Making Space for Everyday Awe: A Workplace Reflection Tool
A new four-week reflection guide from the Next Level Lab invites you to notice, cultivate, and leverage experiences of everyday awe at work.
As the end of the year approaches, many of us find ourselves looking for ways to slow down and reflect on what matters. Often, opportunities for reflection in the context of our personal lives are built into seasonal traditions or rituals, but finding ways to engage in this sort of contemplative practice about work can be more challenging.
In that vein, we’re excited to share Making Space for Everyday Awe, a new four-week guided reflection tool designed by NLL researchers Megan Cuzzolino and Jeff Bachman to help you notice, reflect on, and leverage moments of awe in your work life. Below, we share what inspired this tool, the research principles behind its design, and a few ideas for how you can use it on your own or with your team.
What Our Research Reveals About Awe at Work
Over the past three years, we’ve conducted a series of studies to investigate the nature and impact of awe in the context of work, including an in-depth exploration of the awe experiences of workforce development professionals. This research has surfaced several consistent themes that shaped the design of this reflection tool.
1) Awe at work happens more often than we think.
Although awe often sounds rare or lofty, our research found that most people experience the emotion at least occasionally at work, and a surprising number report having moments of awe monthly or even weekly. This insight mattered for the design of the tool: it suggested that awe is not just something to reflect on when it happens, but something worth looking for regularly. That’s why we built the tool to support a weekly practice – often enough to catch meaningful moments, but not so frequent that it feels forced.
2) Awe at work is largely interpersonal.
Though we often expect awe to be elicited by powerful aesthetic experiences, such as encounters with nature or the arts, awe at work seems to arise most frequently from interactions with other people. Participants in our studies often describe feeling awe when they witness the inspiring behaviors, abilities, or virtues of other individuals in their work environment.
Often, people are awed by colleagues. For instance, an assembly line worker told us that when he made an error that caused a machine to malfunction, he was in awe of the coworker who bravely and skillfully stuck his hands into hot melted plastic to fix it. In other cases, people are awed by their students, patients, customers, or other individuals served by their work, such as a case manager who was awed by the resilience of a client who had survived unimaginable hardship.
Given this finding, our tool prompts users to consider moments of interpersonal connection or inspiration as potential sources of awe that might be sparked for them over the course of a given week.
3) Awe fuels motivation and perspective-taking.
We’ve heard repeatedly that awe leaves people feeling energized and renews their sense of purpose. Many participants point to moments of awe as affirming their chosen career path and motivating them to persist through periods of challenge or burnout. Others say that their awe experiences helped them understand something new or made them think differently about their work, such as a warehouse manager who explained that she rethought her training methods after being awed by a new hire who skillfully completed a task on his first try without any help from her.
For this reason, our reflection tool includes questions that encourage people to link an awe moment to their sense of purpose, values, or identity at work, and to consider whether their awe experience might illuminate any new perspectives or approaches.
4) Awe often goes unnoticed unless people slow down long enough to name it.
Awe is fleeting; in the rush of tasks and responsibilities, most of us simply move on. Yet our research suggests that when people do pause, even briefly, they often uncover insights that translate into real shifts in practice. For example, participants in our research have reported approaching a conversation more openly, taking a risk they might not have otherwise, or appreciating a colleague’s strengths more fully as a result of their awe experiences.
Our reflection tool uses a multiple-choice format for many of the questions, with the choices carefully designed to help people notice and think about factors they might not have considered. We’ve kept each exercise intentionally short—the tool is meant to be something you can use in five minutes at the end of a busy week to capture moments before they slip away.
5) Awe is both emotional and cognitive, and reflection brings the two together.
Awe unfolds as a feeling, but its impact depends on sensemaking: What did this moment show me? What assumptions did it challenge? What possibilities did it open? When we interviewed workers about their awe experiences, they often told us that the process of engaging in deliberate reflection during the interview enabled them to turn an emotional experience into an opportunity for learning.
Our reflection tool is designed to scaffold this process. It begins with prompts to notice and name moments of awe before inviting people to process the meaning of these experiences and plan strategically about how to leverage the power of awe moving forward.
Using the Reflection Tool
The Making Space for Everyday Awe reflection tool is a fillable workbook with four sets of reflection exercises. It’s designed to be revisited weekly, but with flexibility to complete it at whatever pace works best for you. It guides you through:
A brief recollection of a recent awe moment
Reflection on what made it awe-eliciting and what was significant about it
Short “carry it forward” questions and prompts to help you be attentive to moments of awe in the future
The goal isn’t to manufacture awe; instead, it’s to notice what’s already there.
How to Use This Tool at Work
Here are a few practical ways you (or your team) can bring the tool into your workday.
1) Use it as a weekly reset.
Set aside five minutes on Friday afternoons to scan your memory for moments that moved you, surprised you, or shifted your perspective. You may be surprised by how much “everyday awe” accumulates once you start looking for it.
2) Make it part of team meetings.
Many teams begin meetings with a check-in question. To build connection and keep purpose in the foreground, consider asking people to share a recent moment of awe that they’ve documented. If that feels too broad, try anchoring to something more specific, such as “What’s a moment this week that expanded your perspective or reminded you why this work matters?”
3) Use it during periods of challenge or transition.
When work feels overwhelming or directionless, awe reflection can help re-anchor your sense of meaning and broaden the lens through which you see constraints and possibilities. Even during the busiest of times, investing just a few minutes in powerful reflection can pay dividends.
4) Pair it with learning and professional development activities.
Awe often heightens attention, curiosity, and cognitive flexibility. Using the reflection tool before or after a training or workshop can help people absorb insights more deeply.
5) Keep a running “awe log.”
Some people like collecting their completed reflections in a (physical or digital) folder. Over time, this becomes a record of growth, impact, and gratitude—something to revisit during moments of burnout.
Why Awe Matters Now
Workplaces everywhere are grappling with burnout, fragmentation, and a sense of disconnection. Awe cannot solve these structural problems, but it can offer a powerful mindset shift by reminding us that we’re part of a community, that our work has impact, and that meaning often hides in ordinary interactions. Furthermore, awe helps us take a more expansive orientation to our work, inviting us to see the bigger picture and approach problems with a wider lens.
Our hope is that this tool helps you, and your teams, slow down enough to notice the wonder that’s already present in the work you do every day.
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