Feeling Lost or Behind in Life? The #1 Happiness Expert Explains How to Find Your Purpose

Mel Robbins brings in Dacher Keltner — UC Berkeley psychology professor, founding director of the Greater Good Science Center, author of the book Awe — and the first half is a sustained attack on the idea that purpose is something outside you waiting to be discovered. Keltner defines purposeful and purposeless as states: sharp focus and dopamine-driven forward motion versus diffuse, listless attention. Purpose shows up when what you're doing feels connected to something larger than yourself — his example is cellist Yumi Kendall, who feels tied to the audience and to the history of music every time she plays. He leans on Amy Wrzesniewski's Yale research on calling, including the hospital worker cleaning bedpans who saw his job as keeping the place safe, and on his own story: losing his younger brother left him, a lifelong hardworking academic, feeling dislocated and purposeless, and the way back was deliberately small — a daily commitment to kindness and volunteering, including inside a prison.

The practical spine of the episode is a short toolkit. Two questions locate your calling: what inspired you as a child (for Keltner, dinosaurs at age five), and who has inspired you in your life (for him, the Dalai Lama on a 2003 panel). Then a taxonomy of core strengths — knowledge, courage, kindness, justice, transcendence, creativity — with the twist that your strength is where you come alive, not what you're good at or paid for; Keltner says he was raised by an artist and a literature professor, can't make art himself, but comes most alive in museums and theaters. The second half turns to his awe research: awe as the emotion you feel at vast things you can't classify, studied in national parks, art museums, at the Great Wall, even mosh pits. In the brain, awe quiets the default mode network — the ego's to-do-list machinery — and activates the vagus nerve. His numbers: brief awe practices reduced PTSD in veterans by 32%, and he tells rooms of doctors there is nothing better for mind and body than a minute of awe a day, tied to lower depression, anxiety and daily stress.

The episode's centerpiece is an on-air experiment: Keltner walks Robbins through an awe practice with a bouquet — tree peony, anemones, snapdragons, Queen Anne's lace — moving from fine detail to the whole, then smell, then touch. Her associations spill out: roses that smell like weddings and her grandmother, cut grass that means her dad mowing the lawn, the raised flower beds her husband Chris built because voles kept eating her tulip bulbs. Keltner then describes the awe-walk study with Virginia Sturm — adding vast-to-small attention to a weekly walk left people 75 and older reporting less bodily pain, with a paper under review pointing at better brain health six years later. Robbins offers her own twist: hunting for naturally occurring heart shapes in clouds and oil stains, now a family group-chat habit. It closes with Eleanor Roosevelt's nightly prayer about seeing the simple beauties around her, which Keltner says has carried him through inherited anxiety and grief.