How we can get more people onboard by learning more about complexity lenses

Whenever we are working to get a broad swathe of people onboard with our ideas, we do us and them a disservice by only communicating from the narrow lens we ourselves have on complexity.

Separate to personality typologies that stay relatively stable over time (MBTI, Enneagram all that jazz) the way people make meaning can change over time (doesn’t always) in very recognisable stages.

If you’re working with a wide range of people, you’ll likely have people at many different stages (and at different transitions between them).

In this audio, I give a very high-level overview of the work on adult development and the stages adults can through to grow more fit-for-purpose lenses on the world, what that means for you and therefore what that means for the way you put things forward to them.

And yes, this has implications for politics and movement building.

You can download the audio by clicking on the download button.

If you want a tl;dl version, here’s a thread I did on Bluesky a while back:

Complexity of thought is something I’ve been studying for quite some time as someone who supports deep thinkers with big jobs. I think it has implications for a lot of societal/culture change and I don’t really see it being mentioned (it’s quite niche tbh). So here’s a thread.

— Meg Lightheart she/her (@megalightheart.bsky.social) November 9, 2024 at 4:28 PM

https://bsky.app/profile/megalightheart.bsky.social/post/3lajpi6m6j22g

For a more in-depth look at these stages, and particularly how they apply in work, check out Jennifer’s book here - the second edition is grrreat. She works with a lot of coaches, so there is a slant, but the most up-to-date and accessible work on the stages no matter what you do in work.

• Verbatim transcript

  Lenses of complexity and mess

  Hi, this month, or which is… this lunar month based around complexity and mass, began about two or three days before the US election. I didn't quite get my ducks in a row to be able to edit the chapter that would have given you some guidance on what to choose. And then the election happened, and I—it felt inappropriate to be sending an email out in those first two or three days.  

  I then spent the next, following two and a bit weeks, working days, evenings, and weekends on a project for my day job. I finally got a day off. I really wanted to talk to you about the lenses of complexity and mess, the stages that adults can go through to develop more complexity of mind, and how that might apply to engaging large groups of people, which also probably applies to when you're writing, when you're a manager or a leader, a public intellectual, or someone who heads up an organization or a movement.  

  Understanding the basics of the theories of complexity of mind might give us more ability to consciously choose how we communicate our ideas so that people connect with them and engage with them if they want to, but the manner in which we're communicating them doesn't exclude people who we might want to engage.  

  So, I'm going to go through the major stages and then ask some reflection questions, and hopefully that will be useful to you in the setting hours of this lunar month before we move on to the next month.  

  The magic stage

  When you look at kids, there's this stage which is really recognizable to people who've spent time with children. At one point, they are really connected to fantasy. They're really connected to their lens on the world in terms of the anything that they experience, they presume is how things are in the world.  

  They stand on a tall building and look down, and the people are tiny. They don't look tiny. They are tiny. You take a big glass of liquid, you pour it into a low, flat dish, you pour the same liquid into a very tall, thin receptacle, they will say there is more liquid in the tall, thin one than in the low, flat one, and that's because they have not yet grasped the concept of enduring categories.  

  The Development of Enduring Categories

  Then something happens generally around age 7, 8, 9, where their experience of the world builds up enough examples where they begin to understand enduring categories. They begin to understand that physical things have ongoing characteristics, and they themselves have ongoing characteristics.  

  So it's not just that in the moment... previously, in the moment we just want ice cream, strawberry ice cream. And then over that age, we realize that we're the kind of person who likes strawberry ice cream. Part of our identity persists over time. This is a major cognitive shift.  

  The Self-Sovereign Mind

  However, there is only the ability to see through our own eyes, and therefore, in terms of following rules, we will only follow rules if we see that there's a negative consequence to ourselves. We understand other people have ideas and feelings, but we only understand them through the way that they behave and speak, not by being able to put ourselves in their shoes and see the world through their eyes.  

  This is when kids become Guinness World Book of Records mini scientists learning facts about the thing that is their interest. Most people begin to evolve beyond the stage, but lots of us just stay here in our adulthood. And people who remain in this inability to step outside of their own perspective, a label that's useful for us to have so we can refer to it, one of the scholars calls it the Self-Sovereign mind.  

  They're not selfish, they just don't have the ability to see outside of their perspective. And so they'll follow rules if it's really clear that there will be punishment if they break them and they'll be caught. If there's a way for them to get around those rules because they won't be observed, or because the punishment isn't severe enough for them to care, then they will do what they want.  

  The world is really complex, and for people who see the world, particularly adults, but if you also think about it, of teenagers, the world is actually too complex for this form of mind. And so constantly, people in the Self-Sovereign mind feel in over their heads.  

  What we’re really asking of adolescents

  The transition that we ask of adolescents is we begin to expect them to be stepping out of the Self-Sovereign mind and begin to understand that they are part of a larger unit that they owe allegiance to, the family, to society. And it's not so much that we want them to follow the rules, it's that we want them to follow the rules because they place… They're able to see through other people's eyes, and they are able to hold their own needs in one hand, and the needs of, for example, their parents. 

  So when we were adolescents, our parents wanted us to call them when we were going to be late, not because we were going to be in trouble if we didn't, but because they wanted us to do it out of care for them.  

  And very often, the form of mind that someone of that age has is not yet capable of holding their own needs in one hand and the needs of other people in the other. Then they haven't yet built the ability to have cross categorical thinking. And this is the next stage of mind, which is a huge leap in complexity.  

  We might—the some of the scholars call it this, the Socialised mind. And the Socialised mind is when we do step out of our perspective and begin to see that other people have a perspective as well.

  The Socialized Mind

  But when we are deeply rooted in the Socialised mind, all of our values and beliefs come from outside of ourselves. When you ask us, when we're, when we're coming from the Socialised mind, what do we think? We talk about what they think.  

  This is the time of belonging. This is a stage where we find the group of people who we identify and take, like one of my colleagues says, we inhale the beliefs and values of a person or a group outside of ourselves.  

  And at this stage, we do begin to feel that we don’t—sense of self is external, is held by others. And this is the prerequisite for being a member of society, is not that you follow the rules of society because of your fear of punishment, which is what happens with someone at the Self-Sovereign mind. You follow the rules of society because you belong to it, and you want to be a good team member.  

  How we hit the limits of the Socialized Mind

  And so people with the self, sort of self, with the Socialised mind, are able to step outside of themselves, but they often lose the ability to hold their own perspective. And there can be strong loyalty, and even that loyalty can change if someone we respect expresses something that makes more sense to us.  

  Then we can begin to exhale the views that we had and inhale a different set of views, but still they’re coming from the outside. We’re not able to step back and pick and choose our own schema often.  

  The evolution that happens from the Socialised mind is—what do you do when there’s conflict? When one person you really care about or appreciate has one set of views, and someone else you really care about or appreciate has a different set of views?  

  You feel... you feel like you’re being torn apart. And the only route out of that tearing apart is either to plump for one and reject the other, or to learn the ability to go, hold on. What do I think?  

  The Transition to the Self-Authored Mind

  And it’s at this time when people might begin to say, “But hold on, what’s your perspective on this? I hear you talking a lot about other people. What do you really think?”

  And over time, that becomes to be, not an alien concept, but you begin to go, huh? What does my own internal voice say? What do my own sensations tell me? When you begin to—we can begin to develop into something where we are authoring our own system, outside of the perspective of others.  

  And this stage is referred to as the Self-Authored stage. And it’s a very grown-up stage. It’s what we think of as adults having. It’s when we’re able to step back, decide what our beliefs are, decide how we go about things, decide how we can change our methods in order to get our outcomes.  

  Characteristics of the Self-Authored Mind

  We begin to think potentially, when we’re really rooted into the self authored system, begin to think slightly longer timelines, begin to be able to see more patterns. An inspirational leader who has their own perspective will be likely coming from a self authored perspective.  

  And although—it depends on how they formed that. If they’re, if they’ve inhaled someone else’s perspective, it may be that they’re still at the Socialised mind. But someone at the Self-Authored mind, when we are at this stage, we really are much more able to deal with the complexity of the world.  

  We’re more able to get things done. We know our own mind. We have quite a lot of certainty.  

  The Self-Transforming Mind

  There is another transition which is much rarer, but I think we’re seeing more of, particularly amongst multiply marginalized people, is we—once we’ve developed our own lens on the world, but we then begin, continue to see the complexity of the world and realize that our Self-Authored system doesn’t have all the answers.  

  And maybe we’ve gotten really good at things. We’ve gotten really good at getting stuff done, and yet we still—we look up, and we see the world is still broken. There are bigger systems. There are longer periods of history. There are repeating patterns.  

  The binaries begin to loosen to us. We begin to see that there aren’t two sides. There is just this period, this set of gray or a spectrum of colors. And we begin to see that, oh, if I’d been put in a different situation in my life, I might be taking those actions and having those beliefs.  

  The Experience of the Self-Transforming Mind

  And it becomes harder and harder to be certain, and we’re much more able to step back from our self authored perspective, which in its own case, was stepping back from the views of others, and see the reality of the complexity of the world, which is that the world is full of spectrums and complexity and mess.  

  And how do we still take our steps forward? And the transition of the Self-Transforming mind can feel like a loss, more of a loss, potentially, I don’t know, it feels to me like more of a loss, particularly when someone has been really successful in the world, has been really driven towards a particular cause or way of doing things, and then they—it’s like we lose a belief in that anymore, but we’re not sure what we believe and even what belief is.  

  It can be really lonely at the Self-Transfoming stage

  Like, there are nested questions that we begin to see. What is it to be human? What is it to be a leader? What on earth does it mean to know something? To be wise? What is wisdom? Is wisdom real?  

  And there can be, in my experience, some really dark nights of the soul where you feel like you’ve lost all of your landmarks. And the people around you are very likely to be at the Socialised mind as an—or somewhere between Socialised mind and the self authoring mind.  

  There are big transitions. Transitions can take years and years, or people can remain in a certain stage for the rest of their life, and they are trying to bring you back to belonging, or they’re trying to bring you back to the certainty that you had before, particularly if they’ve known you for a while.  

  The Role of the Self-Transforming Mind

  So understanding that this is a new form of mind, that actually the people who can create deeper change in the world are the people who can hold the—can hold loosely to certainty and can see the edges.  

  And the margins are the people who are able to make bigger change that has deeper roots. Often, people at the Self-Transforming mind use ecosystem metaphors. You’ll hear them talk about soil quite a lot (!).

  Engaging Different Stages of Complexity

  So, what does this mean if we want to get a whole range of people joining a movement or being engaged with a set of ideas? Well, it can be really important to think about the Self-Sovereign mind.  

  What does it mean to know that some people will only take action if it’s in their best interests, not because they’re selfish, but because they can’t see outside of their own perspective?  

  People in the Self-Sovereign mind: when we are in that stage, people who talk about shades of gray, we can only think that they are trying to manipulate us, or they’re lying.  

