I’ve watched a lot of races recently: Olympic races, political races, and of course, various rat races so many of us run just to survive in this difficult world. 

I’ve spent a lot of my life joining various races, trying to win things like academic degrees, bestseller status, and financial success. I’ve coached many race-winners, including top athletes, business tycoons, and movie stars.

Here’s what I’ve learned: Grabbing the gold medal, the highest rank, the Oscar (or whatever), will give you a burst of pleasure. But within weeks, days, or even a few short hours, you’ll feel pretty much the way you did before you won.

On the other hand, if you can find a way to enjoy the race, you’ve already won the only prize that really matters.

The real reason we struggle through so many races is that we believe winning will make us happy—lastingly, deeply happy. We want to feel just a few simple things: peace, love, and joy. 

If you’re grinding along in this or that race, hoping to earn these experiences, you’re trying too hard. Because all the things we truly want to feel are available to us, right now, if we can figure out how to access them. 

So how do we do that?

I found many strategies while researching and writing Beyond Anxiety, my latest book, which comes out in January 2025. I found that anxiety is like a toxic screen that blocks our ability to feel peace, love, and joy. Those feelings are always inside us, waiting patiently to be noticed.  

Strategy #1: Focus on an Uplifting Story

Virtually all anxiety occurs when the verbal parts of our brains begin telling, retelling, and embellishing disturbing stories about Bad Things that May Happen. We lie awake horrified by thoughts of an unpredictable, uncontrollable future. We do not have the serenity to accept the things we cannot change. We’re desperate to control the world, other people, our own mortality, the entire universe…

What we can change is the internal narrative. How? Any Wayfinder Coach can guide you through ways of helping your anxious mind let go. In the meantime, try focusing on someone else’s narrative, a story about how someone else found peace in the midst of trouble.

Here are three books that will pull you into the stories of people who won life’s greatest prizes—peace, love, joy—in situations most of us dread. Give them a look (or, if you’re an audible-book fan like me, a listen).

• In one year, my new friend Steven Petrow lost both his parents, his marriage, and a beloved sister who died young from a brutal cancer. In his book The Joy We Make, Steven writes about teaching himself to experience joy in the midst of all these awful losses.
• In her memoir Left to Tell, author and speaker Imaculée Ilibagiza described how she found her way to unshakeable peace and love during the Rwandan genocide, as she hid for months in a tiny bathroom, knowing the neighbors had killed her family and were hunting her. 
• Bruce Greyson, M.D., known as the world’s leading authority on near-death experiences, has compiled hundreds of stories from people who temporarily “died,” often in severe trauma. In his book After: A Doctor Explores What Near-Death Experiences Reveal about Life and Beyond, Greyson writes that virtually all these near-death experiencers described the process of dying as filled with love, peace, and joy.

Do these books sound like colossal buzz-killers? They’re actually the opposite. They’ll guide you out of our culture’s obsession with infinite success, eternal youth, and immortality, into the peace and joy that are always present in our cores.

Strategy #2: Fill the Well

Most of us are drained from running various life races: doing our jobs, caring for loved ones, trying to keep the house clean and the car running. When you’re really tired, even the best self-help strategies, or even reading, just feels like more work. At this point, I suggest the following steps:

• Lie flat.
  I thought I was the only person with this motto until it became a movement in China. “Lie flat” was the clarion call that urged overworked Chinese citizens to passively resist the national work system, which they saw as a rat race with diminishing returns. I have “lie flat” days when my back goes into spasm, when I’ve lost my center, or when I’m just plain tired. But if you can only lie flat for a few minutes, it will still help.
• Imbibe delight.
  We have access to more real-life inspiration than any generation in history. As you lie flat, drink in things from the internet that delight you: podcasts, poetry, music, movies, or real-life anecdotes. For example, there’s the true story of Murphy, a 32-year-old male bald eagle at the World Bird Sanctuary who built a nest and incubated a rock until his humans exchanged it with an orphaned eagle chick. Murphy and his eaglet bonded into a happy little family. Try watching Murphy’s tale, and let the algorithms feed you other stories like it.
• Hang loose.
  As you imbibe, don’t focus. Don’t take notes. Just allow yourself to float along with someone else’s brilliant creation. And then…

Strategy #3: Drop Out of Stories and Into Your Senses

Creating things—art, music, our living spaces, our relationships, anything that requires creative focus—wipes anxiety right out of our brains, at least while we’re actively doing them. If you want to feel the peace that rises when our stories go silent, practice your favorite way to create. If you can’t think of anything, try one of these: 

• Learn to juggle using feathers or silk scarves—anything that falls slowly.
• Tape over the labels on all your spice jars, then cook a pot of stew or spaghetti sauce, adjusting the recipe solely by smell and taste.
• If you’ve ever learned to play a musical instrument, or if you would like to, dig that instrument out of the attic, or borrow or rent one. Learn to play ten seconds of your favorite music. Then learn to play the next ten seconds, and so on. You’ll fail a lot before you succeed, but while you’re focused on the music, your anxious mind will go silent, and you’ll be fully present in “flow,” the state of mind that offers deepest fulfillment.
• Set up a dinner party for three or more of your favorite people. If they don’t know each other, your mission includes creating activities that will help them feel at ease becoming friends.

All creative pursuits appeal more to some of us than to others. But if you pick an area that lights you up, the act of creation always dispels anxiety. You may feel frustration and effort—but at the same time, as you enter flow, your core sensations will be peace and enjoyment.

Any of these strategies, and infinite others, will pull back the screen of anxiety and let you see that you can always access peace and joy, because your true self is made of peace and joy.

In that moment, in that step, you’ll actually feel the things you expected to come only with “success.” You’ll be standing in the winner’s circle. And you’ll find that there’s room in it for all of us.