Wellness Wednesday – “Improving Our Engagement In Life”

For this Wellness Wednesday, we continue exploring how to increase our overall wellness by examining Martin Seligman’s PERMA-V model of well-being. This week, we consider the “E” of this well-being model, which stands for “Engagement.” Engagement is about experiencing more flow in our daily callings in life, where we live in the present moment, engaging with the best of who God has created and gifted us to be to accomplish the tasks at hand. Engagement, or flow, is the intersection where challenge and skill/strength is found. Gallup defines engagement in the workplace as “involvement and enthusiasm of employees in their work and workplace.” Engagement is not just about presence and going through the motions in regards to our daily tasks but doing so in a way that engages our heart and the best we have to offer in life.

Sadly, in today’s world, many don’t feel that sense of engagement, using the best of who they are every day, in their daily vocations that God has given them in love and service to others. Gallup has found that at the start of this year, 32% of employees in the U.S. are engaged at work, and 18% are actively disengaged. That means that 68% of employees are currently disengaged or actively disengaged in their jobs. No wonder so many feel stress, burnout, and a lack of passion for their work because they are not able to connect their work to the best that they have to offer. Consider these statistics compared to Barna’s recent survey of the well-being of those who serve in full-time ministry. In 2022, 40% of those in full-time ministry were experiencing burnout, and 41% had considered quitting in the last year. To quote a line made famous from the Apollo 13 incident as we consider engagement among church workers, “Houston, we have a problem.”

So, how can you increase your engagement level in your various callings in life and ministry, resulting in experiencing greater fulfillment, joy, and overall well-being? Here are a few helpful thoughts for you to consider implementing:

• Discover, develop, and employ your God-given talents and strengths in your daily callings in life. Research on engagement has found that those who try to use their strengths in new ways each day for a week are happier and less depressed after six months. According to Gallup’s data, those who focus on developing a strengths-based life are three times as likely to report having an excellent quality of life and six times more likely to be engaged in their jobs. Why? Because they get to do what they do best every day.

• Do some “job sculpting,” which is about offloading those things that don’t fit within your “strengths zone.” These activities take more time and energy to accomplish because those tasks don’t match up with your God-given talents; the natural ways you think, feel, and behave in life. While we can’t do this perfectly in life, and there are always things we are going to have to do that fall outside of our strengths zone, the more you can offload those things that drain you and focus more on those things that energize you, and you excel at because of your talents, the more engaged you will be.

• Develop a specialty. Those of us in full-time ministry can often feel like doctors who are general practitioners rather than specialists. We can feel like a “jack of all trades, a master of none” in ministry. Try to find an interest, a passion, or a talent that you excel at and develop it into a particular focus of ministry to engage in, either within your congregation, the Church-at-large, or beyond the walls of your church within your community.

• Practice a greater sense of mindfulness, living in the moment, even during daily activities or mundane tasks.

• Spend time in nature, watching, listening, and observing what happens around you.

• Participate in activities you love and in which you lose track of time.

• Engage with God in His Word, spending time in devotion and prayers as you consider the blessings of your calling in Christ by grace through faith, and are empowered by His Spirit to live out your calling in Him in your various areas of responsibilities in life.

In closing, let us consider these words from 1 Peter 4:10-11 as we seek to increase our engagement in love and service to others in our various callings in life, “Each of you should use whatever gift you have received to serve others, as faithful stewards of God’s grace in its various forms. If anyone speaks, they should do so as one who speaks the very words of God. If anyone serves, they should do so with the strength God provides, so that in all things God may be praised through Jesus Christ. To him be the glory and the power for ever and ever. Amen.”