  People at the Socialised mind: how do we help them to feel a sense of belonging, that we are able to help them see that people they respect are thinking these ideas as well?  

  People at the Self-Authored mind: how do we support them in making their own decisions? How do we supply enough information for them to be able to decide how they want to respond to our ideas?  

  And people at the Self-Transforming mind: how do we support them to listen something new into being? How do we support their often new inability to see binaries?  

  Supporting the Self-Transforming Mind

  How do we support them in feeling the roots of our ideas and looking forward and backward, much further than other people do? That we can embrace their sometimes allergy to certainty, or their inability to be certain in lots of situations?  

  Self—people in the Self-Transforming mind are very both/and-and-also people. They’re the people who go, well, that’s a good question, but that’s—the real question is this, or I wonder whether there’s this aspect also.  

  They’re constantly seeing a kaleidoscope of options. So, when we’re thinking about engaging a broad stretch of people, we may need to think about, how do our—how do we shift our ways of communicating so that it’s—we’re giving people the opportunity to engage with our ideas.  

  And at times, we may want to engage people at a certain complexity of mind, and that’s okay.  

  (As a coach, I tend to work with people who are towards the Self-Transforming mind, because I think you all are really lonely, and there’s loads of people who support the people at Self-Authored stage, but there’s very few who support Self-Transforming.  

  So I understand that a lot of the time, my ideas may seem esoteric or a bit floopy to people, and that’s fine for me.) 

  But if you’re someone who is working on creating a mass movement, some people will really like the idea of belonging, but some people won’t. Some people will only understand if they can see the benefits for themselves, for literally, their own lives.  

  Some people will only be able to engage if they’re able to make their own decisions. And the Self-Transforming people—you’ll—they’ll—you just have to have a good vibe, and they’ll have to smell their way into the pathway themselves…

  Reflections on Complexity of Mind

  So I hope those are useful ideas. And it felt like the ideas around complexity of mind are missing from when people are talking about movements, and it seemed particularly pertinent around something so binary as the US election.  

  But also here in the UK, there’s similar flows of polarized thinking, which can, when you’re looking through the complexity of mind, you can see the lens of the different stages of complexity of mind.  

  You’re able to see your own lens a little bit more. 

  And even when I was looking at some of the analysis of the—post-analysis of the US election, you can see some more of the stage of the complexity of mind of the person making the analysis.  

  And then you can get a sense of whether that analysis is something that suits you.  

  Nesting and Growth

  And the one caveat is we tend to forget, once we’ve grown to a different complexity of mind, we tend to forget that we ever had a different way of making sense of the world.  

  Which is the other reason of having these in your mind, because they are all still inside you. We still, like rings of a tree or nesting dolls, we still have the fantasy-driven child. We still have the Self-Sovereign. We still have the Socialised mind. If we’ve grown to self-author, we still have the Self-Authored stage. If we’ve lost our Self-Authored stage and grown towards the Self-Transforming, we also have that.  

  And depending on the stress we’re under and the situations that we’re in and the people we’re around, we can—we contract and expand? We can, yeah, contract to earlier stages, and the ability to expand beyond also takes a lot of time.  

  Let me know how this lands with you

  And there are some interesting stages. I’ll post a link to a book that I think is really useful, the second edition of which has just come out, and also name it—name a couple of scholars.  

  So I hope that’s useful to you. I’m wildly, wildly, wildly interested in hearing your responses to this—where you think it’s useful, where you think it’s missing.  

  And also apologies that this is arriving in the closing hours of the lunar month before we move on to another topic. But I think it will—it applies to our next month, which is thinking about other people.  

  Thanks. World-changing leaders. Thanks for your patience with me.  

What if what you want is on the other side of pain?

In my last email, I mentioned a second pattern-making question I wanted to introduce. I found it personally really helpful in the past couple of weeks.

I'm going for surgery in July to Thailand to have what we, right now, call ‘lower surgery’ or gender affirmative surgery, or what I’m quite enjoying calling in my head, a sex-change operation. Very retro.

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Obviously I'm really excited. It was a cancellation that I got offered much sooner than I expected. I jumped at the chance.

I’d thought I’d come to terms with living with my body as it is (“I’m FINE”), but then literally as I was driving home from Mum’s funeral, I realised this might be my one opportunity to have a surplus of cash and a light, a smile,  just opened up in front of me.

I did, however, have a huge wobble the other day.

The clinic had let slip in an email a couple of weeks ago about not pooping for seven days after the surgery. As someone who is ordinarily, er, very well fibered that was quite a concern for me. They won’t send out any more information beforehand - you just get it when you arrive.

I realised I didn’t actually know anything about the first few days of recovery. So I, of course, went on Reddit.

I found a manga written/drawn probably more than 15 years ago by somebody who went to the same clinic. It was pretty detailed.

As I was reading it, I realised more than theoretically that the recovery is pretty intense because this is a major major surgery. Suddenly, I was panicking.

I really thought, Do I actually want to do this? Can I not just carry on how I have been?

I paced up and down, had a cry, talked to one of my partners.

A couple of days later, one of my siblings reflected back that I was saying like things like, “Well, I'm not getting any younger so if I'm going to do it, it needs to be now because if I wait a year or two, I'll just be a year or two older and that's not going to make me any more likely to recover easily.”

She pointed out that that's not a ‘towards’ perspective, that's like… a circumstantial perspective?

I had to really tune in and go, Do I actually want this to happen or not? Do I feel really committed to it?

The timing is not great in terms of some aspects of my life. We're in the (please gods) final stages of selling my mum's house. We are sorting out the death admin of my partner's mum’s estate. And we’re moving house suddenly and not by our choice.

And then on top of that, I now need to do all the admin for the Thailand trip plus do a massive handover of my job, because I'm going to be away for three months?

And yet, I do really want it.

Holding that certainty didn’t, however, take away all of the panic.

The main thing was the anticipation of pain and my realisation that I have never had any major medical procedures. I've been to the dentist. That's it. I've had horrible tooth pain and had a tooth out.

So I don't know how I'm going to deal with pain that goes on for an uncertain period of time but certainly for weeks. I don't know how I'm going to deal with the recovery. I don't know how both of us are going to deal with being in first a hospital room and then a hotel room for a month in Thailand.

And I don’t know how I actually deal with proper pain because I think in my head I decided that they just give you, like, enough painkillers so it doesn't really hurt.

But you're only in the hospital for a week and there's only so much morphine they can give you anyway and then you're in the hotel and then it's like paracetamol or Tramadol?

So. I remembered you and that pattern-making question I wanted to focus on.

Our last patternmaking question was

What is this an example of?

The question I’d like to suggest you experiment with is:

What does this whole thing remind me of?

This creates a different focus than the ‘What is this an example of?’ question which, I think, gives you loads and loads of different perspectives, but not necessarily many from your own experience, and therefore maybe not embodied knowledge.

“What does this whole thing remind me of?” links you to your experiences or metaphors that sometimes help you find resources you might not otherwise find.

So I was thinking about anticipation of pain to get a result that I really want.

Straightaway it reminded me of what I imagined it’s like to give birth: an anticipation of massive unavoidable pain that you’ve (probably) opted into and you know that the other side of that pain and recovery is something that you really want.

I haven’t watched 20 seasons of Grey’s Anatomy to not know that people can recover from pregnancy and, indeed, huge surgeries (but don’t be too likeable or get in a car or on a plane, just saying).

Like pregnancy, the surgery I’m having is also something that many people have gone through. Not as many as birth, but this particular clinic have done their technique with 180 people a year for the past 15-20 years.

It was helpful to engage that aspect, but it wasn't quite enough.

And then I went, Okay, what else does this whole situation remind me of?

And the thing that I think is really helpful is: it reminds me of a rite of passage.

Which is something that as a white person living in the decaying Western Empire I’m missing. I've never had a rite of passage into adulthood.

Didn't even have a prom, like Molly Ringwald and Duckie.

To be honest, I have had a very easy gender transition so far.

(I preface this by understanding that no one needs to change their body and everyone should be able to change their body if they want to. No matter their gender, no one should have to change their body in any way. It's not a requirement to be the gender that you are and to have that respected.)

Five years ago, I was able to go to a private service and have some counseling to make sure that a medical transition was what I wanted, and I was able to afford hormones. Recently, I was very easily able to transfer my prescription onto the National Health Service, therefore only paying £18 a month.

I like the changes in my body.

I was able because of my job to access voice training, which means I'm beginning to have a voice that I like.

But what about surgery?

I was talking about changing my body the other night with some people who I’d met for the first time and the conversation turned quite deep.

And I was saying that when I first went on hormones for the first time I could feel my fingers and my toes. Spiritually, energetically. Like, I'm not saying that my feet and toes were physically numb, but that I could feel them for the first time -  it was like I was in my body.

But I still feel like I walk an inch off the ground.

And having put some vision on this with my meditation instructor, I think that this surgery is going to help me be fully embodied in the world and therefore be able to do the work that I'm here to do.

Which… is this. The email that you're reading right now is part of that work, creating this rhythm of six monthly lunar focus for leaders who see the deep interdependencies of this world and helping you feel less alone and helping you find who you are, what your best next step is and be fortified enough to take that next step.

That's my work.

And I have a sense that going through this experience is going to allow me to land here and then for the next 20 years (?) do the work that I'm here to do.

So being able to engage Rite of Passage energy is really helpful.

What does this mean?

I'm going to work out ways that I can remind myself of that energy and surround myself with images of people I admire, who have also been through rites of passage. I’m gonna potentially lineup some autobiographies of people who've gone through difficult things, not just trans people.

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There’s also a second part of this question that you can engage:

What does this remind me of in nature?

There are some really interesting things that come out of that.

For me in this situation, some of them are a bit embarrassing about caterpillars  and goo and trust and butterflies.

But also the transformation of forest fires that lead to regeneration. Cutting back in order to bloom.

An image of a tree struck by lightning but somehow allowing new growth (is that a thing?).

Rather than just taking our perspective from other human situations, taking our guide from the bird people, the plant people, the insect people, the miracle of this planet links us to something grounded and fully embedded in interconnection.

Asking these questions makes me think about what you might call ‘Ways of Knowing’, which I think might be a bit of a misnomer.

Ways of knowing implies, well, knowing.

I think we might be better thinking about

sources of information or

sources of data or

sources of influences.

So one of the sources, one of the influences on our worldview and our decisions and actions is science and facts, what Western science and Western academic culture likes to think of as objective facts. Cool. Science is important.

There's other ways of accessing influences to add in different, deeper, lighter inputs in to those decisions.

There is intuition. There is metaphor. There is the learning from other experiences that are similar.

There is indigenous knowing and indigenous science.

There is what nature can teach us.

There is looking at history.

There is lived experience.

There is the thinking that happens through the body.

There is somatic knowing.  The realisations that come when you're doing something physical with your hands and or your body.

