There’s this recurring dream I’ve had since childhood. I’m watching an expansive sky that’s aflame with glorious sunset colors. Streaks of luminous blues, oranges, pinks, purples morph and interweave, becoming more exquisite by the second. In these dreams, my heart brims with awe and gratitude, and I always wake up with a few happy tears in my eyes.
A good day usually follows!
The Primal Need for Beautiful Experiences
Ethologist Adriaan Kortland once observed a chimpanzee foregoing dinner just to stand and gaze at a sunset for a full fifteen minutes. Bowerbirds build extravagant, color-coordinated structures using vibrant foliage, shells, and shiny objects to woo mates. When elephants hear music, they can be observed flapping their ears, swaying their trunks, or standing quietly near the sound source. And of course, there’s the guy the internet loves, famous for singing to rapt animals, including crocodiles.
Do we need to be careful about projecting our own complex aesthetic experiences onto animals? Well, yeah. But enough evidence exists to suggest that the draw towards beauty may extend beyond our own species, which perhaps says something about how fundamental a tie exists between beauty and basic thriving.
The Unmet Leadership Need Hiding in Plain Sight
In my coaching practice with business leaders experiencing burnout, one of my foundational methods involves helping clients identify unmet needs. High-achieving leaders have often spent so long suppressing their needs that simply the permission to admit they have needs is a tremendous relief.
Many are surprised to discover that they really do need more beauty in their life. The emerging field of Aesthetic Leadership shows that exposing leaders to guided experiences of beauty (nature, art) induces powerful mindset shifts. Feeling a sense of beauty helps leaders build stronger emotional connections with their teams. And aesthetic experiences help leaders notice subtle problems, feel less stressed, and open up to new, creative solutions for difficult future problems.
It’s About Meaning
The need for beauty is really about the need for meaning. We need to make sense of our story—our choices, our sufferings, our victories, and all the things that make life worth living. The world of meaning is very powerful medicine for the burnt-out soul, and beauty is often the doorway to that world.
Now, it’s not like our world lacks for shiny, enjoyable things. But that’s not the same as real beauty. The algorithms controlling what you scroll past on that portable rectangle in your pocket know just what you want to see, hear, taste, touch (and, most importantly, buy).
While digitally mediated beauty can be real, it eclipses other, more natural and ultimately nourishing, mediators of beauty. A non-comprehensive list, in no particular order:
· To take a walk in the woods (natural beauty).
· To attend a live concert (musical beauty).
· To rendezvous with a lover (romantic beauty).
· To decide to pray after a long period of not praying (spiritual beauty).
· To read a biography of a person who sacrificed everything and died for a worthy cause (moral beauty).
· To gaze at a piece of art and really encounter its essence (artistic beauty).
These require something of us—planning, courage, immersion. Often, they require physical movement and/or coordination with other people. Sometimes they require significant amounts of time and money. And always, they require sustained attention—gazing, listening, touching, taking it in, letting it permit us to remember what truly matters.
Permission to Meet Your Need
Brené Brown has this lovely exercise she does with leaders, where she asks them (paraphrasing here), “What do you need to give yourself permission for, in order to show up well here?” People pull out post-it notes, and write things like, “I give myself permission to ask for help when I’m overwhelmed,” or “I give myself permission to make mistakes while I learn.”
If something in this newsletter struck a chord, I have an invitation for you. Pull out a piece of paper, and write, “I give myself permission to experience beauty by _____________.”
Finish the sentence in as specific a manner as possible.
· “By buying tickets to that concert… tonight.”
· “By dusting off and framing those handmade paintings my grandmother made and gave me years ago.”
· “By memorizing X poem by X poet.”
· “By walking that one trail where the sunlight dapples through the trees just so.”
· “By journaling about an ‘unsung hero’ in my life who has inspired me.”
You’re not a machine, you’re a being. You get to stop and feel the gift of being alive. As soon as you really believe and practice this, something amazing will germinate and grow in you. It’s the calm, connected confidence of someone who knows what matters and what doesn’t. It’s the feeling of being more authentically human in a world that’s sickeningly shiny, fake, and automated. What an unspeakable gift – to your tired heart, and the tired hearts of those you lead.
Chase the sunset,
Andrea Hollingsworth
