A little more safety

This time of year is always challenging for me. I have to be extremely intentional about how I manage my energy and where I place my attention - the temptation, when on autopilot, is to see the worst and allow old patterns of striving and control to take over.

This year that inner work is feeling all the more difficult and all the more important - and it’s not just me, it’s the field we are all swimming in right now. If my coaching room is a sample of the wider world, I bet you are feeling it too.

Mostly, right now, it’s the AI game of politics and misinformation. Things are moving so fast and it's dragged a set of questions into the light that I probably should have been sitting with for years already. I think about climate change, I try to make sensible choices, I do the things a reasonably conscientious person does.

This feels different - it's made me think about mortality earlier than I expected to. The chance that we might not have that long left. That my children might not get to have children.

Writing that sentence down is hard and I feel my chest tightening as I dare to sit with it for a second longer than is comfortable.

I try and let the feelings move through when they come. Then I get frightened of where it leads if I stay there too long, so I distract myself, because underneath the fear is a worry about losing my sense of purpose altogether, and that scares me more than the original thought did.

I met Maggie Farrar recently. A treasured friend, colleague and mentor. She shared my fears and did what she always does which is bring back the light by asking: And, in that context, what kind of work do you actually want to be doing? I told her I'm already doing it which was not a surprise. I really do LOVE what I do and I know I am making a positive contribution to this mad old world.

We'd done some brand reflection with the Inside Out team back in spring. Round and round we went, trying to find language for what we're actually for, and it came down to something super simple to name and oh-so-hard to explain without sounding trite. We want to create a little more safety in this world. Somewhere people can just be. There's leadership language around it, purpose, impact, all the words that end up on a website, but what we're doing underneath that is building somewhere safe for people. Everything else grows out of that.

I know how that sounds written down - thin, a bit slogan-esque. Putting words to something you can only really know by being in it flattens it every time. But we all felt the truth of it fully in that room in the spring. It’s just a shame that on the page it looks smaller than it is. This, by the way, is my biggest struggle with the book but that’s a story for another time.

Then, a few days after seeing Maggie, I talked to another colleague who doesn't believe any of this. His view is that agents and systems do what they've been built to do, and nothing more, no ghost in it anywhere, and if some sensible people put the right safeguards around it we'll be fine. The scaremongering has been administered to the benefit of the tech companies whose big fat loans are all due for repayment.

I felt myself leaning toward him while he talked. I wanted to believe it - that’s how hope works. Give a person a version of events that lets them sleep and some part of them will reach for it and stick it under their pillow for extra comfort.

So I don't know what I think. A friend who says this is what's keeping her awake at night, a colleague who says it's a robot with good manners, and I believe them both, a little, depending on the day. I think the not-knowing is the worst bit. Not-knowing what will happen with technology, not-knowing which fears to trust, not-knowing which comforts are worthy of my attention, not-knowing whose read on the world to borrow because I just don’t have a clue.

I don't have a call to action for you. I think it's a moment for the harder thing that we tend to avoid, which is sitting in it, holding the existential fear, the joy of micro-moments in work and life and the day to day burdens at the same time. And, when we can, asking Maggie’s question: Given this, whatever this turns out to be, what do I actually want to be building with the time I've got? For me,right now, the answer is - a little more safety for whoever's in the room with me.

If you are interested in exploring executive or team coaching as a way of supporting your team to make this shift, reach out for a chat. We’d love to hear from you.

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