There are lots of ways to access information, to access influences, to access knowings that are build on and augment factual knowing.

I wonder about the ways of knowing that we emphasise and where else might we be able to focus as we close this month of looking at complexity and mess.

How do we approach complexity and mess, which ways of knowing do we personally emphasise? Which influences do we culturally emphasise?

I was talking to someone the other night who spoke about seeing the unseen and as someone who has spent 20 years doing a type of meditation that is designed for real spiritual knowledge that made a lot of sense.

There is an aphorism I heard my teacher use: that a person with vision looks at where lots of things seem to be happening and sees nothing going on. But they'll look at where nothing seems to be happening and many things.

They see dark in the light and light in the dark.

Being able to imbibe different influences can help us to move through the world with more sensitivity, more discernment, more nuance, more wisdom.

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So… yes, I'm closing this month a bit ‘late’. The New Moon was several days ago.

We will transition into spending the rest of this lunar month focusing on our relationships with others.

Patterns and fractals

Yesterday. Last Friday. Friday before last I was driving down to see my sibling in Birmingham where I used to live and whilst I was driving, I was thinking about you.

(Yes, I wrote most of this two weeks ago but it’s been quite the two weeks!)

The easiest way of making a long drive bearable is for me to listen to an audiobook or podcast - something funny or plotty.

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On journeys, I’ve done thrillers, I’ve done cosy fantasy, I’ve done fun podcasts.

The night before, I decided I wanted some true crime. Nothing too gory - I loved this one about North Korean hackers and this one about a leadership coaching cult.

I found one about the UK Post Office scandal which I hadn’t heard of before, somehow.

Basically, the Post Office installed a new IT system, it quickly started showing deficits in postmasters’ accounts, and the PO demanded that they pay it back or they would prosecute them for theft/fraud, denying that it had anything to do with the computers.

Innocent people who were just running the small business of their local post office literally went to prison for it, but the Post Office always said they were the only one this had happened to.

I’m only 10 episodes in and there are 15, but it’s telling the story of how people organised and took the Post Office to court and (kind of) won.

As I was listening, I thought about that complexity question I mentioned yesterday:

What is this an example of?

Here’s some of what I came up with:

• Big corporates/organisations wielding enormous power

• Behemoth organisations making individuals feel powerless

• The invisibility of pain of people we may see regularly

• The power of people banding together

• Racism in British life (lots of the people in the cases were from South Asian backgrounds and often received lower compensation)

• How movements are often driven by one person’s tenacity/stubbornness

• How bloody long change takes

• That impossible things are possible

• IT being trusted implicitly

• Outsourcing can be dangerous

• People hiding behind their jobs

• The relief of having company in our oppression

• Corporate structures persisting (the ‘Security’ team is hundreds of years old and came from trying to stop thefts when money was being transferred on horseback?!)

• What seems big to you, is a tiny distraction or unknown to most other humans on the planet

• How an escape fantasy (eg running a cute little post office) isn’t always the idyll you imagine

• Sometimes the legal system is the only way of keeping big organisations accountable

• How rarely people murder people who hurt others, when, you know, they COULD

Then there’s things like:

• How first-person storytelling can be so involving

• How hearing the actual voices of people involved makes things really engaging

• SO much more information is available in English than in some other languages

• The amount of work a produced podcast involves

And also:

• How organised sounds deliver meaning to human brains (language is a whole THING isn’t it?)

• How information is delivered to a tiny computer in my car and then without wires to my EARS? (and how used to that access I am)

• How I let myself forget the damage that driving does to the planet (and downloading/using the internet!)

• How having audio in my ears helps me feel safer in service stations/in crowded situations

• How I still have that love of being lost in a story that I had a child

• The choices we make on how we spend our miraculous lives on this tiny blue rock in space

(There’s more but you get the point!)

I find there’s an awakening power to the question ‘What is this an example of?’ that takes me out of just being lost in the specifics of my current situation. It allows me to build connections to broader themes, stretch further into the past and see bigger significance.

Pattern-making is a way to move more wisely through complexity and mess - this is a pattern-making question.

I keep being drawn to the power of fractals - in a metaphorical sense, don’t @ me with maths (actually feel free to @ me with fractal math facts, I’d love it).

Most recently, it was the incandescent adrienne maree brown who brought this back to the surface for me.

That we can affect the whole by changing a part.

That even in our tiny actions we can embody the world we dream of.

And I have a hunch that by finding the connections of our present moment with other experiences, we can give more power to the fractal connections of our choices.

I was very drawn to Joanna Macy’s idea of the energy of Business As Usual as contrasted with the energy of The Great Turning, the tide of change that we can nurture. (I’ve got her new podcast in my queue - age 94!)

We can find literal and spiritual company with all of the people who are following the energy of better, more equitable, more just, more magical, more joyful, more survivable futures.

What’s a situation you’re facing right now? What’s it an example of?

What else is it an example of?

And what else?

There’s another pattern-making question I find really useful, and I reckon we’ll be exploring that next.

Complexity and mess. Month two's invitation.

After a month of focusing on self/feelings/sacredness/work, we’re allowing a different aspect of being an interdependent leader take the focus: how we handle complexity and mess.

(New here? This is the intro to the six-month cycle)

Those of you who’ve been around for a while know that I’m fascinated by the lenses adults can develop to look at the wild uncertainty of reality.

How we can (but don’t always do) move from wanting to just be a good belonger, to standing out for solving specific problems, to being inspirational and focusing on outcomes, to then despairing at how everything ELSE is broken and wondering who the hell we are and what we’re here to do, to finally finding some kind of peace as we zoom further in and further out of what’s happening around us.

This month I think I’m holding a few things gently (and I’d love if you joined me):

Patterns

What is this an example of? What does it remind me of?

Time

What length of time am I seeing this through? What happens if I zoom more into the immediate moment? What happens if I delve into the deep past that lead us here? What future timelines am I aware of - and how far forward am I thinking?

Empathy

Who do I have empathy with and how deeply do I allow that empathy to go? Who do I NOT have empathy with and what effect does that have?

Ways of knowing

Which ways of knowing do I sit in out of habit? Can I allow other ways of knowing to be added in? Where do I have certainty/fundamentalism? How do I know what I know? What else might be true? What does my body know? What does younger me know? What does Big Me know? What are non-human people telling me - the plant people, the animal people? What hunches or instincts am I listening to or ignoring?

A friend asked me a while ago about what was missing in ‘leadership’ education. I said I felt like the middle 65% is very well looked after. But the edges - the super macro and the zoomed in micro are often missing.

My hunch is that we’ll get a lot of mileage from looking at the margins this month, the liminal spaces. The quiet, corner-of-the-eye, don’t-look-straight-at-it subtleties. The big, high/deep, sweeping hugenesses.

Let’s see what happens!

As always, let me know if you are using any of these prompts and what they spark for you. Either by replying here or finding me on the socials (I’m @megalightheart everywhere - Insta, FB, Twitter, Medium).

Another world is possible.

PS Support a Black trans author AND do yourself a favour by having a plotty book that will take over your brain - order/pre-order The Library Thief

Fumbling through failure and freeze.

Last Tuesday I really felt like a failure.

(I’m going to tell you the whole thing and hope that it’s maybe a useful parable to round out this month?)

The day after the long weekend, I already needed just one more day off.

****

New here? This is the end of this month’s theme in a six-month cycle of focus areas around interdependent leadership.

****

Yet again, on the Thursday before the weekend, I had failed to clear as much of the public email and voicemails for the service I manage.

I had a morning meeting with some senior people which subjectively turned into feeling like they were listing things that were not right in my areas of responsibility, and ways I hadn’t dealt with A Hot Topic in a good way.

I logged into all the inboxes. My two emails, the public email, the voicemail, Teams, work WhatsApp.

There was one email that had news that was just dizzying.

Another where I hadn’t cancelled a meeting with a volunteer and they’d shown up and I’d not realised until I woke up with a proper movie-scene startle on Saturday going, ‘Oh crap i didn’t cancel!’ and I hadn’t sent the apology email as I had planned.

And then five billion other messages of varying urgency, emotional tone and size of response.

Plus, in the background, all the life stuff (two sets of Death admin, rental house search, Thailand surgery admin) and the world.

And I just froze.

****

I’ve been watching my freeze response the past couple of weeks.

There are two people who used to be among my absolute closest people who have ended their relationships with me in recent times. One of those endings had given me more grief than I felt when my Mum died.

I’d decided to go back on Instagram on 31st March, not really realising it was Trans Day of Visiblity (and my five-year name change anniversary!).

Whilst there, I saw a picture of one of the ex-loved ones and a mention of the other.

Whilst still physically breathing and standing and walking, I could feel my insides breathe in and not breathe out.

I’m kind of fascinated with movies where people have to hide from monsters/killers/whatever, but absolutely cannot watch them when I’ll be on my own, and Zed in particular knows never ever to creep up on me or surprise me. In fact, my startle response is so strong, people around me have to make noise when approaching so I don’t yell, like that Catherine Tate character.

Sometimes I imagine what I would do if I heard someone in the house. Where would I hide? What would I do? What would my exit points be?

When I’m on my own overnight, I lock two doors between me and the rest of the house and absolutely can NOT watch anything that has a hint of danger.

But that sensation of holding your breath whilst they're searching the house?

That’s the kind of breath holding that I had after seeing those posts on Instagram.

That and the breath you breathe in and hold when you see the coffin coming out of the hearse the first time, just before you cry.

****

So I was already frozen inside before the meetings, and the emails.

But afterwards, I was holding my breath to hide, holding my breath before crying, and also holding my breath like when you’ve just made a huge sudden mess, broken something precious that belongs to someone else, or when you’ve had the phone call saying you’ve been burgled. (Both real memories.)

Which meant: I spun.

I tried joining an online co-working session. That almost always works, but that day it did not.

I think I ate, did the dishes, had a nap.

All the things.

But still I was getting maybe one task done, but it was like a thousand alarms all going off at once.

I mean, weirdly, in an actual crisis, I’m great. Calm, steady, assessing. Ella Risbridger in A Year of Miracles, her beautiful cookbook written about food the year after her person died, talks about those of us who had emotionally turbulent childhoods being like sailors who find it hard to walk on land, but feel at home in the rhythms of being at sea.

But this felt like fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail, fail.

Too many examples, too close together.

And I finally had the thought:

‘Oh. I’m actually failing at this job.’

The (perceived) reality of that hit me. I was 3.5 years in and was actually no good at this. I assumed I would be, and turns out, just was NOT.

Underneath that was a firm belief. Are you ready?

‘If I can’t actually do the job of being a senior manager, I therefore cannot coach people who are doing that job.’

So not only was I failing at my job, but it meant that my life’s work was built on a lie.

I allowed this to be true for a bit (spoiler: I do actually get my head on straight in a bit) then thought, ‘Well, I’d better find a way to actually do some work.’

