The Week

I recently offered to host a session of The Week on behalf of the Climate Coaching Alliance. I’ve wanted to participate in or hold one of these sessions for a while now. I’m a huge fan of Frédéric Laloux after reading Reinventing Organizations in 2018 and actively leading a Brave New Work experiment at PaperCut Software. And I was curious about the holistic approach he would bring to the topic of the climate crisis. 

In Day 1 of The Week, they explain some of the ways we tend to numb or distract ourselves from this topic. I realized a few of these still pertain to me.

“I know this already.”

“I’m already doing “XY & Z.”

I was trained by Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corp and I delivered many of his Climate Reality talks in 2020. Would The Week be any different?

I can say, yes, it’s a different experience and it is worth your time. Even the setting itself is different. You participate in three viewings as a group experience, over one week. There is time to digest and there is time to discuss. There is education, examples, real stories, and simple talk throughout. I want to acknowledge, this isn’t an easy topic to face. And you may not feel up to facing it. Take care of yourselves as a priority.

But if you are ready to face it, it’s an invitation to look within and outside. In one moment of The Week, they talk about a seaside village in Wales that will be decommissioned. That seems to be a brave but heartbreaking reality. So often we shore up our crumbling structures to great expense. Here on the Oregon Coast, you repeatedly see communities shoring up their coastlines to protect homes with rip-rap. As a coach, I’m left with the question: how do we do this shoring up of ourselves internally? Do we shore up ways of limiting our view of what’s happening in the world versus facing reality, feeling what surfaces, and choosing how to respond?

Since we’re simultaneously living through multiple crises, it can be helpful to have the context, how did we get here? The Week addresses this on Day 2. After learning about what brought us here, it is helpful to consider, now what? What’s next? How do we respond? This is covered on Day 3. And day 3 of The Week was a real turning point for me. 

Facing any of these crises will surface emotions. Instead of numbing and distracting ourselves, we can face and feel these emotions so we can use our emotions for good. Our emotions point us to what is most precious and help us answer what we want to protect.

I’ve learned so much about the wisdom of emotions from Karla McLaren’s “The Language of Emotions”. There she guides us with 4 Keys to Emotional Genius.

1. Welcome all your emotions equally. There are no negative emotions, and there are no positive emotions. All of your emotions bring you the intelligence and energy you need in each situation.

2. Understand emotional nuance. Emotions arise at many different levels of intensity and you can learn how to identify and work with all of them by developing a larger emotional vocabulary.

3. Learn to identify multiple emotions. It’s normal to feel more than one emotion at the same time. When you know why your emotions arise, you’ll be able to identify the unique gifts and skills in each of your emotions and learn to work skillfully with all of them.

4. Learn to channel your emotions instead of merely expressing or repressing them. You can learn to listen to them, understand them, work with them intentionally, and create many healthy options for every emotion you feel. 

There is much more to learn in Karla’s book, but what about the typical emotions that surface when faced with challenging material in The Week?

• Fear: Our fear can help us with intuition, focus, clarity, and readiness. Fear points you to what action should be taken. 

• Guilt: Our guilt can help us restore integrity. Who or what has been hurt? What must be made right?

• Anger: Our anger can help us with proper boundaries and protection of self and others. What do I value? What must be protected and restored? 

• Apathy: My young adult son recently asked me… why is there so much apathy in the world right now? It’s a great question, but a painful one. But there is wisdom in this emotion as well. Apathy can be seen as a mask for anger. The question to ask when you feel apathy is what is being avoided? What must I bring to the surface and make conscious? 

• Sadness: And our sadness. Our sadness needs to be felt. Releasing our sadness brings us grounding and feeling more grounded eventually brings relaxation and rejuvenation. Our tears can bring us a healing flexibility. It takes a lot of energy to hold our tears back and in.  A trauma-sensitive and present coach, therapist, or friend can help you be with these emotions especially if they’ve done the work to feel their own emotions around this topic. They can help you anchor yourself in the exploration.

  And getting involved brings us something else critical. Connections! When you take action grounded upon what you care about, your enthusiasm is contagious and you meet and connect with people in new ways. Humans are wired for connection and taking action around topics that are precious to us can lead us right to the important experience of connection and belonging. 

  So there is the personal. From a bigger perspective, I believe the many crises we currently face need a new response. We’re living under an overarching crisis from our way of being in the world. What we’ve tried so far is not working. I’ve written extensively about the IDGs, which are a powerful support in addressing these issues. Do we need to go even further by asking questions like what is it to be human in such times of crisis? If we learn from indigenous worldviews in our way of looking at these problems, we start to see how acknowledging the interconnectedness of everything could help. The question I am sitting with now is how can I behave today in ways that open up possibilities for future generations. How can I be a good ancestor?
  

  In my last piece on the IDGs, I talked about creativity and imagination. If we can’t find our way out of these intersecting crises, it will be primarily due to a lack of imagination. Dreamwork is an amazing support for accessing our creativity and mindset of abundance. But it’s also an act of disconnection. If I am unable to see how my actions ripple out to others in the world today, and if I can’t see how that impacts future generations, it’s a lack of imagination that disconnects me from working with others toward that possibility.

  While I wanted to share some of my takeaways from The Week, I don’t want to take away the impact of this experience. It’s something you should experience for yourself. I will host another group session but you can organize and host your own.  The Week makes it very easy!

  
  Please reach out if you want to join my next session of The Week. Or if you host a group, please let me know how that goes!

  I’d love to hear from you if coaching could help support this emotional discovery for yourself. We start exactly where you are and explore the threads together.

  Reach out if you’d like to chat.