When the world you know ends
revealing the hard truths with care
When was the first time your world changed?
The moment when the expected, comfortable parameters of “life as you know it” altered.
Often it is not one moment, of course; but a series of ruptures, an unfolding of interventions that poke holes in what we thought was real.
Personally, I tend to locate these ruptures as chapters, when certain scales fell from my eyes and I was forever changed. Like reading at age 23 The People’s History of the United States. Reading Barry Lopez’s book The Rediscovery of North America. Reading Malcolm Margolin’s The Way We Lived while backpacking in the Sierra Nevada mountains in California at age 19.
My world also changed while sitting in a lecture hall at university, a typical environmental studies 101, as an undergraduate listening to a professor proceed to tell us each week about all the ways humans have harmed, damaged, destroyed and altered our planetary living systems, communities, species and places.
What connects these world-changing moments, are confrontations with painful truths. And with lies we’ve been told, and tell ourselves.
Over and over, life asks us (often not very subtly) to update, revise, evolve our perceptions and understandings of what is going on here. Which also involves having to look at painful hard stuff, that can evoke extremely difficult and for many, intolerable experiences and feelings. Which can make us want to run, flee, shut down, or numb out.
For those of us working on behalf of living systems—people who are called to protect nature, care to our biotic world, to heal relationships and help vulnerable communities, to be stewards, guides and healers—much of what we are doing is asking (or more accurately, telling) people to revise and update their worlds.
To “reveal” the hard stuff.
And it’s very hard for most people to do this, if the conditions are not in place. Conditions that are known to support our capacities to integrate, metabolize, and make sense of what we are ‘seeing’ so we can then make choices about ‘doing’ and ‘acting.’
Most of the time, however, instead of fostering these conditions, there is a lot of shouting, educating, pushing, righting and moralizing. Which only shuts us down even more.
This is why Reveal is one of the Guiding Principles, and a foundation for being an effective, impactful and relational changemaker and change leader.
It is no small thing to shine a light on what needs our attention, our mending and fixing, our care and concern. Even in our solutions work, our creative and innovative “impact” spaces—we are also in the business of existential change work. And that means asking people to look at hard stuff and change our world.
You can try nudging, tricking, incentivizing, selling, pitching or seducing people to change. No amount of behavioral science hacks and atomic habits will get us where we need to go. We are in deep now.
We are being asked to radically revise our theories of change: to evolve from Cheerleaders, Educators and "Righters” into high-impact partners, guides, stewards, and protectors. And it’s not easy.
What I want to suggest to you, is that doing so requires more than reading some memes on LinkedIn by our favorite (dude) thought leader about kindness, psychological safety or empathy. We need to roll up our sleeves, and do the real work, together with other people, in containers and conditions that help us grow and learn.
We need to evolve into emotionally attuned and relationally intelligent communicators who can reveal hard stuff with skill and compassion.
For quite some time, many people have believed we have to stay positive, focus on success, hide our fears and failures to keep people engaged. That we don’t want to expose too much or people will switch off, reject us and tune us out.
This is understandable. We don’t want to encourage negativity, we want to inspire and motivate. We also know that for many people, the issues can feel insurmountable, and our involvement can feel negligible. Add into this mix how these issues bring up anxieties and ambivalence.
To avoid overwhelm and negativity, we tend to focus over and over on the opportunities we have, the benefits of change—anything to get through the drop-in-the-ocean effect of such global, systemic issues we face.
If we want to truly be effective, however, we have to be real. We have to avoid turning into cheerleaders and jumping on the positivity bandwagon. This is because when we’re emotionally honest with ourselves and others we build trust and credibility. We create traction with our people. Not only that, but scientific studies show that when we “name it, we tame it,” as Dr. Daniel Siegel says.
So I want to invite you on this Spring Equinox, to consider what aspects of your style of communicating are you ready to let go of? How can you take one step towards cultivating the conditions that help people face into the hard stuff, and be able to then take action? Here are five suggestions for you, inspired by our work in Project InsideOut, and grounded by evidence-based scientific research.
“Our emotions and how we feel, act as a gateway to our thinking and learning by providing “the bridge between rational [prefrontal cortex] and nonrational processes [brainstem and limbic structures]” (Damasio, 2008).