I then remembered the doc I made for myself called Meg, would it help to…?

(This thread instigated by Anuradha of Sowing Post-Capitalist Seeds fame this week is wildly useful for the neurosparkly amongst us.)

I’d already tried counting the number of emails/VMs and putting a bean in a pot for each one and using that as a progress counter, but that doesn’t work very well for some reason. Maybe I should have done satsuma portions so I get a wee blood sugar boost as well. All I got with the dried beans was an intrusive thought about putting one in my mouth and sucking it.

So, I know it’s laborious, but I went through the inbox, and wrote what action needed to be taken for each email/message on a separate postit.

Then I used what I learned from working in McDonalds when I was 19. I served the customer in front of me: I just did the one postit, then the next.

It was enough to get some purchase, but I had to deliberately ignore my skin being gently on fire, the several alarms going off around me, the people banging on my windows and ringing the doorbell, the train I needed to catch and wasn’t packed for.

Metaphorically speaking.

However, the truth, my truth - and I think this is super important to end our lunar month of focusing on who we are and what we do -  is that leading something isn’t just being inspirational/wise in meetings. It’s so often working out what to do from the overflowing bath with the taps stuck fully open, then actually doing it, whilst managing your emotions about the work, the outside-of-work work, and the world.

Later on, I got to speak to one of my sibling-friends and she talked me down from my sense of failure.

She reminded me

• I’m post-covid, moving house, in the middle of grief, the first day back after a long weekend.

• I’m really really doing my best.

• I’m working within systems (within systems) that either slow or actively don’t want a human and humane workplace to exist.

• No one embodies the platonic ideal of inclusive, interdependent leadership (I should know this from having coached all those people, but I temporarily forgot.)

• We ‘succeed’ by persisting.

Obviously, this helped, and then it led me to think about telling the story of this day. So here we are.

END OF PARABLE.

[Epilogue: I watched myself coaching someone on Friday and, well, I noticed that I can still coach ‘despite’ me being a ‘failure’. ]

****

We’re coming to the end of lunar month one of our six month cycle!

I hope you’ve gotten something from the energy of reflecting on Self, work, emotions and sacredness, even if ‘all’ you’ve done is read my emails.

We transition in the next couple of days to month two which is about how we grow more useful lenses on complexity and mess.

See you there.

Gaining perspective on overwhelm - halfway through the Self month.

Hey wonderful humans.

I’m back on my Sunday morning writing date. (Actually, I started this two weeks ago and then on the Sunday afternoon, I coughed my way back into covid. Just about back on the horse-hoarse now so some of the timings were true at time of typing but some aren’t actually true now, two Sundays later.)

(New here? Click here for the context of the full six-month cycle, and here for this month’s theme and here to get updates in your inbox.

Threads this time: Walking alongside grief. Getting perspective on overwhelm. Staying true to your values when team stuff gets messy. Self-care (but others care?). Gallows humour. The all-pervasive battle metaphor.

1.

(CN: grief. Skip to the next section if you’re tender.)

It’s the first anniversary of my Mum’s death today. It’s 9.01 am as I type this. Last year, at this time, she had gone to hospital in the middle of the night with horrible gastric stuff. She whatsapped me at 10.10 (I just scrolled back) to say she was being admitted with pancreatitis. I texted her some comforting stuff from the NHS website that said most people recover after a week or so.

That message only has blue ticks because I read it when I got her phone a week or so later. It was in her tiny grey rucksack, alongside notes on bits of card (my Mum was ALWAYS with the notes), and tissues. Her lipstick. Her bank cards.

I still remember going into her bedroom and finding a tissue box covered with Italian vocab she’d written on there with biro. So many questions I can’t ask her.

December was rough from about the middle onwards. I think it was Christmas approaching and it being the first one in 48 years without Jenny Joy. I didn’t really have anyone over for the couple of weeks before Christmas and was crying about ten times a day.

This week hasn’t been like that. It’s like the well of tears are there, but I can choose to put my feet in, or not.

I suppose I’ve gotten used to carrying on?

I wasn’t really devastated by Mum dying. But it still doesn’t make any SENSE. I’m still, a year later, waiting for her to stop being dead so I can see her again. Like, surely it can’t be that I can NEVER ask her a question or laugh with her or SING with her again? Exchange a few sentences in Italian or wash the dishes and sing showtunes at the top of our lungs. (Mum was in the am-dram for years. So I grew up with songs from music halls and shows going back to 1900. I still have her voice when I’m at the sink saying in the Eliza Dolittle voice, “I washed me face and ‘ands before I come I did”.)

I went to text her yesterday. Apparently, these urges don’t really go away.

I listened to Krista Tippett interview Nick Cave, whose teenage sons died pretty soon after one another.

He talks about how loss is a fundamental part of being human, the constant sense of loss that we try and avoid, but in grief we are pulled right UP against, our breath frosting the glass. His grief took him to his own kind of faith, which he speaks of in interesting ways.

In my meditation tradition, we’d say the loss is speaking to the fundamental wound of being separated from the divine, and that the longing for connection is what can drive us to seek sacredness.

So part of the longing for Mum is a longing for God, which for me translates into doing what I think I’m here for, which is writing to you about leadership.

So here we are.

(The photo at the top is Mum’s rosebush having survived the winter.)

2.

Woyyy this week has been a lot, including a whole BUNCH of changes and turbulence at work and it was leadership meetings and Board meeting and commissioner meeting this week, and travelling to speak at a conference.

Oh, and we’re looking for a new place to live, doing the paperwork to sell my Mum’s house whilst going through the emotions and logistics of another major bereavement.

Plus there’s colonised mindful stretching practice to get back into (I have NOT done this this week) and, of course, my Duolingo streak to nurture (@megalightheart - find me lol).

Two things have helped.

But before we get to those, I’ve been trying to pay attention to what overwhelm actually is?

Seems to me like some of the ingredients are:

• Too many moving parts to keep track of easily in your head

• Many things that imply many branching cascades of steps that all feel like they need to be taken at the same time

• A sense of it never ending?

  One key that is helping currently is gaining perspective. I kind of feel it almost literally. Like, standing back and having some distance.

In Euston station in London there’s a mezzanine floor with restaurants and the first class lounge that forms a kind of balcony around all the people milling around on the ground floor where all the train platforms are. Being down there is a LOT, particularly sensorily - loud, lots of people, tracking your bags, waiting on tippy-toes for when your train’s platform is announced, so you can be at the front of the surge.

That’s kind of how it feels sometimes to be in amongst the zoomed-in detail of my task list! Loud, urgent, too much to track, things obscuring your vision, in a crowd of things to do.

What’s been helpful is being able to group a whole bunch of things together and go, That Whole Thing is this.

Like, okay there’s:

• Recruitment (several roles, several many tasks).

• Conference.

• Team dynamics.

• Board.

• Commissioners.

• Leadership team stuff.

• Mum’s house and grief.

• Other major bereavement logistics.

• Upcoming surgery logistics.

• Moving house.

• Wellbeing rhythms.

• Queer family.

Helps to be able to zoom out. And see, okay, that’s That Whole Thing. That’s THAT Whole thing.

But even that list feels like too many things to track. Like, I had to actually think to get them all.

So I have to zoom out again and go:

• Day job.

• Bereavement logistics.

• Moving house.

• Me stuff.

It helps to know that I have all the actions captured in one place for all of these projects, so I know I’m not losing anything by zooming out.

But especially in the morning, at breaks, and at night, to stop my Ordinary Mental Consciousness from whirring and whirring and spinning me into actively obstructive swirls, it can help to go, okay, all of THAT belongs to That Whole Thing. Anything in there that I haven’t already captured as a task in my notebook? Yes - capture it. No? Well it’s in there.

The other aspect that helps is handling the downstream whilst somewhat getting upstream.

What do I mean by that?

We have a vacancy at work for the person who deals with the public voicemail and email. We get 5-10 voicemails and 20-30 emails every day - and not always straightforward ones.

I’ve been trying to help my deputy out by dealing with these inboxes and it’s a LOT of work. In fact, I had SUCH grand plans for the four days they were off. I counted all the messages and got a pot of 70 white beans and another pot to put them in, and was going to clear my schedule and do 70 message-beans a day until I’d totally cleared the backlog. Miss Rona had other ideas, so we only caught up with the backlog in the past couple of days.

That’s working downstream - in the thick of it

Upstream is going: what’s somewhat causing this?

Okay - we need to recruit a person.

But also are there any patterns? We were getting repeat messages from people because they hadn’t heard back. So I changed the auto message to set better expectations.

The team have also discussed doing a better FAQ doc that goes to service users so that some regular questions are answered.

That’s upstream.

Of course, we could go even more upstream and think about information flows and system change and putting more control in the hands of patients and renegotiating contracts and abolishing the whole system.

But that’s plenty for now.

Another example.

I have a surgery date and they want me at a certain ‘BMI’. (Ugh, the ridiculous racist bell-curve.)

I need to lose a few kilos.

Downstream, I can buy a bit more fruit so I snack on that rather than biscuits.

A bit more upstream, I can get out some recipe books that inspire me to do more plant-based food.

But I was talking with one of my sibling-friends, and we were saying that if we could deal with the emotional side of eating, that cascades down.

For me, that’s making sure I do All The Things - getting out in the air and the light, properly meditating, seeing my meditation instructor for kind-of-therapy, doing stretching, seeing loved ones, all of THAT.

That’s upstream.

I could, also, contact the clinic and question why they’re using BMI. I could find people who are already doing the work of combatting the use of BMI. I could link in with other trans people who are working on eating differently without the spectre of clawing dysphoria.

Upstream often takes more commitment, and downstream often can’t be ignored in the meantime.

But I find it helpful to find how many steps I can go upstream with the energy I currently have.

3.

In the past, I’ve talked a good game about unilateral control vs mutual learning. How we should come from a perspective of not having all the pieces, and have genuine curiosity about how others deal with things and a transparency about our thought processes.

I’ll bring you some of the detail in a couple of months when we’re talking about relationships with others.

What I noticed about this, however, in this month when we’re focusing on self and feelings and work, is that I am wildly influenced in my ability to come from a collaborative mindset by how stressed I’m feeling.

There is definitely a mini-dictator in me, and not necessarily a benign one, not even from my own perspective.

I can feel her saying, ‘They should just do their job or get out! Sometimes you just have to lay down the law and people have to deal with it.’

This is NOT the mindset that will take us to a new world! But it’s in there. Not very far from the surface, either.

And I feel guilty because we started differently way back in the first few months. But somehow we’ve settled into a groove that is very close to the traditional, closed, hierarchical mindset.

I think I’m going to experiment with using this as a symptom for me to gain some perspective, slow down, and check in with the people around me? Remember queerness. Link in with my values and my sacred practices.

Theory vs practice? All business problems are personal problems?

We have to keep bringing ourselves back. Again and again.

