Recently, I sent out a survey to readers and email subscribers to ask how I might be most helpful to their finding meaningful, purposeful lives that help the world. I’m still analyzing results and will say more later. But for now, one of the questions was “What obstacles do you face when it comes to feeling as though your efforts in life are helpful to the people and world around you?”
One frequent answer that came up was the feeling that “no one seems to notice or care about the efforts that I make.” People said that they don’t do what they do to help their communities and the world for praise, but they do get down that they are so often unacknowledged for their efforts.
How can we get acknowledgment for our work? Perhaps by helping to start a trend of acknoweldgement by acknowledging others.
In a recent post on Ten Ways to Overcome Futility that people seemed to like a lot, I suggested that:
Instead of focussing on how bad the opposition is, focus on how amazing your allies are: Don’t think about the power of the oil companies or of your boss or whomever else stands in your way. Don’t think about the ignorance of people who don’t seem to care. Think about how much love and effort and beauty your allies are putting into the work alongside you.
In other words, we can help overcome our own feelings of futility by taking some of the time we spend criticizing our opponents and use it to give our allies the acknowledgement my survey says we all so badly need.
It turns out that this is not just my opinion. In her book the How of Happiness, Sonja Lyubomirsky wrote:
In a recent study from my laboratory, we found that simply writing a gratitude letter and not sending or otherwise delivering it was enough to produce substantial boosts in happiness. Participants were asked to identify several individuals who had been especially kind to them over the past several years. Those who spent fifteen minutes once a week (over eight weeks) writing letters of gratitude to these individuals became much happier during and after the study. The happiness boost was especially pronounced if the study participants were particularly motivated to become happier, if the gratitude letter activity fitted their goals and preferences, and if they put extra effort into the writing task.
Why wouldn’t it work if we wrote a letter to someone to acknowledge the good work they have done to help the world? What if we wrote short gratitude notes to people for the work we see them do with elderly or kids or on climate or on donating to homeless organizations or working on race issues or simply being kind to neighbors?
My predication is that it would make them happier and give them more energy to do their good work–since the survey says many of us need acknowledgment–while also boosting our own happiness, according to Lyubomirsky’s research.
So Try This:
Suppose you have been working on climate or race or any other social good and you feel you need acknowledgement. How about if you tried identifying someone else who has been doing similar good work to you? What would happen if you wrote them a short note that acknowledged them? What if you said, “I know what it feels like to go unacknowledged from my own experience so I wanted to acknowledge you.”
Try it. Try it now. Write to five people a short paragraph about how grateful you are to them for their good work. You don’t even have to send it. But what if you did? What if you emailed them right now? How does that make you feel? How did it make them feel?
If nothing else, wouldn’t that go someway to helping us all feel as though our good work is seen by someone?
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