Your Focus on Delight Will Change Your Life

Your official invitation to the 2025 Delight Challenge is HERE.

What we put our attention, and intention on, grows. It sounds simple, but it’s profoundly true. When we turn our attention toward a desired state — like delight, awe, ease, or connection — we begin to see more of it in our lives. The brain, after all, is an expert pattern spotter. What we practice noticing, it learns to find again.

The Art of Noticing

Poet and essayist Ross Gay, in The Book of Delights, committed to writing about one small delight every day for a year. He noticed the way a stranger smiled at him, a flower pushing through concrete, the light on his garden. Over time, these moments — what trauma therapist Deb Dana calls glimmers — became a practice of attention. They weren’t big, they were  just every day, ordinary miracles.

Likewise, psychologist Dacher Keltner reminds us in Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder that awe isn’t only found on mountaintops or in symphonies. It’s in small gestures, collective moments like music concerts or sports games, and the ways we encounter life’s vastness in the everyday. His research shows that awe expands our sense of connection and softens the edges of our ego — creating physiological calm and emotional resilience.

Both Gay and Keltner point to the same thing: noticing desired states of being transforms us.

The Science Behind “Seeing More of It”

From a neuroscience perspective, here’s truth behind the idea that what we put our attention on grows.

Our brains are constantly filtering reality — deciding what matters based on what we focus on. This process is shaped by something called the reticular activating system (RAS) and by neuroplasticity, the brain’s ability to rewire itself through repeated experience.

When you intentionally direct attention toward delight, you strengthen the neural pathways associated with positive affect and curiosity. In Hebb’s famous phrase, “neurons that fire together, wire together.” Over time, the brain learns that delight is worth noticing. It starts tagging similar experiences as important, creating a feedback loop of awareness and appreciation.

As the Greater Good Science Center notes, savouring positive moments doesn’t just make you feel good in the moment — it physically imprints those experiences in your brain, increasing emotional balance and resilience. In short: where you put your attention literally shapes your perception ← how you see your life.

The Delight Challenge

What delights YOU?

Join me!! For one week, you and I will take part in a simple, powerful experiment:

Choose and notice your desired state. Choose one — delight, awe, ease, wonder, or joy — and practice finding it, naming it, or capturing it each day. 

Post one (or more!) photo each day on Instagram that reflects that state — big or small, obvious or subtle — and tag it with #TheDelightChallenge and #AlignedByDesign and tag me @kellywoodlifedesign.

By the end of the week, you'll notice how your brain shifts: you may start finding beauty in places you overlooked, wonder in ordinary moments, or delight in small gestures. This is what alignment feels like — your attention and intention moving in the same direction.

By focusing our attention and intention on noticing more moments of awe or delight, we invite the brain to rewire itself so it naturally seeks and finds those states of being, making our lives feel better and more aligned.

The 2025 Delight Challenge will be the end of November, keep your eyes on my social media for the official start date. Until then, try this short practice: before you open your eyes in the morning ask yourself, 'I wonder how delight will show up for me today?' That's it! That's all you have to do, until the challenge begins.