spaces that will hold and bolster you through ups and downs, and that will give you the chance to do the same for others.

Move Your Body to Ground Your Mind. Regularly moving your body so that you fully inhabit it, connect it to your mind, and as a result become...

“If you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea.”

Social scientists call this motivated reasoning, or our propensity not to see things clearly but instead to reason our way into seeing things as we’d like them to be.

A common example of motivated reasoning is when you know that you no longer want to be in a job you dislike, but instead of facing that uncomfortable truth, you look for (and find) numerous reasons why your current job—the one you can’t stand—is actually great. Or, even easier, we ignore our stressors altogether.

We bury our heads in the sand or do precisely what society’s heroic individualism and superficial success culture tell us to do: thin...

ourselves, buy stuff ...

The pioneering humanistic psychologist Carl Rogers spent decades working with

individuals on personal growth and fulfillment. Perhaps his most poignant observation, the one he became most known for: “The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change.”

When you first hear acceptance you may think of giving up, complacency, phoning it in, or committing to mediocrity. But this isn’t the case. Acceptance is not passive resignation. Acceptance is taking stock of a situation and seeing it clearly for what it is—whether you like it or not. It is only once you gain a clear understanding of a situation, and get at least comfort...

You can’t work on something in a meaningful way if you are fighting it at the same time.

An elegant Buddhist parable teaches not to let the arrow hit you twice. The first arrow—be it a negative thought, feeling, event, or circumstance—you can’t always control. But you can control the second arrow, or your reaction to the first one. Often, this reaction is one of denial, suppression, judgment, resistance, or impulsive action—all of which tend to create more, not less, difficulty and distress. The Buddha taught that it is this, the second arrow, that hurts worse, and it is also the second arrow that prevents you from doing anything wise about the first one.

When you lie to yourself about your situation, doubt and anxiety almost always ensue. You go from playing to win to playing not to lose.

Psychologists call this the difference between a performance-approach and a performance-avoidance mindset. When you adopt a performance-approach mindset, you are playing to win, focusing on the potential rewards of success. You have an easier time immersing yourself in the moment and entering a flowlike state. Under a performance-avoidance mindset, however, your focus is on dodging mistakes and circumventing danger. You are constantly on the lookout for threats and problems because deep down you know that you don’t belong.

studies show that while fear may work as a short-term motivator, it is a poor long-term one, leading to increased stress and burnout.

It’s about constantly knowing where I am. I feel a deep freedom that comes from acknowledging my pain, my flaws, and my failures, and moving forward anyway,” she says.

Language shapes reality, and these subtle shifts go a long way toward eliminating guilt, shame, and judgment and fostering self-compassion instead. When you catch yourself shoulding, try using another word and see what happens.

Long-standing psychological research shows that the more you try to think or feel a certain way, the less likely you are to think or feel that way.

What you can control, however, is your behavior—that is, your actions.

Taking actions that align with your values—regardless of how you are feeling—is often the catalyst for your situation to improve.

In the scientific literature, this is called behavioral activation. In lay terms, and phrasing that I first heard from the podcast...

Here’s how the pieces come together: Accept where you are. This is often the hardest part of getting where you want to go. Use the lens of a wise observer to see your situation clearly without becoming fused to it. If your situation and your awareness of your situation begin to collapse on each other, pause, realize what is happening, take a few deep breaths, and zoom back out to gain space. If you start judging yourself or your situation harshly, or find yourself spiraling into rumination, try to practice self-compassion. This is what is happening right now. I’m doing the best I can. Once you feel like you’ve evaluated your situation from a place of acceptance and clarity, choose a response that aligns with your core values. You are making a conscious choice, responding instead of impulsively reacting. In many ways, this is the embodiment of wisdom. Act in accordance with your values, even if you don’t feel like it. Mood follows action. All of this is a lot easier said than done. But with repetition and practice this cycle gradually becomes more natural.

When you find yourself tight, anxious, or insecure about an important endeavor in your life, pause and remember that you’re as ready as you’re going to be. Take a breath or two and imagine that nothing is wrong. What would that feel like? When I go through this exercise with my coaching clients they tend to report that their chest opens, their respiration slows, and their shoulders drop. Now ask yourself: Which physical state is more conducive to peak performance? Anxious and tight or relaxed and open? Unanimously, my clients tell me they prefer the latter.

Judson Brewer, a Brown University neuroscientist and author of Unwinding Anxiety, found that when we shift from worrying about and trying to control a situation to accepting and being with it, activity in the posterior cingulate cortex (PCC) decreases. The PCC is a brain region associated with self-referential thinking, or getting caught up in one’s experience. The more PCC activity, the less likely we are to enter a high-performance flow state. “In a sense, if we try to control a situation (or our lives) we have to work hard at doing something to get the results we want,” Brewer writes. “In contrast, we can relax into an attitude that is more like a dance with the object, simply being with it as the situation unfolds, no striving or struggling necessary, as we get out of our own way.”

As Bud Winter, widely regarded as one of the greatest track and field coaches, was known for saying, “Relax and win.” Intuitively, this makes sense. Worrying about a situation or denying it altogether does not change it, but it does waste a lot of energy. What is happening right now is what is happening righ...

Acceptance is about being with your reality, whatever it may be. By doing so, you lessen the distress caused by wanting things to be different and judging yourself when they are not. You rid yourself of the gap between your expectations and your experience, and you eliminate the second, third, and fourth arrows.

Only once you’ve accepted your reality will you find peace, strength, and stability, or at least an understanding of the actions you might take to attain these states. Acceptance is not about doing nothing.

Acceptance is necessary to experience contentment and happiness in the here and now, and it is the first step toward making progress in the future.

we seek to do more and more, faster and faster, in an effort to get better and better. This is a rational desire. Except there’s one major problem. Contrary to what heroic individualism would have you believe, we aren’t machines. Computers and robots can dual-process. They do not experience fatigue. Nor do they have rich emotional lives that depend on the quality of their attention. We humans are different.

When we strive to be everywhere and do everything, we tend to feel like we’re not fully experiencing anything.

A study conducted by King’s College London found that persistent interruptions, such as the kind caused by multitasking, led to a ten-point drop in IQ. This is twice the decrease one experiences after using cannabis and on par with the decrease you’d expect from having stayed up all night. Multitasking is great, we tell ourselves. It’s being überproductive, optimizing, getting so much done! But this story is an illusion.

It’s not just performance that suffers when our attention is scattered, but emotional well-being too. Constant interruptions and nonstop busyness exact a severe toll on mental health.

Researchers from Harvard found that when people are fully present for their activities, they are much happier and more fulfilled than when they’re thinking about something else. The more scattered people are, the more likely they are to feel angst and discontent.

Studies have found that, on average, people spend 47 percent of their waking hours thinking about something other than what is in front of them.

In essence, we are training our brains to be in a constant state of hyper-alertness, always thinking about what could be happening somewhere else and feeling the urge to check in and see.

No retweet, Like, nine p.m. message from the boss, Instagram post, or “breaking” news story is more meaningful or satisfying than being present for the people and pursuits we care about most.

In other words, it is important to remember that whenever you say yes to something you are saying no to something else.

protect our time, energy, and attention and direct it wisely—when

wise

Wise

When you are fully present for what is in front of you, you become more likely to enter flow, a state in which you are completely absorbed in an activity—be it running, lovemaking, painting, writing code, solving math proofs, engaging in good conversation, meditating, surfing, you name it. In flow, your perceptions of time and space are altered. You enter what is colloquially referred to as “the zone.” Decades of psychological research show that people perform best and feel best when they enter this state.