As Natalie Goldberg, the Jewish Buddhist writing teacher says, ‘You don’t just drink one glass of water. You drink glass of water after glass of water.’

4.

I spoke to a loved one I haven’t spoken to in wayyy too long this week. She works in freedom from oppression work, particularly around race, class and gender.

She asked me about what was going on, and I told her (bereavements, end of relationship, surgery date, moving house, work things).

‘And the world,’ I said.

And we looked at each other and just laughed. For maybe a full minute, we had no words.

It’s SO bad out there.

Sometimes you need to laugh with someone you love who gets it.

5.

I took four days off with Covid. But WOW it took a lot of persuading by my sib-friend.

Self-care and boundaries are all well and good, but when you can clearly see the impact they’ll have on others around you, it’s really tough to follow through. Even if you’re the one who hassles other people to take time off. ‘Should you really be working?’

She persuaded me by saying, ‘What will matter in a year?’

Me having done my best to not create long-term health problems will matter. So I slept for three days.

Whenever I’m walking I’m having to remind my fast legs that my lungs are slow.

6.

The battle metaphor is EVERYWHERE, right?

Yes, sometimes we have to literally physically fight.

But most of the time we don’t. I’m trying to be sensitive to how it inhabits my language.

7.

If you’d like to know what action you can actually take to move us beyond capitalism, this programme by someone I really respect and love is starting on 24th April.

https://www.sowingpostcapitalistseeds.com/foundation-course.html

I literally couldn’t recommend it higher. It changed things deep within me.

***

Another world is possible.

With love.

Who am I and what am I doing?!

As I introduced yesterday, this (lunar) month I’m embarking on a quiet journey focusing on sense of self/Self and how I/we get things done.

And of course how that interacts with the other four aspects of: interdependence, other people, freedom from oppression and better planetary futures.

I’ve been asking the question gently in the background of my meditation every morning for the past couple of months - Who am I? Who?

(This has led to my delightful Ordinary Mental Consciousness providing me with two earworms - one from Les Miserables and the other from Muppet Album 2 which involves Zelda and her singing owl. Yes mind, good pattern-finding!)

I thought I’d sit down and write a wild and shaggy list of some of the places I may be looking at over the next month. Feel free to join me in some of them and add others…

***

Where is my sense of Self? As in, who am I outside of my random set of personality traits? Outside of trauma responses and the collection of mental/emotional patterns? How do I find her whilst swimming through the waves of despair and fear and gloom that try to keep us lost on this shadowed planet?

What eternal parts of me can serve as a lighthouse in this foggy world?

***

Whose eyes do I view myself through?

Who am I as a friend? And who taught me to be that kind of friend?

Who am I as a partner? A lover? Where did that learning come from?

Who am I as a leader? Who did I learn that from and how much did I decide ‘for myself’?

How do I know the above is true? Is that the kind of friend/partner/lover/leader that it’s right for me to be?

***

What is it like to let go of some of my wantings and think about serving what the world needs?

There is a constant tension between wanting to be fiercely placed in the intensity of the time I have incarnated into and the longing underneath my escape fantasies of either being (a) a wise little baker running Meg’s Place (‘When it’s gone, it’s gone’) (b) a hotel jazz pianist or (c ) the hedge witch living on the edge of town.

***

What does it mean to be living in a time where society says, ‘Put your oxygen mask on before you help others’ and ‘If you can’t love yourself, how the hell you gonna love someone else?’

***

How does my sense of self affect how I look at interdependence and complexity, and experience it, and navigate through it?

How does my sense of self affect my relationships with others - with people I have a relationship with, with teams, with organisations, with politics, with the human race, with non-human people?

How does my sense of self affect my fighting for and nurturing a present and future free from oppression?

How does my sense of self affect my involvement in better planetary futures?

***

What is it like to be a glorious eternal soul living in the body of a monkey?

***

And how does allll of this express itself fractally in what I get done and how?

A snapshot of me getting things done:

I’m writing this right now on Sunday morning in a Google Meet with a friend I’m growing a lovely new relationship with. Having a witness and travelling partner always helps me.

I spend a lot of my days with one of my besties/siblings either WhatsApping her my list and my progress through it or jumping on Zooms to co-work together. Plus cajoling each other through cooking, cleaning, moving our bodies and getting early bedtimes.

I spend a lot of Monday triaging all of my inboxes, noting the tasks down in my (kind of) bullet journal, then planning what can actually get done this week.

I am VERY affected by how I feel, much as I long to be one of those Productivity 10x Pomodoro 5am Club Just Eat The Frog robots.

I just had a breakthrough with my meditation instructor a few weeks ago, one of the outcomes was finding a way to be… upstream? from my up-until-now omnipresent anxiety.

What that means in my working day is I’m building a muscle that allows me to live from that upstream standpoint, which then means I can ‘get more done’ and be more present.

I have post-its on my wardrobe in my bedroom ( pictured above!) that remind me of the key areas of focus I’ve signed up for in my day job, and the areas that maintain my sense of wellbeing and connectedness and the… chord of notes I want to hold in my non-work life.  

I’m on a 78 day Duolingo Spanish streak, but I haven’t touched my piano in six weeks or finished ONE book for my Read Harder 24 book challenge I signed up for in Jan.

Time! Space! Sleep! Relationships! Food! Duty! Fun! Grief! It’s a lot to balance.

***

Then there are questions like:

How much do I pay attention to the pain of the world as portrayed through the Doom and Panic machines, and how much do I ‘just’ do the work that is given to me to do (and how does that affect my sense of self and how I (think) other people see me)?

Many areas of inquiry.

***

Oooh which leads me to a more meta question:

How do I want to approach this inquiry? How do I keep it linked to who I am/want to be/the world needs me to be and the work I’m doing in the world?

***

Right now I feel a sense of deep quiet and a well of energy to be embarking on this journey.

Join me in a month of asking: Who am I and what am I doing?

(Oh god, that sounds a bit too close to home to how things really feel lol. I’m changing that to be the title of this post!)

Very happy to hear: how you get on, podcasts/writing/tiktoks that made you think, where you’re sharing your investigations.

With love.

Another world is possible.

An invitation

Hi lovely humans

I'm starting a thing tomorrow that will go for six months. I'm happy to do it on my own, but I wonder if you might be drawn to join me in some way - mentally, spiritually, through writing or conversations or art, through themed reading or listening... 

Tomorrow it's the New Moon before the Spring Equinox, where I am anyway. 

I'm starting a practice that will take me through to the New Moon near the Autumn Equinox. 

(I know I'm mixing sun and moon here but ANYTHING in the natural world feels better to me than the awful robotic bloody Gregorian calendar!) 

The other day I was listening to Krista Tippett interview Christiana Figueres, the extraordinary powerhouse behind the 2015 Paris Agreement.

And they were talking, as so many people have, about all that needs to be done by 2030, which when you do a certain kind of maths is VERY soon. 

But I found myself doing a different maths, based on a six month cycle - and there are thirteen of those before the Autumn Equinox in 2030. 

That felt quite spacious. 

You might know I've been thinking about five interlinked aspects of leadership:

• Self

• Interdependent world-sense

• Relationships with others

• Liberation from oppression

• Planetary futures

I'm going to spend six (lunar) months placing attention on these aspects - allowing one to come to the forefront in turn each month (with a fallow/void/chaos/exhale month at the end).

I was going to do a big launch and invite you to a community and all that but (a) seed rhythms start quietly and in the dark and (b) wow the past couple of months have been Quite A Thing. 

My sense is if you join me in whatever way feels good and right to you, we could build some kind of heartbeat, vortex, slipstream for the future. 

And I know I know, inevitable collapse and too late and islands of sanity... but also god(s) in everything and allowing the transpersonal and seeking sacredness, taking action and the truth of fractals. Right?

Anyhoo. 

I'ma do it. If you'd like to join me do. If you'd like to tell me you are, great. 

Maybe we can work out some kind of way of connecting and linking what we're doing inside these rhythms, but that's for Future Us. (Hi future us!)  

MUCH love for us living in this time and longing for better.

Another world is possible.

Do you fold your tendrils in at night?

I’ve noticed that I’m doing a new thing at night which is helping me sleep.

My day is full - full of work, full of worry, full of thinking about things that are both in direct influence and definitely out of my direct influence.

Which means, when I tune into it, my energy feels splatted outwards.

Tendrils reaching into all sorts of places, some thousands of miles away, some imaginary, some far far into the future, a few into the past.

I always sit on the edge of my bed anyway to do (what I call in my head) ‘creams and pills’. Then I close my eyes and do a quick repeat of my morning meditation.

What’s new is I’m consciously drawing everything back IN.

Babes, I'm about to sleep.

There’s nothing more for me to do. The day is DONE. It serves no one for my energy to be all out THERE.

So I pull it in. I breathe my edges, my boundaries back in place.

I feel my breath, I feel my body, I ‘allow’ the world to keep on turning whilst I get ready to rest.

It’s (a) quite insightful to see how externalised I allow my day to make me and (b) how… integrated I feel when I’ve done it.

It does not mean I don’t care.

It does, however, mean I’m preserving my energy so I can go again tomorrow.

Why can't we listen better?

Certainty is a bugger.

I mentioned last week about how false certainty about (bad) future timelines only leads (me) to anxiety and freezing, and that remembering I don’t *actually* know what’s going to happen gives me room to breathe.

As a coach, I’m a bloody brilliant listener. I hear patterns, levels, emotions, hesitations, possibilities, the lot. I have literally nothing else going on in my mind but you.

Outside of a coaching session, I’ve been watching what happens when I’m listening to people and, well, it’s often not pretty.

And I think the source of why I might not be truly listening is certainty.

Arrogant certainty.

Certainty that I know the outcome of a conversation.

Yes, I might learn some information, but my attitudes won’t change, my outlook won’t change, my sense of self won’t change.

I just know it.

I think, if I’m wildly honest, that might be rooted in a kind of unconscious disrespect of who I’m talking to, and a sleepy-numb approach to what I think might happen in my day.

A disrespect that nothing you’re going to say is going to really affect me.

And sleepy-numb as in, forgetting the utter freaking miracle of you and me being conscious humans on this tiny blue rock in space. The utter unlikelihood of it all. The fragility of it. The wild complexity of every moment.

And there I sit, basically waiting for my day to unfold exactly how I expect it to.

And for us to have a conversation and have it end and then us both to continue about our totally predictable days.

This? Is no way to live.

The Theory U folks talk about levels of listening.

- Listening which is basically waiting.

- Listening for debate.

- Listening for emotion and connection.

- Listening which allows for transformation.

I’m not saying I’m always Waiting Listening, but I’m rarely Transformation Listening.

I had a badge a while back that said, Today Everything Changes.

I found it a pretty inspiring reminder, for a bit.

But how do I continue to remember?

Do I need to prep for conversations with this in mind?

Do I need to open more to the people in front of me?

Do I need to shift my attitude to humans?

