There is no path, the path is made in the walking

How can we each put our restless energies in service of what seems really needed, in acts of spirited leadership?

These practices support us being open in the face of the uncertainty of many very challenging possibilities. We find that when we contract and shrink, creativity, community and connectivity decrease too.

This is part two of our three-part series related to Leading Through Storms’ Four Pathways To Spirited Leadership framework. It concentrates on the framework itself.

I’ve been fortunate to work alongside amazing human beings. I feel the support of those 100s of people today. A community across time and space. Some of whom are no longer alive in physical form.

Jake and Kirstin, my co-founding friends at Leading Through Storms, also feel the wisdom and experience of others with them.

We have attempted to put some of the key lessons we’ve picked up into practice to support us through the next twenty years.  At Leading Through Storms we seriously entertain a thought experiment: what is it for us as leaders, as citizens, to consciously do right now, if, in these next twenty years, society as we know it collapses? So that the form of the collapse allows healthier regeneration, for humans and the more than human alike?  

How can we each put our restless energies in service of what seems really needed, in acts of spirited leadership?

We work with four interweaving pathways to help us: 

Training body and mind

We have learnt that we need to give ourselves firm foundations to engage constructively and compassionately with our own psychological lives, and those of others. Put simply, we see the need to pay attention to practices that can support us respond appropriately to the storms we face, so that we can lead in ways that give us the best chance of regeneration and building citizenship. 

These practices support us being open in the face of the uncertainty of many very challenging possibilities. We find that when we contract and shrink, creativity, community and connectivity decrease too. We understand that we need to train ourselves to repattern our pre-cognitive reactions as far as possible, and / or note them as they happen to enable more of a choice to be made. In this way we can consistently build a more outward, collaborative orientation and psychological state. 

As leaders, we do need to put the hours and hours of training in so that when we are really called, we are more able to really take in what is actually here in front of us right now, however uncomfortable. Rather than fabricating what we want it to be, or fearfully imagining it to be worse, drawing on unpleasant prior experiences. This ability to take in what is here, we call presence. We are more grounded and more effective since we can face reality, however shocking. Because we’ve made it more likely that we are healthy psychological and physical ecologies in ourselves.

Deeply Exploring All That Matters

We understand the need to be continually prepared to be curious, especially to allow ourselves to explore issues that may seem unpalatable, with as open a perspective as possible. 

We follow Michael Rosen’s lead as articulated in We’re Going on a Bear Hunt; “We can’t go under it. We can’t go over it. Oh no! We’ve got to go through it.” Now is the time to face in, to look at what is problematic, visible. And be available to discover, through inquiry, what is initially invisible, too. In these #polycrises times, turning away does occasionally have value, but for us as leaders in our communities, really opening our eyes, minds and hearts into the inconvenience, disruption, suffering and dissonance is imperative. 

Interestingly the act of looking in, even when painful, somehow seems to liberate rather than drain energy, somehow seems to loosen spirit rather than overwhelm it. Both training our bodies and minds and ability to build relationships can support us on this pathway. And as we explore, the ability to experiment – with our orientations and more visible actions – is another underpinning of our leadership. 

Catalysing Generative Relationships

We all know how to do this; we are by and large sociable beings. But how often do we pay real attention to how we do this act? And explore, through experimentation, different ways of doing so?  

Drawing on the work of Searle & Austin, we have seen first-hand how naming building relationships as valuable work to be attended to, changes both the exploration of possibility, and the quality of the actions chosen.

This supports the building of communities of practice - at the centre of this movement. We pay attention to other humans, and more-than-humans, seeing them for what they are. Joyce Fletcher’s paper, Relational Practice: A Feminist Reconstruction of Work (1998) explores how it is that we often tend to make invisible and attach no value to the very behaviours that ‘get things done’ humanely in organisations – those which are eye-openingly-obviously-overlooked. 

As leaders we must demonstrate how we value this relationship-building work visibly, else it becomes victim to not-enough-time-ism, and somehow our best intended efforts end up being severely polluted by the ‘how’ we do things. The means, and the end? 

Formulating Creative Experiments

To engage creatively with the #polycrises without being ground-down and overwhelmed requires a lightness of approach. If we can turn our restless energies, inquiries, personal practices and relationship-building into (shared) experiments, where again, we are simply trying to discover something, we can perhaps transmit, as we lead, a sense of spirited curiosity rather than tense ‘must-not-fail’ doggedness, of light elegance rather than prickly raggedness. For clarity: we do not cultivate a façade, rather we explicitly choose an orientation to our work to allow us to face into incredibly testing events with a neurochemistry that increases the appearance of expansion and momentum building something new – or remembered - and healthy. 

The mere act of experimenting communicates to others that we are trying to find out, we are not sure what to expect, we are prepared to take a risk. There is a chosen act. There is not a definite result. 

We work together with other leaders, in supportive community, to experiment and explore each of these pathways. 

It’s not always easy. In the next blog we’ll look at what happens when we inevitably stray from the paths.

References

Michael Rosen, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt

Joyce Fletcher, Relational Practice: A Feminist Reconstruction of Work (1998)

Searle & Austin: Speech Acts Theory. With thanks to our friends at Thirdspace Coaching for drawing our attention to this body of work

And, from the great array of written riches, we recently have found the below particularly helpful in making sense of how we can behave as leaders in these times:

Schenck & Churchill’s Ethical Maxims for a Marginally Inhabitable Planet

Bringhurst & Zwicky’s Learning to Die: Wisdom in the Age of Climate Crisis

Deep Adaptation resources:  Professor Jem Bendell – Strategist & educator on social change, focused on Deep Adaptation to societal breakdown & Deep Adaptation Forum

Thanks to Katie Teague for the photo.