Got an Awe Inspiring Moment?

Have you heard of ‘the overview effect’? I hadn’t until I recently heard Simon Sinek interview an astronaut (more on this in a minute.)

The gist of the overview effect is astronauts, while orbiting 254-ish miles from the Earth's surface, look back on our little blue marble and see how interconnected we all are. Some reported it to be such a transformative experience that many of them returned with a different mindset.

The A Bit of Optimism is my new favorite podcast, and the interview with Leland Melvin is a great place to start. Simon and Leland talk about being of service and how many astronauts return from their voyage more focused on serving, presumably because of the overview effect.

Their conversation reminded me that you don’t need to be an astronaut to have a version of the overview effect.

I remember standing in the Australian desert, looking at millions of stars, feeling smaller than a speck of sand in the cosmos. I remember examining my 3-hour-old son’s fingernails, wondering how they could be so impossibly tiny. I remember getting just a bit teary as my first flight post-COVID lumbered down the runway, daring to hope that maybe, just maybe, ‘normal’ life was starting again.

What awe-inspiring moments have you experienced? Go ahead and ponder this. I’ll wait….

Are you back? Good! Have you noticed that events like this sometimes yank us out of our everyday view and puts us face-to-face with the big picture? Even remembering those moments can reunite us with the bigger picture. I think the big picture wants us to know something. I don’t know what that something is entirely, but I have a few leads.

Maybe what the big picture wants us to know is mattering matters to us humans, and one way to do work that matters is to be of service. And here’s where I get all caught up. What does “acts of service” mean to you? Does it have to be big to count as an act of service? I worry that an act of service means curing world hunger, finding the cancer vaccine, or saving endangered animals from extinction. There’s only one great Jane Goodall (and she’s not me). But here’s the thing, this grandiose definition is limiting. It’s not that these causes aren’t important. They are. It’s just that I probably won’t be the solver. But that doesn’t mean I can’t be of service every day.

I’ve been noticing micro-acts of service in others. A kind word. A compliment. Being polite. A well-meaning joke. A smile. All of these things can put a little boost in someone’s step for a minute, an hour, or a day. All of us can be of service starting right now. All these little kindnesses can improve others’ lives.

Looping back to the topic of this blog which is engagement, you may have heard me explain that my formula for engagement is value + experience = engagement. The value part of the equation is your benefits, products, services, content, and events. The experience part is all the interactions with staff, leadership, others in the community, the website, etc.

In my research, when I talk to people about engagement, they tell stories about their experiences. They often recount a kind word, a compliment, a smile. Adding more experiential elements to the value you deliver sounds like a business strategy, but it is also an act of service. 🥹