As it’s Mental Health Awareness Week, and after reading Janet Hughes powerful blog on her journey, I thought I’d write about my experience over this last six weeks.
It’s mental health awareness week next week, a time for us all to make a bit of extra effort to talk about mental health and think about how we’re looking after ourselves and each other.
What I’m finding a creative tension is the need to create ways to make sense of what’s happening in a rational way when what we’re experiencing is irrational in every sense? What if the frameworks we create reinforce unconscious biases about what how we think of the world around us. That’s why it’s refreshing that the Forum for the Future has started a “diary of discontinuity” to make sense of this uncomfortable and surreal situation with online calls to discuss the discontinuities and tensions we’re seeing, and a set of questions to prompt that debate:
1. What am I noticing about my inner response to the situation we face?
Throughout the crisis, I seemed to follow Kublers stages of grief, but not in the regular way:
From shock to action
I was in shock about the fact that Covid 19 wasn’t this faraway virus but it was going to hit us hard and fast. I remember the conference call I had on this on a bench outside the Treasury where I was having a meeting with Policy Lab on something completely different!
However, that same afternoon, about an hour after being in shock, I moved from the denial to the acceptance stage, exploring options for how we might be able to tackle issues on the ground, support those who were the most vulnerable and mobilise our partners and communities to work together.
Over the next week, I put in place plans to refocus my team on core missions we had developed for the organisation to support the response to Covid 19. I put in place daily check ins to support the team through this, in terms of the work, but also themselves as humans.
From action to depression
A week or so in, perhaps overwhelmed by the relentlessness of the work, and the feeling that the demand kept increasing, both in terms of the infection rate and the number of people needing help, that I was feeling psychologically exhausted. I was anxious as to whether I was doing the right thing, how I was best using my time — between leading and supporting my team and supporting other parts of the organisation.
I was definitely struggling to find meaning until I started opening up about my own feelings to people around me and started my first coaching session — which had been booked several weeks previous. It wasn’t my first coaching session ever, but for some reason or another I hadn’t prioritised it before.
2. What am I being called to let go of?
I’m looking at how I let go of planning strategically in a linear way, which isn’t what I’ve done anyway in the past, but has often been asked of me. Perhaps most importantly what I’m having to let go of is face to face contact which I really need to help build & strengthen relationships, get people to interact and collaborate using all of their senses. As I review the mission of my team
- Start with what matters to people in their everyday lives to develop outcomes for the place — how do you do that in a way that’s digital and enables everyone to participate?
- Use our understanding of people’s needs to align outcomes to your resources — how do you make sense of people’s current and emerging needs in a way which is more real time?
- Move from building services to building movements — how do you build movements when you can’t bring people together physically?
- Challenge ourselves and others to be brave & radical — how do we challenge ourselves about what we do in a world where we’re navigating an emergency?
- Empower staff to work with residents to solve problems together — how do we help people do that digitally?
3. What’s beginning to emerge now?
I’m feeling more comfortable with being uncomfortable. I’ve always worked in roles which aren’t strictly defined and I’ve wanted that ambiguity to have the freedom to shape how I can best use my skills, come out of my comfort zone and create spaces for people to enact change — and I’ve had the visceral need to do that at work and outside, from creating strategies, designing experiments to running festivals or campaigns.
I’m also sensing that the more this situation continues the greater the gap will grow between people like myself who have a job, a house and good health and those who are more exposed. I know I’ll need to continue check my assumptions and put myself in other people’s shoes as difficult as that will be when we won’t be able to go out and about as much.
4. What discontinuity are you experiencing right now?
The discontinuities I’m experiencing are between feeling like I’m living a unique situation where there’s a short window of opportunity to be really radical while not knowing what will stay or change in the next few weeks. We are seeing the windows of possibility open up and close at the same time. We are still in the crisis as we try to get out of it. We are trying to create disruption for something better while wanting safety in the crisis. We know that whatever we do next, this situation will have radically changed us so there is never going to be a back to normal.
How do we make sense of a situation no-one understands? How can we be more aware of how others are feeling to better understand their behaviours?
How we do know what behaviours to use? How can we identify what levers we use personally to effect change? How can we feel confident in “blowing an uncertain trumpet” to misquote the Danish Prime Minister? In all emergencies, we need to know how to embrace emergence.
I feel like I’m creating the space to mobilise people to take action to test out ways to recover and renew our work, while not giving people the time to think and have space to deal with the psychological impact the situation has on them. Everyone experiences it differently and in invisible and changing ways.
I’m currently reading the excellent book by International Futures Forum aptly called “Dancing on the Edge” as that sums up what I’m doing!
Those are my tensions or discontinuities, what are yours? How do you make sense of and navigate them? What’s helping you?
