From Diminishment to Development: A Sensemaking Model of How Life Experiences Foster Humility

It is not uncommon for people to recount humbling experiences that have transformed how they see themselves and approach their work. Although the benefits of humbling experiences are widely assumed, we have an incomplete understanding of what these experiences entail and how they may help forge humility. Existing research consists largely of idiosyncratic lists of events that might be humbling without deeper inquiry into what makes these experiences unique or how they are integrated into one’s identity. Our theorizing combines insights from the sensemaking and humility literatures to specify the dynamic processes through which humbling experiences are internalized, including contingency factors that limit or enhance the impact of these events. This approach adds theoretical precision to the understanding of what it means to have had a humbling experience and challenges the implicit assumption that humility is a stable quality. In addition, we inform the debate about how humility relates to negative emotions and self-views by distinguishing humility itself from the process through which it is developed. Throughout the paper, we use leadership as an illustrative context to ground our theorizing, but the processes we propose apply across organizational roles. Altogether, this work provides a foundation for better understanding how humbling experiences cultivate humility—an attribute that allows individuals to approach their roles from a more self-aware, other-oriented perspective.