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Dear, Friend,
I've been sitting with a question for these past few months. What will really help leaders?
I set out earlier this year to listen to the voices of those who are leading in this era of accelerating complexity. (Still In It is the report and you can access it here).
Beneath the surface of their work, all the initiatives, strategies, and genuine commitment to doing business well, I heard a kind of sustained bracing against a world that just can't sit still.
A world caught up in performative pushing that results in increasingly higher levels of stress, stress to the point of burnout which is at epidemic levels today.
I have lots of ideas about what might help. What I’m most curious about, however, is what helps at the level of our nervous system, individually, but also within our collective nervous system.
I have a hunch that the most overlooked antidote is right in front of us.
We Forget We’re Creatures Too
Look around at where you spend your day. If you’re like most of us, we're encased in metal and concrete, surrounded by glass and plastic, screen lighting up buzzing and beeping.
Our interactions are over-scheduled, mediated, filtered, and optimized.
Heck, we run to get out of the rain, and curse when it's too hot outside or when the AC is on the fritz.
We scroll images of forests and sunsets and mountaintop and call it nature.
Meanwhile our nervous systems clearly haven't gotten the update. Our capacity to adapt is not nearly as great as the technologies that we're now surrounded by and the challenges they’ve wrought.
Our nervous systems are ancient, still wired for soil underneath our feet, wind on our skin, and the sound of water moving to soothe us. The mismatch between what our biology responds to, even expects, and what our daily environments deliver to us is real, cumulative, and it's taking its toll.
Neuroscientist and journalist Clayton Aldhern, in his book "The Weight of Nature," writes about what he calls the direct interventions of environmental changes on our physical brains. We are becoming, he argues, more suspicious, more anxious, more distracted, and even nihilistic.
Climate change, he writes, isn't only out there; it actually lives inside of each of us.
We've outsourced our regulation to artificial environments a long time ago, and we're now paying the price in ways that mostly we can't even fully name. When we lose touch with nature we lose touch with our deepest self.
Bur Oak Lessons
I've always loved being out in nature, digging in the dirt. Both of my grandmothers were avid gardeners. My mom is a master gardener.
Over Memorial Day weekend, I was in heaven cleaning up the garden, planting plants, beautifying the tiny space of heaven that we share. I was delighted when a handful of people walked by saying, "I love your garden.” “It's so peaceful here.” “I feel so good when I walk by."
Nature touches us, resources us if and when we allow it.
Trees have always been a part of it. There’s a bur oak at the end of my family's long winding driveway. Its acorns wear bristly husks like little woolen ski caps, its bark is deeply grooved and grayish, textured like something that has earned its age.
As a kid growing up that oak tree was mine.
When home felt unsteady, and sometimes it did, I would find my way to the shelter of that oak tree. I'd press my hand against the deep-textured bark. I'd lean in and something in me would begin to settle.
Of course, I didn't have language for it as a kid but now I do. I was co-regulating my nervous system with a living system far older and more stable than me. I was letting the tree's rootedness influence my body, absorbing stability through contact. It was amazing.
The tree isn’t a metaphor for strength but a source of it. Metaphors live in the mind, but this lived in my breathing, my lungs, my chest, my whole body. I was nature too.
What the leaders on my listening tour over these last months were describing -- the bracing, the vigilance, the exhaustion of constant uncertainty, even the burnout -- is a nervous system problem. It's systemic, not just individual. It lives inside our biological systems but also our collective relational systems at work.
The nervous system responds to what the body actually touches, hears, smells, and stands inside of.
When we're all together we can all get hyped up and anxious and over the top or we can learn together to co-regulate our nervous systems and settle like I did with my tree.
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