Written by Louise Marra, Programme Director - The NZ Leadership Programme
Last year, about this time, I wrote and talked about the three C’s – the three challenges of our time – Covid, Colonisation and Climate. I have added a fourth – connection.
We have a connection crisis. Our disconnect from ourselves, each other, our cultures and the living planet are a pandemic.
And we all suffer because of it as it leads to many of the other issues we face.
All of these challenges require collaboration, which requires deep connectivity to pull off. I have always felt that collaboration is a mastery art – we barely collaborate with ourselves, our partners and our children and yet we need to collaborate more than we have ever done to be able to change the trajectories of our planet and our people.
I have been contemplating what “connected excellence” rather than “disconnected excellence” would look like.
As leaders, I feel we need to become sewers, threaders, weavers, electricians, plumbers, living bridges – able to dissolve old threads that have not served many and sew the connective threads back between people, cultures, the planet and, of course, ourselves. This will enable us to work together and create a world where all can thrive.
Colonisation – it requires we look deeply into our selves and how we are sewn together and what is in our body systems from our own conditioning. White superiority, human superiority, and the affects of these on many humans and cultures and the planet has got to be rewired – we cannot keep “worlding” in the way we have been. Once we can own, see and feel these threads we can start to untangle, dissolve and resew.
Climate – is a not a technical issue, it is one of connection, resewing ourselves, rethreading our relationship as nature to nature, we cannot be other than part of the web of life. This is not a concept, we need to retrain the felt sense within us of this and then we can create solutions.
Covid, of course, seems to threaten our connectivity. How do we use it as a time to deepen connectivity with ourselves, each other and the planet and do some serious sewing work?
And the exciting thing is the science is telling us the same thing. For some years I have been immersed in studying trauma – individual, collective and intergenerational - and how it shows up in us, our teams, our organisations, our families and our systems. Systems are never separate from the parts that make it up. There isn’t a system out there – we are all part of systems. We keep threading a system through our paradigms and bodies.
Part of my obsession with understanding trauma has always been around releasing full human potential – individual potential and human potential so we can meet our challenges. Trauma is the key thing that holds us back. It keeps us in the powerful survival energies of needing to be more, get more, have more, fear, scarcity, fight and flight. And all those things we often wish were not so in ourselves or humanity.
And it is true they are never the impulses that will create a new world.
Part of understanding trauma is also understanding the place in us that is never traumatised. We have trauma, we are not trauma, so there is always a whole place in us to return to. It is this place that heals and integrates our past traumas. It is this collective place, this collective goodness that will rise out of that survival energy and help us inhabit together a place that can create a new world.
Polyvagal theory tells of this place – it is connected, vital, alive, and not in any survival energy. It can be fostered, grown, recognised, exercised, muscled up. It is a delight to be in.
This theory is the “science of feeling safe enough to fall in love with life” from The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy by Deb Dana, a leading writer and researcher on this theory. It is safe enough to bring your magic to yourself, to your life in leadership and to others .
It is this place I have been more focused – how do we foster this place in us, our teams, our families and how do we co-create our systems together from this place? We also have to acknowledge from whom do our cultures not feel safe, who have not thrived in this society that wasn’t built for them.
So how do we create new evolutionary processes that allow us to meet in this place? Not in the survival energies of fight or flight, or the immobilisation of the dorsel vagal system (which kicks in when overwhelm gets too high).
How many of your teams and organisations are constantly in overwhelm? Trying to do the right thing, but not creating the soil, the culture, the relationships which help people feel safe enough to bring their aliveness.
We need to get out of overwhelm fast, because there is big collaborative work to do. We need to together dissolve the threading that has not worked and then co-create new cultures and ways of being and operating in the world.
In a state of connection, restoration, creativity, wellbeing and fresh solutions are possible of us and of the system!
I believe we all need to step into a holistic worldview quickly. From there we can meet each other, the planet and, from there, create.
Of course ,Te Ao Māori and the worlds of te tangata moana are already in this holistic worldview. We need to listen, hear the stories of the past, restore and then work together.
In working with senior leadership teams I see Māori, Pasifika, Pākehā and leaders from ethnic commnities beginning this journey, and it is just starting. We need to be able to move from the strategic to the granular – what can be dismantled now in organisations that doesnt work, what will take a bit longer, what can be created now and what needs some time and bridge building to create. There are real answers in organisations to these questions.
So connected excellence will require so much more courage and connection and a brave facing into the trauma of the past and a slow building of deep connectivity - I believe the restoration, solutions, the evolutionary pathways together will emerge from that.
Find any ways you can connect more deeply with yourself, with others, with Papatuānuku. We are all going to need it.
THE NZ LEADERSHIP PROGRAMME 2022
Are you a leader interested in emerging a more hopeful future for Aotearoa?
Applications are now open to mid-level, senior and community leaders across Aotearoa to apply for The NZ Leadership Programme 2022.
Our life-changing Programme will be delivered through seven in-person retreats held between March and November 2022. Across the year, successful candidates will participate in safe and brave learning spaces; engage in open and honest discussions about the real issues we collectively face; and build their capacity for leadership through times of uncertainty and great change.
We warmly invite suitable leaders across New Zealand to apply now.