Rido / Adobe Stock / Sarah Soryal
Key Takeaways
- Savoring is the act and art of extending positive feelings — about anything.
- When we cultivate wonder as an orientation to leadership and life, it helps us — and others — open up to possibility.
- Savoring doesn’t depend on the happenstance of external things. It rests with us to choose it.
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Despite these times of extreme change, uncertainty, and complexity, many leaders still expect that they, and the people who work for them, should leave their worries at the proverbial office door. If that ever was a reasonable expectation, however, it clearly no longer is.
Across industries and at all levels, people are overwhelmed, exhausted, and burning out like never before. The consequence: ever-growing disengagement, which undermines individual well-being and organizational productivity and performance.
In its most recent State of the Global Workplace report, Gallup found that the percentage of engaged employees dropped from 23% to a meagre 21% last year — a decline equal to that seen during COVID-19 lockdowns.
There are many contributors to this. Friction around return-to-work orders. Increasing financial stressors and polarization. The rise of AI.
And there is yet another big one that fails to get the attention or response it deserves. As the authors of another Gallup report, The State of the World’s Emotional Health 2025, succinctly put it, “The world is on an emotional edge.”
Have you ever spent most of your day worrying? It turns out, 39% of the more than 145,000 people Gallup surveyed said they did — just the day before. In addition, hundreds of millions more people routinely experience worry and stress than a decade ago, the report also finds.
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Of course, we live in what experts call a polycrisis: an age of many interconnected crises seemingly happening everywhere at once. These range from the cost-of-living crisis to the climate crisis, the misinformation crisis, and the mental health crisis.
Given all that, the prevalence of worry is surely understandable. It just isn’t healthy or helpful. As abundant research shows, worry tends to narrow thinking, impair decision making, and erode connection — none of which is good for leaders, teams, organizations, or society.
So, what would happen if we flipped the script — from worry to wonder? Or to put another way, to stop feeling that we somehow need to save the world and start focusing more on savoring it?
From worry to wonder
When we speak of wonder, we often think of what might better be described as moments of awe, such as the joy of seeing thousands of starlings fly in synchronized, swirling movements above our heads.
But wonder is much more than a momentary feeling we either stumble upon or don’t. When we cultivate wonder as an orientation to leadership and life, it helps us — and others — open up to possibility. It reduces stress, rumination, and emotional exhaustion. It also fosters creativity, connection, and resilience.
As the late Rachel Carson wrote in a little gem of a book called The Sense of Wonder, “Those who contemplate the beauty of the Earth find reserves of strength that will endure as long as life lasts.”
And, yes, I know. That’s all well and good for weekends and holidays. But leaders can’t be expected to take their teams out to contemplate the beauty of the Earth when financial pressures, deadlines, and customer and stockholder expectations are looming. How could this apply in the workplace? This is where savoring comes in.
Savoring in the workplace
Savoring is the act and art of extending positive feelings — about anything. You don’t have to round up your team and head to the woods.
For example, one leader recently told me that she takes photos of salamanders, which she finds fascinating, and sends them to a team member whose son loves them. It takes very little time, but it extends her positive feelings and, by sharing them, forges connection.
Another leader I know makes it a habit of saying something he genuinely appreciates about the people he works with, week after week. Doing so rarely takes more than a minute or two, but the impact is enduring, as people tend to be more open to him than they would be to those who lean more toward criticism or have no sense of appreciation at all.
So, what if, in these times when so much needs fixing — and most of us feel time-crunched — savoring were a simple and effective way to build a culture where leaders and teams have more emotional bandwidth to face complexity and stay creative without burning out?
What if, to put it another way, we thought of savoring as a much-needed sense of leadership maturity and helpful antidote to the fantasy that people leave their abundant worries at the office door?
What the research shows
A growing body of research suggests savoring is about much more than you may suspect — namely, being nice.
One 2025 study published in the journal Personality and Individual Differences finds that feeling and extending positive emotional states — “a phenomenon known as savoring” — leads to improvements in self-esteem, self-compassion, mindfulness, and positive reappraisal, a coping strategy in which people deliberately reinterpret a stressful or adverse event in a more constructive, meaningful, or beneficial way.
Research also shows that savoring reduces stress and other forms of psychological distress, as well as depression. And strengthening positive emotions and mental well-being, in turn, tends to improve our capacity for positive interactions with others.
Several things are important here that may not be immediately obvious: One is that savoring is about self-agency. It is about choosing to extend our positive feelings and well-being rather than letting those moments quickly pass away like a leaf blown by the wind.
This means that instead of experiencing ourselves as people who may or may not stumble upon a moment of awe, wonder, or joy, we become people who are both on the lookout for such experiences — and give them legs. Cultivating savoring in the workplace helps leaders and teams catch, as it were, otherwise passing good moments and helps them become a bigger part of us. It puts the many benefits of awe and other positive experiences more in our control.
Have you ever spent most of your day worrying? It turns out, 39% of the more than 145,000 people Gallup surveyed said they did — just the day before.
Second, we tend to have habits that either amplify or dampen the experience of savoring. Some of us, for example, have a habit of minimizing the positive emotions associated with positive experiences — quickly moving on to the next thing or adding what didn’t feel right — perhaps because someone else chided us for being too emotional, too Pollyanna-ish, or just plain too much. Others, in contrast, may embrace such experiences as we might a particularly delicious meal. We slow down and give it space to fill us up.
Finally, the domain of things leaders and teams can savor, as suggested above, is not limited to those occasions of stumbling on a glorious sunset or winning a big new contract. Research shows that, even in hard times, people can reap the benefits of savoring experiences they had in the past or anticipate in the future.
Savoring, in other words, doesn’t depend on the happenstance of external things. It rests with us to choose it as an orientation to leadership and to cultivate a culture that counterbalances the many stressors in today’s workplaces, both those arising at work and those brought into the office.
Ultimately, it is developing practices that help people stop getting caught up in so much unproductive, unhealthy, and disempowering time spent in worry and, instead, reconnect with the wonder of what is good as a wiser, healthier, and more effective orientation to our uncertain times.
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