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.

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.

This is why you’ll not only learn about the principles of groundedness but also find concrete and evidence-based practices for taking them off these pages and making them real. In my work with coaching clients, I call this the knowing-doing gap. First, you need to understand something and be convinced of its value. Then, you actually need to do it.

As the Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh says, “If you want to garden, you have to bend down and touch the soil. Gardening is a practice. Not an idea.”

Instead of accepting this truth, when things don’t go our way we tend to default to magical thinking, convincing ourselves we’re in a better place than we are. 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.

“If expectations are unrealistically high they could be the basis of disappointment and low life satisfaction,” write the authors. “While the Danes are very satisfied, their expectations are rather low.”

Jason Fried, founder and CEO of the successful software company Basecamp, who has written multiple articles on professional satisfaction, put it like this: “I used to set up expectations in my head all day long. Constantly measuring reality against an imagined reality is taxing and tiring. I think it often wrings the joy out of just experiencing something for what it is.”

Joseph Campbell, one of the world’s foremost experts on mythology and actual heroism, wrote, “The crux of the curious difficulty for the hero lies in the fact that our conscious views of what life ought to be seldom correspond to what life really is.”

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.

This mirrors a concept in ancient Buddhist psychology that is often referred to as selective watering. In short, the mind contains a diverse variety of seeds: joy, integrity, anger, jealousy, greed, love, delusion, creativity, and so on. Buddhist psychology taught that we should think of ourselves as gardeners and our presence and attention as nourishment for the seeds. The seeds that we water are the seeds that grow. The seeds that grow shape the kind of person we become. In other words, the quality of our presence—its intensity and where we choose to channel it—determines the quality of our lives.

How we spend our hours is how we spend our days. And, as the writer Annie Dillard so eloquently pointed out, “How we spend our days is . . . how we spend our lives.”

Instead of always thinking, Don’t just stand there, do something, we should at least consider thinking, Don’t just do something, stand there.

In a Harvard Business School working paper titled “Goals Gone Wild: The Systematic Side Effects of Over-Prescribing Goal Setting,” a team of researchers from Harvard, Northwestern, and the University of Pennsylvania set out to explore the potential downside of goal setting. They found that overemphasizing goals—especially those that are based on measurable outcomes—often leads to reduced motivation, irrational risk-taking, and unethical behavior.

is to regularly practice pausing. A modest way to do this is to close your eyes and take five deep breaths three times a day. You can pair these breaths with specific activities, like eating dinner, showering, brushing your teeth, or prior to checking your phone in the morning. Your only job is to follow each breath all the way in and all the way out.

A few years ago, I went to see the poet and philosopher David Whyte speak. I left the event with the following scribbled in my notebook: The things you care about make you vulnerable. The things you care about break your heart.

Per the golden rule of physical activity, move your body often, sometimes hard; every bit counts.

Your inner way of being influences what you do, but what you do also influences your inner way of being. Parker was falling into a common trap. He was spending a lot of time and energy on the internal work and formal practices, on strengthening his internal groundedness, but he wasn’t necessarily manifesting these qualities in his everyday actions. His being was out of alignment with his doing. Instead of a harmonious feedback loop—in which being strengthens doing and doing strengthens being—Parker was stuck in gridlock. Too many of his daily activities and routines ran counter to the principles of a more grounded life.

In a famous sermon to his disciples in the early 1300s, the spiritual teacher and mystic Meister Eckhart implored of his followers: “It is not that we should abandon, neglect, or deny our inner self, but we should learn to work precisely in it, with it, and from it in such a way that interiority turns into effective action and effective action leads back to interiority and we become used to acting without any compulsion” (emphasis added).

On her bathroom mirror she wrote: “Stop trying not to lose. Play to win.” It served as a helpful reminder every morning.