This is (yet) another example of needing reminders of how we stay conscious when the mind is so prone to distraction and overwhelm.

How?

How do we drop into our bodies, into a felt-sense of the world, using that deeper vision that sees beyond immediate appearances?

We don't need to go looking for the utter profound magic of each moment.

But how do we stay open to it?

We're at the mercy of what we can't step back from

Part of why I included so many reminders to ‘tune in’ in my Monday routine plan yesterday (which is called in Google Docs ‘Just Do This’ lol) is that it can be really important to nurture the ability to not get caught inside what’s happening to us.

We are at the mercy of what we can’t step back from.

Remembering my spiritual sources, as it were, allows me to somewhat regain during the day who I am when I’m meditating at the beginning and end of the day.

Another question which really helps me is

****

What is this an example of?

****

I used this today a couple of times in leadership meetings.

Someone came and did a fab presentation about a new initiative. When I noticed it was great, I asked myself, ‘What is this an example of?’

Amongst other things, it was an example of doing ‘upstream’ work which means fewer problems later on. Which, as I type this, is making me think of what we can do in a similar way in the service I manage.

In a different meeting, we discussed our targets and objectives. When I thought about what I was finding hard about this, I realised it was an example of me not being able to find the right level of abstraction, and of us as a group of finding the same levels of abstraction for quite different areas of work.

We somewhat found a way through this by agreeing that we would evaluate if the objective was at the right level by if it felt motivating to us as a stretch.

Asking ‘What is this an example of?’ can help us to see patterns and go up from the specifics to larger categories and lessons. Often this frees us from being lost in the detail to find lessons and freedom to move inside the context that detail exists in.

I find it allows me to breathe freer and, again, remember who I am.

This question is itself an example (SWIDT?) of how we might grow our ability to be bigger than the issues in front of us, and cultivate a more interdependent perspective.

Try it out?

How I start Mondays as a neurosparkly person

How do you start your Mondays?

No matter our work and purpose, the struggle to get stuff done is often a source of shame and pressure. It can be for my neurosparkly brain, anyway.

Below is my Monday plan - when I remember to use it, things actually turn out much smoother.

Offered in the spirit that some of this might spark something useful for you.

*****

Tune in - get quiet/ground/breathe etc.

Convert inbox messages with tasks to mini-projects (what I call tasks as they almost always have several steps hidden inside, sneaky buggers) - email/Teams/whatsapp

(Tune in)

Go through all lists and create post-its (or whatever) of mini-projects with a hard absolute deadline of your last working day this week or before

Sort by absolute hard deadline of today, tomorrow, next day etc

(Tune in)

In addition, choose the one important but not urgent project to focus on and book into Deep Work slot

(Tune in)

See if you’re mentally bouncing off/squinting/clenching/glazing over any of the mini-projects and go deeper into why (still, slow, gentle)

(Tune in)

Choose first mini-project with a deadline and list alllll the tiny steps

(Tune in)

Tune into which tools to use - postits, music/telly/podcast in background, stand/sit, rewards, timer, body double, text accountability…

(Tune in)

Do the steps!

(Tune in)

Choose next mini-project with a deadline (repeat 7-9) then nice-to-get-dones

****

Wish I'd remembered this today. Past Meg knows me well. I should listen to her advice…

Get past climate action freeze

Don’t know about you but I freeze when I think/read about climate collapse. Like, it feels like I stop breathing.

I have a bunch of books and podcasts I could read and I just don’t because the thought of It All panics me.

Probably because (a) I’m trying to do it on my own and (b) I’m not actually doing anything.. Literally nothing. Recycling doesn’t count.

I was thinking this morning about what it might look like if we all had a collective climate project we were part of.

You know how when people meet you they ask, What do you do? (hate that for lots of reasons but it’s true.)

What if you could meet anyone and ask,

What climate project are you part of?

There’s so many ways of being involved.

• Actual digging/planting/purifying/saving/nurturing/whatever.

• Lobbying.

• Direct action.

• Writing.

• Website maintenance.

• Community-building support.

• Convening.

• Research.

• MONEY.

• Witchcraft.

• Wayfinding.

• Cooking for the people doing all of that work.

Some kind of action, WITH OTHERS.

What if we made it just a part of life - that in addition to EVERYTHING else we do, we had a climate project we were part of?

Just musing.

Are you letting yourself be a laughably passive 'ally'?

I went to see a documentary a couple of weeks ago and realised I'd let myself stop at an embarrassingly early stage in my solidarity with intersex people.

The documentary is Every Body, and is based around interviews with three intersex activists - River Gallo, Sean Saifa Wall and Alicia Roth Weigel.

Having known about the I in LGBTQIA+ for a while and having (knowingly) hung out with a couple of intersex people a bit, I'd allowed myself to think of myself as an 'ally'.

I was rudely awakened to how laughably passive my 'allyship' was when I watched a straightforward 90-min documentary and learned a LOT.

I think there's a stage people go through after we find out about a way that people are marginalised/oppressed where we feel generically neutral-to-positive about those people, and if we're not careful, we stay there.

Like friendly cows in a field, watching a train go by.

(I wonder this, by the way, when walking in the Pride parade. Thousands of people turn up to cheer and watch but I don't really know their politics or commitment. Just that if they've come along to stand and watch us walk by they probably don't actively want to kill us -- which is not NOTHING let's be clear. How actually educated they are about the needs of the LGBT+ coalitions, and how much they actually speak out and organise is another matter.)

There's a long distance between passive awareness to active solidarity.

I think a good next step is self-education.

I'm about to embark on a journey of googling, reading/watching lists, articles, books, podcasts so I know more about the perspectives of intersex people, the campaigning and activism that needs support and what's being asked of people who aren't knowingly intersex.

I normally start with searching for "[x] 101", or "[x] reading lists" or "podcasts about [x]", making sure I'm prioritising voices of people who are also marginalised in other ways, so that I'm not just getting a single-issue perspective (very easy to have, particularly if we only listen to white voices.)

I will at no point in these early stages ask any intersex people I know to answer any of my questions. Google, is, especially at this stage, of course, my friend.

If you've come across anyone or any media that should be on my radar, let me know?

Don't let people be the only one in meetings

There was a time I was in a meeting. Everyone else seemed to know what was happening, and I was asking for clarification and it was obvious I was breaking deep taboos.

I literally started doubting my sense of what was being asked of us, as everyone else seemed to not think it was bad (or at least seemed to understand!)

I came out of the meeting really shaken, tears in the stairwell and everything.

It wasn't until a few days later that a colleague forwarded on a news article that said the thing I thought was happening was indeed happening, not just with us but across the sector.

Although it was a terrible phenomenon to read about, I felt the relief in my body to know that I wasn't being stupid or obtuse or naive.

I remember in some facilitation writing I read a while back, one of their major practices was noticing when someone was on their own in expressing a view.

If this happened, as a facilitator they would ask, does anyone else see this this way?

And if no one did, they would find something in their own experience that overlapped in some way with the lone person's.

Their perspective was that having someone isolated was a deep rupture for a group and one of the things that would stop healthy interactions happening.

(I think there's some nuance here about if someone is expressing harmful views, but, maybemaybe even then it's useful to keep someone in a conversation rather than shunning them. MUCH nuance there, but, you know, dynamic tensions

Just because you're on your own, doesn't mean you're wrong.

And sometimes sharing what's happening for you can be enough for someone to get the strength to carry on.

What's a dynamic tension and how does it help us navigate complexity?

One of the transitions adults go through as we grow our lenses on complexity and mess is from certainty to a felt-sense of how… mixed life is.

Feels like we're living in the middle of lots of what I think of as dynamic tensions, within a pressure to create clear, pure rules.

I'm wondering if part of moving through the world in a wiser way is resisting rules and instead living inside those dynamic tensions, where there are no clear ‘right’ choices, only annoying nuance.

How do you handle these?

Here's one I'm… embarrassed? ashamed? of…

I’ve signed up for a paid ‘yoga’ app that is wildly customisable (style, level, session length, amount of instruction, voice), and makes sure over a period of days you've had a good variety of movement. All of which to say, I’m finally actually moving my body once or twice a day.

I'm trying to make it more likely that 70-year-old Meg can move, and I'm working on being more present in my body, after years of chronic dysphoria-led disembodiment.

So, through that lens, this app is pretty bloody perfect.

However, I'm extremely aware that it also has less than zero to do with a connected system of spiritual knowledge or even anything or anyone from India.

Whilst I was on my free trial, I spent a while searching for Indian owned yoga apps or Indian yoga videos but they didn't work in a way that suited my neorosparkly brain or they asked for way more time than I can spend each day.

So I either

- find some other type of balancing/stretching/strength activity that isn't (what one of my besties calls) colonised stretching that I won't actually do for more than a week (ask me how I know)

- go back to running (which only serves cardio)

- haul my ass to a class run by someone from a real lineage (money/time/who?)

- work out how to teach myself and make my own sequences (?)

- try and MAKE myself do something I'll find very hard to actually stick to

or… do something I don't find particularly ethical.

Add it to the list of an Evil Prime subscription, owning a car, and not hassling our landlord enough about our gas boiler?

This is what I mean by dynamic tension.

I want to be building my strength, balance and flexibility in ways that suit my brain/timetable AND I don't want to be contributing yet again to the centuries-long project of White violence.

I want to (more publicly) denounce genocides AND it helps literally no one if I lose my job or jeopardise the service I manage.

I want to be working on nurturing our medium-term work culture AND there's so much detail to deal with day-to-day.

I want to talk to the landlord about converting our gas hob so that we're not directly burning fossil fuels every meal AND I love the immediate control I have over the temperature (plus we had a terrible experience with an induction hob at our last place).

I want to nurture a human and humane team environment AND we have to operate within challenging KPIs to keep our funding.

I want to date more AND oh my god don't make me struggle through messaging so many strangers.

I want to read All The Books/knit/play jazz piano/draw/paint/make my own clothes AND I want to rest my brain at the end of the day with Grey's Anatomy reruns.

I want to knit impressive garments AND I find it wildly stressful to spend 100 hours making something that might not fit.

I want to throw my lot in with the climate crisis direct action lot AND we cannot live without my salary.

I want to give it all up to run a tiny bakery AND I want to do everything I can to bring us closer to another, better world (and we all know the bakery is just an escape fantasy lol)

Through a black and white lens, the ethics of some of these are very clear.

In practice, in our current world, it's much less straightforward.

Reminds me of when a (non-day-job) colleague came to me with a dilemma she was in, about someone she was connected to who was beginning to express some anti-trans views.

She came to me for advice, and maybe because I was tired, I ended up saying that it was up to her to decide what fitted with her feminism, what sat right with her, her spirit.

We live in a wildly confusing world. We absolutely shouldn't excuse ourselves from self-education and doing the work of anti-oppression, AND there's also a challenge in facing the truth that we often have to, at least in the short term, live within in a tension that can't be resolved.

