Buffet Year & the Cure for Learned Helplessness

How New Experiences Reshape Our Mind & Belief

In 2023, my incredible husband Josh had an idea after I shared the concept of a Buffet Year, which is the approach to try as many new experiences as possible to get unstuck. When you try new experiences, just as you would try food at the buffet line, you quickly learn what you enjoy and what you don’t. ANd just as in the buffet line, you can discard what doesn’t suit you. 

For anyone who has laid awake at night asking “is this really all there is to this life” - waking up, getting kids ready, working all day to pick up the kids, make dinner, watch a screen, and go to bed, Buffet Year is TRANSFORMATIVE. While the badass version of a Buffet Year is to commit to doing one new activity every single day for 365 days, the coolest realization we had when Josh set out to do just that was he found his THING, his JAM, the thing that he most needed to feel lit up by life - guitar lessons. 

The moral of his story is that it doesn’t necessarily take 365 days to jump start a fresh perspective. In fact, he and I both learned from embodying the Buffet Year “yes” mindset that it expands your perspective and joy immensely just by trying new things as often as possible. Indian food? Heck yes, Buffet Year. Skydiving? A very scared, yes because (gulp!) Buffet Year. Parasailing, May day baskets, hypnobreathwork, solo travel, psychic reading, new restaurants, eyebrow wax and so much more were all a yes in 2023 because of Buffet Year. 

Learned Helplessness & Buffet Year

But here’s something new that I learned. Buffet Year is a cure for an all too common phenomenon called “learned helplessness.” Learned helplessness is a psychological term for when a person believes we can’t change or impact an outcome, can’t make new habits or can’t learn new tricks, as they say, and therefore give zero fucks. What starts to happen, however, is that there’s a snowball effect to this kind of thinking. 

A potent example is how millions of people believe their vote can’t or won’t change the outcome of an election. If 2016 or 2020 taught us anything (other than the scary reality of an insurrection), it’s that individual votes ABSOLUTELY matter. There’s no doubt about it. And when apathy in one area of life persists, it creeps in elsewhere enabling us to tell ourselves that there’s no point to countless major and minor decisions, learning to learned helplessness. 

But the beauty of trying new experiences and adopting a Buffet Year with a commitment to try new experiences is you learn firsthand that you absolutely can do a lot of really cool and hard and mind-blowing things no matter your age, ability, money, or time freedom. We actually have an infinite ability to change, adapt, and grow into even more expansive possibilities than we are today. 

How a Buffet Year Cures Learned Helplessness in the Workplace

I’ve spent the last 15 years in law firms and if I had a quarter for every time I heard something to the effect of can’t teach an old dog new tricks, I’d be rich. It’s obscene and beyond disheartening the volume of highly intelligent, privileged, well-educated people who refuse to learn new things because they have conditioned themselves that they can’t pick it up, it’s not worth their time, or it won’t really impact the outcome, which, ironically, is often the firm’s bottom line. 

But anyone who, in a professional setting, allows this mindset to persist without challenging it is actually enabling their learned helplessness. Just look at the millions of elderly Americans who stay connected with family via a social media app as an example of the true ability to learn something new, embrace a new technology, and grow. 

It’s led me to believe that committing to a Buffet Year in one’s personal life is a powerful catalyst for believing there is more to learn, more to grow, and more to embrace. No one is stagnant. Unlimited potential exists in all of us if only we believe and trying new experiences enables more of the antidote to learned helplessness - personal belief in our ability to change. 

But it’s not about my experiences - why don’t you try your own Buffet Year. All you have to do is start saying yes to more new experiences. It can be your very own year of yes.