Tchiki S. Davis

We are at a precipice. At this moment, we can continue on our current path of stress, disease, and burnout, forever putting profit and success above human wellness. Or, we can come together to make fundamental social changes that enable us to re-prioritize health, well-being, and thriving. I believe the well-being revolution has already started, and it is unfolding right in front of our eyes.

The well-being revolution

Everywhere I look, it seems, people are turning away from the 9-5 desk job in favor of more creative, flexible, and meaningful life pursuits. A critical mass of people are coming together for Consciousness Hacking meetups and pursuing their passions with the mission to develop Transformative Technology. Products and services that help us understand and improve employee well-being are proliferating. And tools that help people to learn happiness skills are popping up all over the place (For example, at The Berkeley Well-Being Institute, the Greater Good Science Center, Potentia Labs, and Happify, just to name a few.) As a nation, we are sick and tired of being sick and tired.

Supporting the well-being revolutionaries

This week I was asked to brainstorm how we can best support the well-being revolutionaries. My colleague asked “How can we build a community that provides every person emotional, spiritual, and business support to actualize their gifts, live authentically, and pursue vocational callings that are in alignment with their true purpose?” If we are indeed undergoing a cultural shift, we need to develop communities that provide scaffolding for the people who are ushering in this new way of living.

Creating community within our current cultural context

Building communities is fundamentally about socialization. Socialization is the process by which we learn about and adopt socio-cultural norms. For example, if I work at a company where everyone works 80 hour weeks, I quickly learn that I should work an 80 hour week. If I go to a grocery store where everyone pushes people in the aisles to get by, I learn that I should push people in the aisles to get by.  And if I spend time with friends who are always telling me how stressed they are, I will even start to act in ways that make me more stressed just so that I feel like I fit in. It is our nature to conform to group behaviors, even if we know those behaviors are bad for us.

Rewriting internal scripts

Our internal scripts about how to behave, think, and feel about well-being need not be erased, they need to be re-written. American scripts – for example, “the American dream”, “Pulling yourself up by your bootstraps”, and “If you work hard, you can achieve anything” – have driven us to strive for success, power, prestige, and profit. This socialization is powerful, it is enduring, and it operates without us even knowing it.

If a revolution is to take place, we have to create new powerful messages – messages that redefine success as living authentically, purposefully, and healthfully. Any community that aims to passionately and fervently advocate for wellness needs to create strong scripts that are regularly reinforced, so that people have something they can work together to achieve.

Teaching people the social norms of the new community

Creating a community like this will need to be deliberate. For example, let’s say Billy and Joe both went to the same elementary school but now they are assigned to different middle schools. On Billy’s first day of school, he is given a locker and schedule. He is told he must figure the rest out on his own. This school may not have deliberately been trying to teach Billy about the culture, it just happened. Billy is being taught to operate independently at his new school.

On Joe’s first day of school, he is assigned a “first-day” buddy to help Joe learn the culture. The buddy introduces Joe to people and teaches Joe about lunchtime activity groups. Every single person Joe meets introduces themselves and asks him about himself. At the end of the first day, the school organizes a big gathering for all the new students and asks them to form teams to develop self-directed projects based on their interests. This school is deliberate about teaching their students that this culture expects students to be creative, active, and collaborative participants in their own learning.

There is nothing inherently wrong with either of these schools approaches. The point is that it’s human nature to go along with social norms. If you aren’t deliberately teaching members about your culture, some type of culture will emerge on its own. It may or may not be one of wellness and thriving. So figure out what type of culture you want, then teach your community the behaviors that create that culture.

If you want to learn more about how I can help your organization measure or improve well-being, feel free to contact me or visit me at berkeleywellbeing.com.