What Is Your Life Showing You? A Year-End Reflection
Pine Park, Dartmouth College, Hanover, NH. Picture taken by Sloane Miller
On NPR this week, Zadie Smith quoted Salman Rushdie: “Our lives teach us who we are.”
It’s deceptively simple. We can think many things about who we are: our values, our intentions, our best selves. But when we pause and look honestly, it’s our lived patterns that tell the truth. How we spend our time. What we say yes to. What we avoid. What energizes us and what drains us.
This idea maps beautifully onto Richard Boyatzis’ work on the Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA).
In his research, Boyatzis describes two dominant motivational states we move between:
The Negative Emotional Attractor (NEA) is a psychological state driven by stress, fear, anxiety, or guilt. It focuses on problems and weaknesses to motivate short-term action or avoid negative outcomes.
The Positive Emotional Attractor (PEA) is a psychological state marked by optimism and growth-oriented emotions such as hope, joy, and purpose. It activates the brain’s creative centers and motivates us toward our ideal future self, supporting learning and sustainable change.
Here’s the key insight that ties these ideas together: Your life reveals which state you’ve been living from most often.
If your days feel constricted, reactive, or endlessly stressed because you’re problem-fixing, it’s often the NEA running the show. The NEA is efficient in the short term, but exhausting over time. It narrows attention and keeps us surviving rather than becoming.
The PEA, by contrast, is expansive. When we’re anchored there, we access creativity, resilience, compassion, and long-term change. We’re more aligned with who we want to be, not just who circumstances demand we become.
Here are some questions I invite you to sit with as the year closes:
What is your life showing you about who you’ve been this year?
What emotional state has most shaped your choices?
What would you like your life to be showing you instead?
Coaching intentionally activates the PEA, helping you reconnect with your values, strengths, and desired future self. From that place, change becomes not just possible—but sustainable.
Your life is always teaching you. Coaching helps you decide what lesson comes next.