Yesterday, I took to my instagram stories (we are connected on instagram? Is that the correct terminology? What would I know, I’m an elder millenial and all this stuff is getting a bit difficult to understand. Anyway, you can find me here www.instagram.com/leahsteeleuk)
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Anyway, as I was saying, I took to my instastories with a concept I had been rumbling on and had some clarity about. If you’re not familiar with the concept of the rumble, it’s from Brene Brown’s work Rising Strong and is the second part of a 3-part process designed to help us learn from setback, disappointment or failure.
The 3 part process is Reckon, Rumble, Revolutionise, and the rumble is some of the most difficult work. It’s about getting curious about what’s gone on, in stead of armouring up or getting aggressive. It means examining a situation with an open heart and mind.
I hate going through the rumble, as do most people, but you can’t skip the second act (there’s a whole explanation on this in Rising Strong, you should definitely go read it. It’s this month’s bookclub book in The Resilience Academy and I’m already kicking myself for not doing it sooner.
I’ve been in the rumble for a while with a situation, something that came to my attention a couple of weeks ago. I know plenty of us are rumbling with issues old and new; if you thought you were the only one who had had some difficult stuff brought to the surface or struggling to adapt, then you are far from alone.
That process of reckon-rumble-revolutionise is absolutely key to the stress and burnout conversations, because it’s the moment when we realise that what we are doing doesn’t work and we have to find a better way of doing it - but first we need to understand why what we did didn’t work, so that we can choose more wisely for ourselves. But it’s far from the only time it arises.
I had a breakthrough in my rumble yesterday and shared it to my instastories, and I’m reproducing them below in this blog for you for a couple of reasons.
First, you might have been exactly where I am. There’s been plenty brought to the surface, in particular the way that people think about and see the world, that can feel destabilising or disconcerting.
The second reason I’m sharing it is because of the process. This process involves ruminating on a situation and trying to view it from different angles - that’s the part about keeping an open mind and an open heart. Really fucking tricky by the way, when you’re already exhausted, struggling, maybe even in some pain about it.
Something I’ve always been very good at is helping others to see their situation from a new and different angle. Whether it was helping contentious probate clients to empathise with the other side (often a family member that they had decades-old issues with) in order to better understand their case and plot our next step, to helping stressed out clients understand where they are taking the professional personally and struggling with perspective. However, it can be difficult to do this for yourself, and yesterday I experienced a perspective shift that changed it all.
The third reason I’m sharing it is because I strongly believe in progress over perfection. I am naturally wary of anyone who presents themselves as perfect, polished and poised. Having mainly been described as a calamity jane, bambi on ice type my whole life, these people make me nervous and often I feel inferior.
I never want that for you.
As a mentor and trainer I help provide solutions, new perspectives and ways of workings, shifts and adjustments but I never ever pretend that I am preaching from the mountaintop and have evolved beyond these issues. I might have a different perspective and be a little way along the path from you sometimes, but I’m human. I screw up. I have lessons to learn (god do I have plenty of lessons to learn). I’m in this with you, as someone who has walked this path and can spot the pot holes and twisted vines that could knock you down.
By sharing my own working out, my own process, I hope that I can give you some insight into how I work, how I work with you, and the kind of steps we can take to help you move forward stronger than before
So here is yesterday’s rumble, reproduced for you.
One of the things that caused me real pain over the past few weeks has been the rise/outward disclosure of conspiracy type thinking. I’m someone who genuinely thinks the best of people and that we are all trying our best, however hampered by our experiences, upbringing, mental health or understanding we might be.
So to see the rise in and outward disclosure of conspiracy theories is something that has really hurt. It’s broken down friendships because I’ve felt unsafe and unheard around people whose basic understanding of the world is so different, and so much darker, than mine. It’s also caused me to question who I am , and my inherent worth. Because, one of my core programmes has been that old Voltaire quote ‘I do not agree with what you have to say, but I’ll defend to the death your right to say it’
I’ve always prided myself on being able to find common ground with ,or at least an understanding of, most people. Yes, even the dark , crazy and weird. Especially, perhaps!
So to suddenly find that I’ve been thinking entirely different from some of the people that I loved and admired? Well I feel a big nauseous just writing it.
(Yes I could simply write those people off, call them crazy or ridiculous, but again, that’s never been who I am. All of this has struck at the heart of how I identified. Yeah yeah, first world problems, I know.)
