Making Friends with Monsters
I had a call with a participant of the Climate Change Research Leaders programme I’m running with 64 million artists yesterday. We were talking about the challenge of facilitating groups and conversations about climate action, when under the surface there’s so much unacknowledged fear present.
“There’s a monster under the bed, and it won’t go away by simply shining a light on it,” she said. “It’s really there, so the fear is justified, it’s a completely appropriate response! I want to know how to work with that.”
Her analogy was brilliant. And after six years of practice and research on how we navigate the emotional landscape of leadership, a response just fell out of my mouth.
“Yeah, we can’t pretend it’s not there. We have to face it somehow, but the fear of what it might do to us if we acknowledge that it’s real feels almost impossibly difficult. So what if we made friends with the monster, and turned it into an ally?”
Yes. But what would that actually look like? How do we make friends with the monsters that scare us most?
And, to make the analogy explicit, how can we shift our collective perspective of climate change from being a fear-inducing monster that can paralyse our capacity to respond, into an ally that moves and empowers us to express all of our creative potential, and contribute…
