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You Are Invited to Co-create Your Future

You are invited to co-create the future.

The world is changing. Systems, coalitions, structures, governments, and landscapes that once seemed intractable feel more precarious every day.

We don’t know what the future holds, but we do know that life can change in an instant … a hurricane, an accident, a pandemic, a diagnosis, an election …

Fear perpetuates disconnection and a perpetual stress response.

Of course we want to run and hide, retreat to the smallest and safest version of our lives, and just check out. After all, dissociation is a very powerful (and useful) nervous system response, but not a particularly life-giving way of being (and thriving) long term.

Numbness and dissociation can become its own purgatory. And isolation is its own disease with devastating results for the individual and the collective.

And in the meantime, we become more useful to those who would control us.

Between the time I spent driving organizational culture change on a daily basis as a non-profit CEO (in an organization with a 100 year old history) and my own journey of the last decade or so, I have some learnings and observations about change and human behavior:

  • We will hold for dear life to the thing that is killing us–hyper-focused on the thing that we are “losing”, even if that thing is also destroying us– because the nervous system is wired to prefer the status quo.
  • When our nervous system is focused on survival, it is practically impossible to imagine a new and better future, much less to take steps to bring that future to life.
  • Power structures are built to perpetuate themselves.
  • The people and systems who are in power are going to fight like hell to say in power. And the closer they come to losing power, the uglier, nastier, more vile, violent and blatant their actions become. In fact, they would rather sink the entire ship, than hand over control. In other words, it often gets worse before it gets better.
  • Because of all of this, true and lasting change doesn’t happen overnight. In other words, this is a marathon and not a sprint.
  • As my mother used to say, “The Universe abhors a vacuum.” If we remove, release or destroy something, without clarity and purposeful action toward building/creating something to fill the void created in its absence, something or someone else will fill that void; leaving us with very real, unintended and undesirable consequences.
  • What we speak into the world has real power. If you don’t believe me, ask me about my living situation of the last eight years. And someone told me once that the universe doesn’t hear “not” … so speak the things you want into the world opposed to the things you don’t want.
  • Fear, othering, and unresolved trauma would have us drift furthering into isolation, hopelessness and learned helplessness all while we cannot heal alone, we cannot thrive without safe community, and we cannot create seismic change alone.
  • And this quote I heard on a call this week: “You never change by fighting existing reality. To change something, build a new model that makes the existing model obsolete.” ~Buckminster Fuller

If you want something different–for yourself, your family, your country or your world–you are invited to nurture and expand your nervous system capacity to envision a more beautiful future and then to take aligned action steps (often micro-steps) over time.

You are invited to notice the moments where your survival instincts have taken (or are threatening to take) over. To re-regulate and then use your power of choice to decide what to do (or not do) next.

You are invited to nourish yourself and your relationships, challenge the stories you have come to believe about yourself, about other people, and what is possible, step out of old paradigms, and witness and heal the parts of you that are broken, fractured, and stuck from carrying the wounds of the past.

You are invited to rest and restore (just because) and also so that you reinforce your capacity to hold a vision for your individual and our collective good.

You don’t have to hold and fix all of the things (because you can’t anyway; trust me, I have tried), and also, you are invited to bring your fullest, most vital self to this lifetime–one breath, one moment at a time.

Love,

Booth

p.s. If you are ready to accept the invitation to step more fully into your own power, voice and agency in this next season, I am now booking 1:1 clients for one-time, three-month or six-month support. Purchase here or schedule a Discovery Call to explore whether this offering is a good fit for you.