Be real with yourself. First, start with how you are relating to the difficult realities of this work, the daily feedback about devastating losses, missed opportunities, slow political response. Investigate your own Window of Tolerance. Do you allow yourself space to feel, grieve, and process, either with your teammates, friends, family, in nature, in solitude, with your partner, or in large crowds at a demonstration? How you relate to painful stuff is going to reverberate and echo across your work and how you show up. Building your tolerance for feeling the feelings is what builds your resilience and that of others, so we start here.
Do a comms audit. Review what you are putting out into the world—content, messaging, campaign strategies, and events. Are you focusing only on solutions, positive stories, and feel-good messaging? Do you come across as a cheerleader? I it data heavy and highly educational? Review your materials through this lens of balance, nuance, and realness. This is not the same thing as depressing, doom and gloom. Realness and revealing is about being straight up, and modeling a humanity that is relatable.
Storytelling with edge. Provide opportunities for authentic personal storytelling and set the tone for vulnerable sharing at the leadership level and throughout your organization. Mix up your narratives. Feature unexpected stories, perspectives, and vulnerabilities. Be watchful of the heroine narrative tendency to only focus on people who went through a tough time to emerge triumphant and radiant. This is hard stuff and it’s a relief to hear it told straight. We want to hear from you. How hard or bad was it? How did you navigate it? What still gets you down?
Be real. Name the enormity of challenges we face. Express your humanity. Bring as much humility and humor as possible to all your communications. Show up as yourself. Imagine an approach to engaging people about transforming how we live—with each other, on the planet, and with ourselves—that is candid, witty, real, and down to earth. Imagine an approach that integrates the hard-hitting truths that are so hard to bear, with the imagination and verve and edge of which we are so capable. Imagine a way to engage your people that is not sugar-coated or fixating on the perky tips, tools, and resources, but on authentic connection and community.
Build and foster containers. I cannot say this enough. The conditions that enable people to process and metabolize hard truths and realities is not by scrolling home alone. It is not in a pressurized meeting with a tight agenda and no space to arrive or reflect. Here is what we know from science: humans require reflection to integrate and process. We can also call this “containers”—spaces that give us safety to simply process, reflect and be with content and our own processes. That can look like giving people space to connect in small groups or partners, jot down notes, or simply asking questions at close intervals during sessions, presentations or events. People process information through our feelings, senses and relationships. How we design our impact convenings simply must integrate this, or we are not being efficient with our resources and time.
These resources and more are available on Project InsideOut (PIO). What you see there was created with a grant from a foundation, who discontinued their support in 2023. The world needs this work now more than ever. If you are interest in supporting this work to evolve into its next iteration, and interested in a course, masterclass, learning journey or program, please contact me and my team! I am committed to supporting a new wave and movement of attuned, compassionate and high-impact change leaders and changemakers at scale.
Take good care and until next time,
Renée
News, podcasts + Announcements
—> In case you missed it! This piece in Desmog - The US Has Never Been More Divided on Climate. Here’s How to Build Bridges (and It May Surprise You) - has been making the rounds. Read and share.
—> Lovely people at RegenIntel just released this awesome podcast conversation with Chad. Amazing and 'unfiltered convo!
—> Find me at SEJ! Super excited to be participating in this year’s Society for Environmental Journalism gathering. If there was a time to bring a trauma-informed approach, this is it.
Thanks to those who have contributed to my GoFundMe to help cover my mom’s dementia caregiving costs. Appreciate your support — either here or subscribe to my Substack. If each person subscribed to my Substack for only $7/month, it would cover all of my monthly care costs! Thanks so much.
1. Years ago at UC Santa Cruz, I was talking with the head of the Community Studies program. at the time what they did sounded so "small" and "local", so I was not interested (I sure wish I could go back now and help them...). Anyway, I stated matter-of-factly that "when people get the information about what is going on, they will take action," or some version of that (now) obviously faulty notion. He said no: actually, if you just give people information, they might become *more* resistant. They need to feel that they can do something, have agency, etc.
Now, when I am speaking with people about what's going on, I try to remember that they may have very different ways of managing what is happening. They frequently don't say much, and I don't know about the stories they tell themselves about how they are coping or allowing themselves to balance during this time.
2. I am seeing how people become activated at various paces. One young woman a few weeks who said, "well, but there's nothing we can do." And then yesterday, she said she wants to go to the demo, and is in a very different place. And an older friend who several weeks ago said "I can't think about it", then the other day opened up, shed a tear, and was grateful for a way to express her feelings. She felt much more alive to what is going on.
On the one hand, my opening the conversations is part of a permission structure — me demonstrating my continued interest in helping the situation. On the other hand, there must be some internal processing going on there.