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Are you made for these times?
Happy New Year to you all.
We hope 2025 is a year of abundance for you and your families.
It’s easy at the moment to lose hope and get bogged down by the relentless unrest and unease in the world. Maybe after emerging from your own festive break this feels all the more alarming as we transition back to our day jobs and our usual routines and feel the uncertainty that may appear.
A note of hope this January
I have certainly noticed the backlash, thank goodness, towards the incessant ‘New Year New You’ callings that January brings. And I wanted to bring a note of meaningful, positive hope into January, hopefully something more mature and sustainable.
However, I have made a promise to myself in writing this article that I will not take a paragraph or two naming and describing ‘these times’.
VUCA, BANI & whatever else describes these times, I am assuming that if you are drawn to reading this article then you are pretty much versed in ‘these times’.
I am interested instead in the perfections we have, as leaders and as parents, for these times.
Clarissa Pinkola Estes in her ‘letter to a young activist during troubled times’ wrote:
“My friends, do not lose heart. We were made for these times. I have heard from so many recently who are deeply and properly bewildered… Ours is a time of almost daily astonishment and often righteous rage over the latest degradations of what matters most…
I urge you …do not lose hope. Most particularly because the fact is that we were made for these times. Yes, for years, we have been learning, practicing, been in training for and just waiting to meet on this exact plain of engagement.”
Shifting the focus
By changing the mindset to that of Pinkola Estes I find myself less veering towards the difficulty of what is wrong or unmended in our world. I feel less weakened by what feels too big or overwhelming, what is outside of my reach. My focus changes to what I can impact, no matter how seemingly small or insignificant.
As I write this the tragedy of the fires in Los Angeles is unfolding, Trump wants to take over Greenland (!), and wars rage across the world. What can I do?
Perhaps as parents we experience the unsettledness of the world more acutely as we consider our children and the futures unfolding for them. My 17 year old is great by the way, of reminding me how Gen Z are going to save the world!
I can lean towards action, a way of not minimising the difficulties in the world but turning towards a way forward that I can take responsibility for.
Leadership and the Greater Good
One of the ways that we coach leaders to broaden their own perspectives and clarify what their leadership is in service of, is by widening the lens to what is greater than the individual. The UN sustainable goals are helpful here, as are familiarising ourselves with groups and movements that are making a difference to our world and helping a new reality to come into being.
Some of note, but please find those that resonate with you – Project Everyone, Black Lives Matter, Project Drawdown, The Elders, Sunrise Movement & my own professional soap box: The Social Mobility Foundation.
When we are connected to something greater than ourselves hope starts to flow again.
When we shift our perspective in the middle of chaos, to stand still and to navigate towards our own unique strengths and resources, we will find greater maturity to meet these times.
Together as we connect and learn we can embody the truth that we are indeed, made for these times and begin the work that our children and grandchildren need of us.
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Feature image credit: Photo by Johnathan Kaufman on Unsplash