AND we need to be conscious of who benefits from that compromise and who loses. And how that sits with our spirit.

AND how we find peace in our body and take the next wise and timely action with so many unresolvable loops.

AND how we do our best to live with integrity whilst we exist in this particular moment/the space-time continuum.

Erm.

I don't have a neat conclusion, here.

Discuss?

A question that's helping me be less anxious as a leader

When I look at what's required for us to become the kind of leaders the world needs, so much of it comes down to... feelings.

Anxiety, dread, grief, anger, overwhelm, exhaustion. All of these come up as we face the challenges of creating a new world whilst swimming in the current world. They can stop us taking the action that we need to.

I have a question/reminder that I'm experimenting with today that might be useful.

When I read Laura Van Dernoot Lipsky's work on overwhelm and secondary trauma (back when I made all those youtube videos in six weeks?), I thought becoming less overwhelmed was going to be all about systems and stuff.

But so much of what she recommends is things that increase our capacity - like, being in nature, seeing people we love, getting sleep, having a stillness practice, moving....

And I'm really really doing my best to do these things. I'm moving once or twice a day, I'm convening some queer open house spaces so we have some community, I'm doing crafts, reading more, I'm trying to turn off Grey's Anatomy and prioritise sleep.

But I come from a line of matriarchs who worried. And let's be frank, we live in an increasingly worrying world.

For me, worry and anxiety is what I feel when a part of me feels like something bad is going to happen.

I don't know about you, but I forget that that feeling of certainty doesn't actually mean I can predict the future.

So here's the reminder I'm using today:

****

You don't actually know what's going to happen. Are you opening to the present moment?

****

I don't know what's going to happen later on today, tomorrow, next week. I certainly don't know what's going to happen nationally and globally in the coming years.

But opening to the current moment will make it more likely I can take the next wise and timely action.

I've already used this reminder SEVERAL times today and I think it's helping.

How does that sit with you? What else helps you with staying out of the worst bits of worry? I'm all ears for strategies!

30 Reasons You Might Want to Improve Your Instincts In June

This Monday 1st June you can join me and 100+ people (I KNOW!) in 30 daily prompts designed to help you evolve better instincts in the middle of mess and stress.

So why the heck should you want to do this?

I came up with 30 reasons - one for each day. :)

1. Climate/social justice is a wildly interconnected, messy, mind-boggling situation.

We need better instincts when looking at these chaotic, volatile systems so we don’t take simplistic, harmful actions. Finding a way for everyone to be free of the hellscape that white patriarchal capitalism has created is not something that can be put on a fridge magnet.

2. Better instincts come partially from good input.

We focus on seven different aspects (or really six-plus-one) that widen the store your instincts come from. Each day there's something new to allow in.

3. We'll practice other ways of knowing things - not just from the head.

Our gut, heart and background knowing are important too.

4. It’s free.

Hello?

5. You get a cute printable journal (if that’s your kind of thing).

6. You get a cute printable poster to orient you (if that’s your kind of thing).

7. You get a tracker chart to tick off each day so you can see your progress through the month (if that’s your kind of thing).

8. There is a short weekly reflection questionnaire.

I’ll share the edited results so you can find out how others are doing.

9. This is the only time I have clear plans for us to do this as a cohort (rather than just self-study).

There’s a power in knowing you’re part of 100+ others doing the same thing at the same time.

10. Each prompt takes less than five minutes to digest.

11. You can listen to or read the daily prompt.

12. There’s a two-sentence tl:dr version of each daily prompt.

For if you really don’t have the time/energy/spoons to read or listen.

13. Once you’ve gone through the 30 days once, you can easily design your own cycle.

I’ve got a plan for us to pool our ideas about other prompts that would be useful, so you can keep it going if you find it useful.

14. I’m going to be sharing my reflections as I go through this process for the first time.

I hope that’s a benefit?

15. Each of the daily aspects we cycle through have been chosen specifically to relate to aspects that evolve in transformative leaders.

16. You get guidance on different methods to remember be aware.

Life and our mind are both really good at distracting us from being conscious, so in order to remember to be aware during the day, we need tricks and tactics. I’ll share a bunch and you can see what works.

17. You don’t need to change your day at all.

The prompt gives you a background focus for the day, but doesn’t require you fit anything else into your day (apart from the less-than-five-minute prompt.)

18. It’s nice to have someone else tell you what to do for a bit?

I mean, you're always making the decisions, right?

19. You’ll be helping to improve this for people in the future.

This is a pilot experiment, so all your feedback is like an investment in future people’s wisdom.

20. You can go really in-depth if you want.

You could use the prompts to do some full-on reflection and writing, if that’s where you’re at. Just because they don’t need much time to read/listen to, doesn’t mean you can’t go deep.

21. It’s not going to add to your overwhelm. It’ll help.

By expanding your capacity to hold more complexity.

22. It could be a great thing to do as a team.

Let your colleagues or friends know and you could all sign up and set up a WhatsApp group or whatever as an accountability group, or have some regular Zooms to process what you’re noticing.

23. You can download the audio and have it on your device.

So you can re-listen during the day (or if you repeat the full 30 days again).

24. The prompts are in ordinary language.

No jargon here.

25. There’s no catch.

I’m not building up to sales pitch!

26. It’s a way of building a habit.

27. You don’t need any background in adult development/leadership theory.

I’ve built all that in for you.

28. This is a queer, trans-led project

Er, hi! Worth saying.

29. If it’s not for you you can just ignore the emails.

Or unsubscribe if you’d like to never hear from me again!

30. The next 30 days are doing to happen anyway.

You might as well invest in Future You.

Sign up here:

megalightheart.com/betterinstincts

Email me if you have any questions: meg@megalightheart.com

How to get on top of things

Move beyond overwhelm to sustainable work habits that help you sleep at night with three essential ingredients

I wondered about posting this in the midst of, you know, the world burning, but I reckon whether you’re holding on to your job because capitalism, or if you’re organising for social and climate justice, you still need to know how to filter all the stuff you could be doing and decide what you’re going to do, right?

It is not straightforward knowing how to deal with the demands of complex jobs and complex lives. Overwhelm and procrastination are natural outcomes of not having systems in place to handle too much input for the tiny pipe that human beings are.

Overwhelm

Task overwhelm is when there are too many things-to-do for us to hold in our head at once. It makes it really hard to decide what to do and what not to do and can lead us to unhealthy habits: freezing, overwork, random efforts, procrastination…

Procrastination

Procrastination is when there’s something we feel like we are meant to be doing, and we are avoiding doing it on that timescale. Some of its roots are simple and some of them are complex.

I have a complicated history with ‘productivity’, ‘time management’ and procrastination.

I found myself teaching productivity but had secret, chronic, debilitating procrastination.

Many years ago, i was the internal training office at an IT training firm. I got the job because I just loved the internal training manager but she left after four months on maternity leave, leaving me as basically the internal training department.

That meant I was responsible for all the soft skills training on any topic: selection interviewing, disciplinary interviewing, assertiveness (bless), business communication, coaching… and, yes, what we used to call ‘time management’.

So, I did what I normally did and went to Borders (sob), hauled 12 books into the cafe, took notes, bought the best two and created a one-day course. It was a pick-and-mix approach, where I took loads of ‘tips’ and people could choose the ones that made sense to them, plus I nagged people about how much time they spent doing ‘urgent but not important’ things, when they should have been spending time on ‘important not urgent’ things (yeah, right). Not a coherent approach.

Several years later, I became Europe’s lead trainer for a system called Mission: Control (yes, we used to call it Mission: Impossible).

It had been a pretty static course with loads of PowerPoint so I and my mentor recreated it so it was much more dynamic and suited to British/European culture (I also de-cultified it as it came from a funny organisation).

This system was comprehensive, getting you to think about everything you had to do, wanted to do, dreamed of doing and had committed to do. It was super strict about scheduling and lists and lead me to have a portable dictaphone with me at all times so I could capture things whatever I was doing - even when driving or if I woke up in the middle of the night and thought of something.

I often spent my morning replaying scary, indecipherable whispers.

My secret during this time was: I was a chronic procrastinator.

I hid the fact I wasn’t getting stuff done - particularly stuff to do with my business, particularly sales and marketing and finance and a whole bunch of things. It lead to some dark times in our life.

I really tried to implement this system, but it was made for people who were different to me, plus: emotional stuff can’t be avoided forever (this book and this book really helped me with the darker side of procrastination.)

Fast forward to several years after that, and I was listening to Merlin Mann’s podcast Back To Work and they talked about David Allen’s book Getting Things Done and I thought it was time to get my shit together. I did a full GTD implementation - quite similar to Mission:Control, but a bit more realistic, plus, after years of meditation and therapy, I think I was a different person by this time.

It was enough to get me going and I used a half-assed-but-works-for-me version of GTD on Evernote for the past six or seven years.

A couple of years ago, I came across Bullet Journal, a way of using a paper notebook to track what needs doing and what you’ve done. I cycle between that and digital notes. I love analogue, really, despite the fact that my phone is glued to my hand at every waking moment.

I’m also immersed in reading on complexity, chaos and emergent strategy, so I’m well aware that pretending we’re robots in a factory isn’t going to fit complicated, ever-changing project-based jobs.

All this to say: I’ve looked a lot at productivity and to-do lists and procrastination and I think I’ve mainly come out the other side with some basic patterns that you can use to create a system that works for your brain and routine and job, and that can flex as things change.

(Non-neurotypical people - people with ADD/ADHD or other conditions or disabilities that affect short-term memory and your style of focusing - sorry, I’m definitely coming from a neurotypical position here. My hope is that the principles I introduce might have enough flex in them for you to adapt them to the way that you work. Let me know if there are things that would help for me to include and I’ll edit them in.)

There are three main practices that seem to be common to most systems that help you get on top of stuff.

1. Capture

2. Capacity

3. Review and reflection

1. Capture

One of the major mistakes we make when we’re swimming through the world is trying to hold everything or nearly everything in our head. (Remember, I speak as a recovering chronic procrastinator - please know I’m writing this with a major dose of self-recognition.)

Either you never make a list, or you make one for that day just to get the few things that are totally on top of your mind in front of you or you have several lists in several places.

Result: the feeling that important things might be falling through the cracks.

Also: open loops burning cycles in your brain at all times.

This is exhausting.

You want to close loops but you can’t close the loops by getting everything done. You never get to the end of your list. Not whilst you’re in work.

I think there is, however, a collective sense memory of when you finished school or university or a job and for a brief few days/weeks, you had nothing on your mental list. I have a theory we’re unconsciously chasing that feeling again. But it never comes - we think that having a bunch of unfinished stuff is bad and if we only just GOT IT TOGETHER we’d hit that halcyon task inbox zero again. But our heads always feel so FULL.

The first thing we need to do is get all that stuff out, and into, here’s the kicker, ONE place.

