by Eddie Pipkin

Did you win a gold medal at the Winter Olympics last month or an Oscar the other night?  Me neither.  So, clearly, neither of those accomplishments is going to be the key to our ultimate happiness.  What about if we select the perfect March Madness bracket?  Or we finally complete a Pulitzer Prize winning play?  Or we get the promotion we always wanted?  Or finally run that marathon?  All worthy goals, surely, but according to scientists (and based on our own personal experience if we’re honest), none of those epic achievements is going to land us in the nirvana of contentment and completion.  We’ll be thrilled for a bit and then restless again.  Us and everybody else we’re doing ministry with.

We work so hard towards specific goals and yet the feeling of accomplishment once we check those goals off our list can be so fleeting.  It’s frustrating, and it’s totally human.

The NY Times’ sports section, The Athletic, has a newsletter called Peak that explores the psychological side of sports.  It’s always a great read, and following the Olympics it featured an article called “Most of us are bad at predicting what will make us happy, including the world’s best athletes.”  I often think of little ol’ me as inept at managing my own psychological landscape, but world class athletes with gold medals . . . c’mon!  Surely, they find themselves on the mountaintop and live the rest of their lives with a sense of accomplishment and peace.  Not so much, it turns out!  They, too, struggle.  They, too, can find themselves surprised that they are still hungry for more.

As ministry leaders, it’s important for us to understand this utterly normal psychological sensation, because it has effects on our organizations, on our teams, and in the people we lead.  It’s one of the primary ingredients in our organizational seasons of peaks and valleys; it’s one of the drivers of the uncomfortable disaffectedness of staff members and volunteers (in a culture that promotes how filled with joy and mission we should constantly be); it is one of the causes of burnout and dislocation for those who participate in our ministries.

If we don’t remind people (and ourselves) how normal this cycle is and how to live with it and learn from it, we risk people turning away and abandoning things about which they were once passionate.

I’ve written in this space before about the “hedonic treadmill,” that sense that it takes increasingly bigger and better things and more increasingly challenging moments to create the same sense of excitement in our lives.  That’s part of what’s going on here.

Also though, we struggle with “the arrival fallacy,” which is the compulsion to achieve a greater, majestic goal, because that accomplishment will be the “it” moment that will finally establish our ever-lasting happiness and sense of completeness.  The article I cited earlier, “Most of us are bad at predicting what will make us happy,” recounts the inadequacy of this proposition, citing no less a protagonist than golf’s number one practitioner, Scottie Scheffler, who has spoken openly about how being the best golfer in the world is still, surprisingly, not enough.

“Here was a professional athlete, balanced, self aware, ruthlessly competitive and intimately acquainted with what really mattered — family, friends, “the deepest wants and desires of my heart,” Scheffler said — and none of that seemed to matter. He still struggled with the same cognitive trap.”

The article pivots to happiness expert Arthur Brooks who says that this confusing cognitive impulse is just “how we are wired.”  It’s one of the realities of human design that keeps us striving for more, but if it gets out of balance, it can be harmful.  We’ve all had that feeling of the best Easter season ever (!), followed by a disappointing sense of emptiness in the weeks to follow.  It’s weird, isn’t it?

Psychologists offer this explanation for that unexpected effect:

“One of the primary reasons people are bad at forecasting their emotions is something called “focalism,” a cognitive bias in which people tend to narrowly focus their attention on big events while ignoring all the smaller aspects of their lives. [Daniel] Kahneman, one of the giants of psychology, had once captured the idea in a simple line: “Nothing in life is as important as you think it is, while you are thinking about it.’”

Brooks suggests downplaying the anticipated ‘podium moment’ and instead focusing on “intention without attachment,” focusing on the beauty and purpose of the work itself, the benefits of the practice of the pursuit of the goal, without getting caught up in an obsession of winning or the laurels of achievement.

Brooks notes that people find a sustained level of happiness and contentment practice these six things:

  • They ask deep questions.
  • They fall in love.
  • They look upward.
  • They’re very spiritual or philosophical.
  • They find calling in their work, not just achievement in their work.
  • They seek a lot of beauty in nature, art, music.

And then Brooks adds one more essential, profound thing:

“[T]hey understand the nature of their suffering. They’re not afraid of their suffering. That’s what people who find meaning actually do.”

Let us note the ways in which healthy participation in local church life provides excellent opportunities to engage and develop those seven practices.

  • The local church encourages people to engage with deep questions.
  • The local church encourages people to fall in love with God and with their neighbors.
  • The local church encourages people to practice awe on a daily basis.
  • The local church provides resources and partnership for spiritual growth.
  • The local church connects people with meaningful work in serving others and making the world a better place.
  • The local work shares ways to engage in beauty, music, art, and even nature.
  • The local church brings useful context to suffering and grief and provides a community with which to share suffering and grief.

Events and programs are not ends unto themselves.

They should always be conducted in service to those seven practices, for those with the privilege of leading them and for those who are participating in them.

How do you do personally with maintaining an even keel as you pursue challenging goals.  Do you intentionally pursue the practices that Brooks identifies as those that give us purpose and lead to contentment?  Do the teams and organizations you are responsible for leading focus on these practices?  Trophies are nice, but really they are just a fun byproduct of every day well-lived.