Introduction
There is growing consensus amongst climate scientists that we are living in a world that is dying. A recent analysis of the planetary boundaries, a set of parameters that reflect the limits of life’s support structures, revealed that six of the nine have been breached. The levels of extraction and exploitation of our global ecosystem is exceeding the planet’s capacity to regenerate and continue supporting life.
What do we most need to do to slow the change, to reduce the harm and save what we can? When asked, the Zen poet Thich Nhat Hanh’s response was “to hear within us the sounds of the Earth crying”.
The deadening of our response
In early March I delivered a talk for Coaching at Work on Generative Dialogue as part of their contribution to Climate Coaching Action Day 2024. I came across a quote by Joanna Macy, an environmental activist, author and systems thinker and this became the foundation of the talk: “Of all the dangers we face, from climate chaos to nuclear war, none is so great as the deadening of our response”.
When faced with distressing events our conditioned tendency is to avoid feeling the difficult emotions that are evoked – anxiety, fear, rage, despair, anguish, helplessness, grief. In doing so, we inadvertently suppress the life force that is energetically trying to express itself through us and this impairs our growth.
The biggest threat to our survival
Another compounding and related factor is that we have been conditioned to over-rely on our left hemisphere’s linear, abstract, conceptual processes of reasoning and rationality to make sense of the world. As a consequence, we’ve lost touch with the embodied feeling intelligence of our right hemisphere, the vivid, concrete, ambiguous sensory field of perception that connects us to ourselves, our fellow human beings and to nature, to all of life.
According to Iain McGilchrist, psychiatrist, former Oxford literary scholar and author of The Master and His Emissary: The Divided Brain and the Making of the Western World (2019), we’re now living as though we’re right-hemisphere damaged and this is the single biggest threat to the survival of our civilization.
Holding difficult emotions
One of the most significant steps we can take to save our world, and perhaps the least considered, is to develop the capacity to stay present and connected to our distress. This kind of choiceful stretching lies at the heart of vertical development and transforms the mind and heart.
In her article The Way out is through: Contrasting Emotions and Vertical Development (April, 2024), Alis Anagnostakis PhD, adult development researcher and founder of Vertical Development Institute highlights the salient elements of her PHD research. She studied a group of 35 senior leaders as they undertook a 6-month learning journey. Just as the program was about to start COVID-19 hit and this intensified the process. As a method for qualitative data collection, each participant was required to journal every week for the period. Further data included the analysis of two developmental assessments. The single most powerful differentiating factor between leaders who developed and leaders who didn’t was how they related to their emotions. Rather than pushing the difficult feelings away, those that grew approached their experience with an attitude of curiosity and openness. The exploration of their interiority was guided by the question “what might I discover about myself?”.
This process naturally engages the right hemisphere. With the two halves of our brain working as an integrated coherent whole we gain access to ‘whole self intelligence’, a rich, vibrant set of thinking and feeling capacities that unlocks our highest potential.
Case Study
Sarah, a leader in a global market research organisation, is one of my vertical development coaching clients. During a recent session we explored the discomfort she was feeling related to communicating low pay rises to her team. On the theme of discomfort, Sarah shared that she found it too distressing to look at any material related to the suffering of animals. Recognising the developmental potential inherent in this, we agreed that I’d send her two carefully selected images a week depicting cruelty to animals. We started with the inhumanity associated with factory farming.
I offered Sarah guidelines to support her to stay present with her experience and to pay particular attention to what she could feel in her body. As part of my duty of care, I stressed the importance of prioritising her self-care – if it felt too much at any time it was ok to stop. After spending some time looking at the image, she journalled to capture insights and learning. One of the patterns she recognised was her tendency to run away from difficult feelings through trying to ‘fix the problem’. Paradoxically, she realised that she needed to be able to feel the helplessness, to allow it to carry her to a place of empowerment for meaningful change.
Sarah’s choiceful stretching is accelerating her growth. Through courageously turning towards her experience of distress, she is metabolising the feelings and releasing her evolutionary potential to build capacities such as presence, resilience, perspective adeptness, relational sensitivity, wisdom and compassion. This can lead to an increased capacity to see, understand, empathise and be in stronger contact with herself, others and the world.
Leading with whole self intelligence
Cultivating whole self intelligence is the leadership imperative of our time. As Otto Scharmer, senior lecturer at MIT’s Sloan school of Management, says in his book Leading from the emergent future: From ego-system to eco-system economies (2013), this is the moment when we need enough people with the skill heart and wisdom to pull us back from the edge of breakdown onto a different path. Leaders who engage their thinking and feeling selves are emboldened to take powerful intelligent action for positive change, in themselves, their organisations, communities and the world at large.
To hear within us the sound of earth crying is to see through the eyes that have cried. Tears transform the heart, generating a stream of living water to slow the change, to reduce the harm and to save what we can.