Yep, I’m going to be momentarily hardline and say: you need one place to capture EVERYTHING that goes through your head to do.

Life admin, work stuff, big stuff, small stuff, things you mean to do, things you dream of doing, things people request via email or slack or whatever, things to buy, send, get rid of, fix, sell, say, write, read… All of it.

This means you need what we used to call in my Mission:Control days: a capture tool. It needs to be accessible at all times and very simple to use.

That probably means: a notebook, an audio thing or an app on your phone. If you can make it work with index cards or butterfly postits where you KNOW it’s all gonna be in one place, you’re not going to lose anything and you can capture things at pretty much any moment? Go for it.

Whenever something occurs to you, you capture it.

The idea is never to hold ‘Must do x, must do x’ in your head. You know when you go ‘OH! CRAP!’ as a loop from the back of your mind leaps above the waves momentarily? You capture it RIGHT AWAY.

After a few days, the relief is massive, knowing that nothing is slipping through the cracks. (This isn’t the whole piece of getting out of overwhelm, but it’s a good first step.)

I recommend you start out with just one massive long-ass list, no topics, no sections. We can refine it later, but I think it’s important for you to only add structure in as you find you need it, not go for preemptive structure and get lost in the implementation, losing the reason you’re doing this: to be taking wise and timely action!

Lots of the productivity systems recommend that you do a massive sweep through your life which takes hours/days: go through all your emails, Slack messages, Trello tasks, pieces of paper, and transfer all the tasks onto your list. To a certain extent I’d recommend this, but don’t put it off waiting for that day when you can do it thoroughly. Up to you as you understand your psychology, but something is better than nothing.

Go for imperfect.

So that’s the first part: a massive list of things you could do.

The next thing to think about is: capacity.

2. Capacity

Stupid time/space continuum. Stupid body. We are not infinite unicorn spirits with built-in time machines. We are tiny monkeys who need to sleep. So there are human limits to what we can do. Even if you didn’t sleep, there would still only be 24 hours in a day.

I am willing to bet almost anything that the amount on your list is wa-hayyy more than the time you have available. And that’s not including what’s going to go on it tomorrow and the next day.

So the next step is to look at your capacity.

To start with capacity means: how much time do you have available to do stuff on your list?

It may be that you have a diary or a calendar and you can look at what meetings, etc are already scheduled. It may be that you’ve been holding that in your head. Or maybe you don’t have anything scheduled as you don’t really have a meeting-filled life.

Sketch out: When you start work. When you finish work. What’s already in your diary for the next few weeks.

Add up the hours. That’s how many hours you have IN THEORY. (Look at your list. Cry.)

Yes, in theory. Because there are at least four aspects I can think of off the top of my head that we need to add in.

1. Biorhythms

You are not a robot. There are times when you have more cognitive surplus and times when you have less. For me I have more mental capacity in the morning. My Golden Hour is 10.00-11.30ish. Sometimes I have a second wind at 3.30/4.30/5.30 but not always. A coaching client of mine is the opposite. She (mentally) wakes up at 4.30pm - has all her best ideas, is the most creative - so she schedules meetings in the morning and does her best to keep that time free (or talks to me *waggles eyebrows*).

Evidently, your capacity is not a simple maths problem. Some activities require more juice, some less. Each hour is not the same.

If you’re not sure, do a time/mood diary for a couple of weeks and you’ll soon find out (I used for a bit Daylio).

2. Transition time

You can’t move from one task to another without a break - not for long, anyway. There is always some attention residue that means some of your mind stays with the previous task.

Plus, if it’s a significant shift in gear, you are not a car. Your mental clutch takes more than a second to deploy (ok, whatever, I’m not mechanical, shut up you know what I mean).

For example, if you’re an introvert and you’ve just spent a bunch of time with people, you need decompress time.

If you’re moving from one project to another, you need time to reorient yourself.

3. Surprises

If you ever do a time log (yes, I would recommend it) you’ll find that a lot of your time is spent in things you just couldn’t have predicted at the beginning of the day.

Some people call them asteroids or interruptions, I call them surprises.

For example, I had someone on Mission: Control who worked on reception. She found from her time log that literally 75% of her day was unplannable so really she could only rely on maybe 90 minutes of schedule-able time a day (but her boss expected her to do, maybe, six hours…)

Your capacity is definitely affected by the amount of surprises you can realistically expect. (Yes, you can try and reduce the amount of interruptions/asteroids/distractions in your day, but best to deal with reality right now and then aspire to change things.)

4. Willpower

We use willpower whenever we don’t do what we really want to do in a given moment.

Thing is, all the research suggests we only have a limited amount of willpower and when it’s gone for the day, it’s gone. This is why I’m easily able to have a healthy breakfast, but all I want for dinner is chips and ice cream.

The only way to renew it is either sleep or (less effectively) food.

If you get on with something you’re not loving, or have to really pay attention in a meeting, or have to do something that makes you nervous but you do it anyway, or you do something that you really have to concentrate to do, or you resist checking the notifications you’re getting, or you’re trying to ignore distractions… all of those are examples of you spending your willpower.

Let me repeat: there is a limited daily amount of willpower!

If you’re in recovery, or eating differently, or have caring responsibilities, or are dealing with a less-than-conducive working or living environment, you’re already spending some of your budget just living. This also counts if you’re a Person of Colour, trans, disabled, or have another marginalised identity and you’re navigating this world not built for you.

So it can be a helpful idea to think about a willpower budget in your day. Look at your day as it is spread ahead of you and think:

What is going to require me to be focused or what am I going to have to really get myself in a particular mindset to do?

Are you being realistic about what inner resources are available to you?

If you’re not getting good enough sleep, or you’re working on a different lifestyle challenge or you’re really having to wade through hard stuff in the rest of your life, well, you’re already spending some of your willpower outside of work, so you may need to be compassionate to yourself about how much you can get done in the rest of the day.

This is why you used to be able to do a thing with a level of ability, but you just don’t seem to be able to do it like that right now. YOU ARE NOT A ROBOT.

This concept is also linked to the idea of Deep Work - the ability and habit of spending chunks of 90 minutes or longer totally absorbed in one task without distractions. With our fractured, notification-addict way of approaching things, we are training ourselves out of the ability to do this and it’s where a lot of our ‘real’ value-add work comes from, often.

3. Review and Reflection

So, you’ve got your list and you’ve got capacity.

Now what?

Review

There is no magic formula for this - you have to review what you want to get done, what has to get done and what capacity you have to do that work - and then consider if you need to lower your expectations based on your capacity.

A major guiding principle here is that you are probably overcommitted so much that even if you didn’t sleep and you were an unwavering automaton you’d still not get it all done.

So a big part of being a person who gets things done is deciding what you’re not going to do: today, tomorrow, this week, next week, not for a long time, ever.

You might find this article on having a F**ks I Give List helpful to decide on big-chunk priorities.

It can be a really good discipline to keep a time log - making note of what you’re actually spending your time on and when - so you can review what your intentions were and what actually happened. Not in a punitive way, but as a clear-eyed picture of what happens in your day.

You can just have a page in a notebook with the half-hour segments and set a reminder on your phone or whatever to fill it in. You could also use an app like Daylio for this.

A question I ask myself is: What is the open loop that most needs closing right now?

Other possible questions are:

• What task has the biggest ramifications if I don’t complete it today?

• What will I be most relieved to get done today?

• What am I neglecting that could do with some attention?

• What will Future Me be glad I did today?

• What is the wisest action right now?

• What would be the next step on this project?

• What's the cold porridge on my list, that’s only going to get more congealed if I leave it? (Nicked that from a coaching client)

In combination, of course, with:

• What do I realistically have capacity for, bearing in mind my energy levels, environment and motivation?

List buckets

It may be that you need to start sorting your list into a couple of different buckets.

Maybe you need categories like:

• Needs doing in the next week or so (this one has to be done in combination with the question of capacity and with your diary in front of you)

• Doesn’t need doing in the next couple of weeks

• Probably not going to happen for at least a year/is a dream I don’t want to forget

It’s cool to copy things onto a ‘list for today’ as long as everything is still captured in your master list. Pay attention to tension in your body though - are you being honest about your capacity today or is there an internal dialogue that says ‘Well, that has to get done today, so I’ll have to find time, I’ll just be super-focused,’ when the truth is that you’re only going to get half of it done and you need to have some awkward conversations with people?

Difficult conversations are actually an important part of getting clear with your work habits.

The part of us that says ‘yes’ to things is often not in contact with the part that knows capacity. Also if you’re being assigned tasks, no one else has as clear a picture of your capacity as you do.

A coaching client of mine talked about her inner labrador who just said yes if the project sounded interesting or exciting.

When she came to me she was in theory working 8 days a week for different clients! Just having a view of her capacity (a really simple monthly planner, in her case) helped her to have more nuanced conversations, and she learned to set expectations better.

The decision to commit to doing something has to be based on more than just a feeling - you are a human with human limits (dammit) and also with a swirling set of priorities, only some of which will be visible to other people who want you to do stuff for them.

And probably you’re way overcommitted now, so looking honestly at what’s on your plate vs your capacity probably means that you’ll need to get clear with other people.

Estimate time

The other part of review is looking at complex things on your list, maybe breaking them down into smaller tasks, and estimating how long they’re going to take. Humans are notoriously rubbish at estimating how long something will take. Mostly we err on underestimating (apart from things we dread, which we sometimes overestimate - ever had that thing where you finally get around to doing something you’ve been putting off and go ‘Well, that was a lot simpler than I expected!’? That.)

I know it doesn’t feel like you have space to leave space in your diary, but the truth is that things will take longer than you expect so often you have to rejig your day (and therefore tomorrow and the day after) based on surprises or based on the fact that something took much longer than anticipated. A plan is just a place to start.

So reviewing your situation daily and weekly is super-important. And don’t say you don’t have time - seriously, the gains are huge from getting more conscious, even if it feels uncomfortable at times.

Reflection

I think of reflection as a bit more in-depth than review - more like something you do a bit more globally to go, ‘How’s it all working?’

Questions:

• In what ways is this system working and in what ways does it not suit my working day/brain/personality/current demands?

• Is my way of capturing working, or is it getting fragmented (including: Am I holding things in my head that aren’t captured on my central list)?

• Is my way of estimating capacity working? Am I underestimating or overestimating my daily capacity?

• Is my way of reviewing working?

• What could I do to give myself more capacity? Can I change when I do things, where I do them, how I do them?

• What has worked in the past for me that maybe I could start doing again?

• Are there conversations I need to have with people?

• How much ease do I feel in my body, looking at my list and my schedule?

• Am I sleeping, eating, drinking enough water, exercising, having enough time with others/on my own?

So there you go.

If we’re going to get stuff done in the world, we need to know how to get stuff done, but in a way that really works in a sustainable way.

Take time to think about these three aspects and make a system that works for you and get out into the world, doing what needs to be done.