Why Dr Julia Baird is searching for grace (and you should too)

As Dr Julia Baird scans the room she poses a question to the crowd before homing in on a single voice.

Moments earlier the acclaimed Australian journalist and author used part of her keynote address at the FW Leadership Summit 2024 to discuss the subject of goosebumps. Specifically, the feeling of awe they deliver.

“Put your hand up if you had one in the last, say, month,” Baird asks the audience from the stage of the Shangri-La Hotel’s ballroom Sydney.

“Okay, keep it up if it’s the last week. That’s good. And what about the last day?”

As one summit attendee raises a hand, Baird steps forward. 

“What was yours in the last day?” she asks, before learning the catalyst was music.

The ABC broadcaster openly admits she has a keen interest in goosebumps, intently seeking them out, or more specifically the feeling of awe they deliver. She wrote her award winning book, Phosphorescence, on the topic.

“So today, scientists measure the emotion or phenomenon or awe in goosebumps. It does actual things to our body,” she says. 

“It does things to our heart rate. It does things to our levels of stress. And I’ve spent the last few years of my life very intensely focused on awe and hunting it and pursuing it. It’s really commonly described as when you stop in your tracks when you forget about yourself when you’re taken outside of yourself and, in a way, you feel small.

“You know, in the vastness of the universe, underneath the sky at the edge of an ocean, in front of great art, listening to beautiful music, listening to someone who speaks from the heart, watching Taylor Swift or the Matildas.”

Guests putting their hands up during Baird’s keynote at the FW Leadership Summit

She says her search for awe began while ocean swimming in waters off Manly on Sydney’s Northern Beaches. It was during those swims she witnessed the natural phenomenon of phosphorescence, which inspired her 2020 memoir of the same name.

“(In the book) I made the case for the physical, the mental health benefits and the sheer joy of awe and the research on it really is astounding,” she says.

“It shows that when we experience awe regularly we’re more likely to feel connected to each other, be altruistic, be calmer and be more content.

Her hunger for awe has reached a point where she builds chasing actual phosphorescence into all of her family’s holidays. 

“It’s like we share the same kind of hunger, a yearning for something else, something that takes us away from our own dramas and our own foibles and something that we share something that actually unites us.”

Though awe is not always felt by everyone at expected times. She shared one humorous antidote where her children struggled to find awe when a visit to see whale sharks at Ningaloo in Western Australia resulted in four days without WiFi.

“I was really blown away by the nerve that (Phosphorescence) struck. I had so much correspondence from people saying, ‘Me too, I feel the same’,” she says.

“It’s like we share the same kind of hunger, a yearning for something else, something that takes us away from our own dramas and our own foibles and something that we share something that actually unites us.”

She suggests the moments of awe also paves the way for another element.

“It’s also for a moment of grace, in a way, that we can agree and we can, we can find something that makes us strong, which is what or does,” she says. 

“I think that’s what we often forget.” 

Like awe, Baird has deep personal connection to the feeling of grace. She examines grace and how it has the ability to change everything in her 2023 book, Bright Shining.

MC Deborah Knight during a Q&A with Baird at the FW Leadership Summit

As for why awe and grace resonates so strongly with people, Baird believes it’s because of the fractured and polarised times we all live in. 

“We’ve seen it, we’ve seen the documented increase in loneliness, for example,” she says during a Q&A session with Nine journalist Deborah Knight.

“We’ve seen the exhaustion, the anxiety – pandemics, foreign conflicts, we’re watching wars – the stress can be quite overwhelming. The irony of technology is the more we have at our fingertips the more manipulated we are, the more we can find out in a heartbeat, the more disinformation trickles to us as well. So I think it is in many ways a period of quite profound dislocation.”

As for advice to others on how to show grace to yourself, Baird says it starts with forgiveness. She acknowledges this is not always an easy step for some.

“The thing that comes instantly to mind is how difficult it is to forgive yourself for things,” she says.

“My mum, when she worked in prisons, said that was something that inevitably a lot of the inmates who might have had extremely difficult lives and dealt with a lot of abuse or violence, struggled with the ability to forgive themselves – for not parented better or not having done a whole lot of things. 

“It’s really important to learn how to be … as the Irish poet (John) O’Donoghue says – to be exceedingly gentle with yourself, remove that inner critic, allow your own self to be human. I think that’s a massive thing.”

Taking a selfless approach to grace is another way.

“Sometimes the way you can show it to yourself is to show it to other people,” she says.

“Sometimes I worry that we just get on an infinite spiral of wellness, self improvement, self analysis, self reflection, self, self, self, self. And at some point, you’ve got to go: ‘I wonder how everyone else is going?’ I honestly do that on my worst days. Because I think ‘Well, if at the end of the day I’m still going to be in whatever situation but someone else might be a bit better off because I’ve done something else’. I think then that gives you a little building block because then you’ve got a purpose.”

Image credit: VIENNA MARIE FORNOLLES