What I wasn’t expecting was a level of healing around this today. Of an understanding. I’m sharing these quotes from Brene Brown’s Rising Strong and I cannot recommend it highly enough.
Gotschall argues that conspiratorial thinking ‘is not limited to the stupid, the ignorant , or the crazy. It is a reflect of the storytelling mind’s compulsive need for meaningful experience.’ He goes on to make the compelling point that ultimately, conspiracy theories are used to explain why bad things happen. He writes ‘to the conspiratorial mind, shit never just happens’ and the complexities of human life are reduced to produce theories that are ‘always consoling in their simplicity’.
Gotschall writes that for conspiracy theorists' ‘bad things do not happen because of a wildly complex swirl of abstract historical and social variables. They happen because bad men live to stalk our happiness. And you can fight, and possibly even defeat, bad men. If you can read the hidden story’
He explains that there’s growing evidence and ‘ordinary, mentally healthy people are strikingly prone to confabulate in everyday situations’
Social workers always use the term confabulate when talking about how dementia or a brain injury sometimes causes people to replace missing information with something false that they believe to be true. Many confabulations are less the result of health or memory issues and more about the interplay of emotion, behaviour and thought.
The stories were confabulations - lies, honestly told’
Here endeth the Brene Brown quotes.
What I take from this is the following:
We are desperate for control, understanding and the ability to ensure that the bad things that happen to other people can never happen to us. Either because we are smart, or understand more or are better prepared. We are all telling ourselves stories, eitehr about the way the world is or who and how we are. The problem is, that we don’t have all the answers, and so we comfort ourselves with stories where there are gaps in our knowing.
That means that sometimes, my story and your story are written by completely different authors and operate in different worlds.
This has caused me so much pain because I have always operated in a world where I was absolutely rooted in who and what I was, and knew the laws of physics of my world.
I’ve worked with plenty of people with severe traumatic brain injuries, degenerative physical and psychological injuries. Once I knew that they were confabulating, I could restore the laws of physics in my world without needing to change theirs.
I hadn’t seen ‘conspiracy’ in the light of storytelling, fulfilling person needs and confabulation until this morning. Reading this helped re-affirm my own laws of physics regardless of other people’s understandings.
I don’t think that this is fully ‘done’ yet, I’m still rumbling with it, but I feel calmer, lighter and more at peace than I have done for a while.
(The story I have been telling myself for weeks now is that I am a bad person for being unable to reconcile someone else’s world view or remain supportive of them. I’ve definitely not been giving myself enough support and care, and have fallen into the old habits of ‘other people know better than me’ and ‘how I feel matters less than how others feel’. I see that now).
Maybe these are just the ramblings of another lunatic on the internets. Maybe you think I’m weird.
Or maybe, like me, you’re breathing a small sigh of relief for having a process to work through this and to understand others when the laws of physics in their world seem to vastly different from your own.
Finally, you’re not a bad person for letting go of people whose views, opinions or behaviours hurt you. It doesn’t negate what they meant to you. It just is what it is.
By the way, this doesn’t just apply to illuminati/anti-vaxx type ‘conspiracy theories’. This can also apply to the ‘people who are on furlough vs people who aren’t’ empathy gap. Ditto for kids vs no kids’
It definitely applies to the ‘I broke lockdown rules vs towing the line every step of the way’ people.
Because it’s about the gap between what we know and who we are , how we fill that gap and, crucially, how to understand and relate to other people whose ‘knowledge gap story’ doesn’t reflect our own.
(Yes, I shared all of this in instastories. I’ve always been wordy)
This whole process is a series of holding beliefs and thoughts up to the light and seeing if there’s another way of looking at them. It might take some time and some energy, but in doing so, you regain your peace of mind. It seems like a plan to me at least.
Let me know if this insight has helped you, and if you want a little bit more help getting perspective, regaining your confidence and self-worth where you’ve been beating yourself up, or being able to work with people who drive you up the wall… reach out. It’s kind of what I do after all.
PS The next workshop in the Grit and Resilience series will take place this Sunday 3rd May at 8pm. Titled ‘Thought alchemy; how to turn negativity, overwhelm and struggle into strength’, in this workshop I will be going deeper into the process I’ve shared in this blog, together with the core beliefs and practices that help me to keep going forward, even after I’ve fallen flat on the arena floor. The link to reserve your spot will be going up tomorrow morning (Wednesday) but in the meantime, if you would like a space, drop me an email at hello@searchingforserenity.co.uk and I’ll make sure that you’re the first to know when it goes live!