In this #coachbetter episode Kim talks with Elin Kelsey and Ivy Yan. Elin is an author, researcher and leader in the solutions-focused environmental and climate justice movement. Her mission is to spread wild contagious hope. Ivy is an experiential learning designer and facilitator advocating for the happiness and well-being of human beings and nature as a whole. Together they bring so much hope, joy and happiness to their work, that it is truly contagious!

In this episode they talk about …

• The ways emotions are contagious and how we, as educators and coaches can bring hope into our school contexts.
• How the world works in cycles and seasons, and how important it is for us to understand what season we are in, and how we can recognize that within our school communities.
• The importance of breaks, of being in nature, being vulnerable and recognizing the ways that we need to find space and time to heal
• Why emotions are important – even when we’re talking about facts
• How we are connected – and how important embracing that connection is.
• How and why we need to be shifting the narrative to one of hope.

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Show Notes

Within your work and expertise, how is the global state of the world and the planet affecting educators and schools?

Elin: one of the things I would say right off the bat is that there’s a very common narrative (how we understand the world the way we talk about it) of fatalistic doom-ism. The feeling that the world is wrecked right now and it’s fated to get worse. The state of the world is one thing and urgent global issues is another. The vast majority of humans are aware of climate change and wanting to see change. We don’t have an issue of being unaware, but we have a “hope gap”. We are very aware of the issues, but we don’t know what solutions exist. This is very disempowering. Especially if you care a lot about these things, it causes you to feel helpless. We know from psychological research that emotions are contagious. So these narratives, which are perpetuated very much through the media or the way in which we learn about environmental issues, and global issues, it spreads. We keep reinfecting each other. So I’m really interested in how we practice hope in such ways that we can infect ourselves in more empowering narratives.

Ivy: a conversation with my niece popped into my mind. Playing a card game with her with a set of relationship cards, relationship between humans and the earth. If you could describe the state of the earth. The earth will never be the same, but the change will be something we can’t predict, current state, pain, future it all exists together.

Elin: Rise of a new discipline of climate emotions, now we have ecological researchers. Phase model of eco emotions and ecological grief. (developed by Panu Pihkala, Finnish researcher). in that phase model, there’s a lot going on. When we first become aware of these problems or when we are aware of them over and over and over again, is a different phase, and a different experience. There’s a very healthy distancing we can take when we say, “I need a break”. There are times when I need to distance myself to take a rest, and I need to engage in things that matter to me that have purpose. When we’re in eco anxiety, we move between shut down entirely or we get into frenetic action. The struggle is to recognize how to maintain one’s individual and, and collective health around rest and action, because the issues we face are complicated and complex, and they require long-term engagement, which is different than an escape or just powering through till it’s solved.

I’ve been taking a break, I feel ok taking a break.

One of the things that fuels our sense of despair is that we know how bad things are and we know nothing is getting better. That’s a cold hard fact. Almost all the news we hear about climate change is focused on problems. 97% of global media is on problem identification mode.

New practice: checking my expiry date of what I believe is true. I just assume that I need to check something, especially if I’m convinced I know it. When I take a break, I’m way more up for being vulnerable and checking. When I’m exhausted I don’t have the energy to check myself.

I’m wrong almost all the time. A lot of the time the issues have moved in a good direction. You have to look beyond the problem identification and analysis.

It’s part of self care to be vulnerable to check our beliefs. Our taken for granted narratives between ourselves are reinforcing these negative ideas that nothing’s happening and it’s all broken, it’s getting faster broken or it’s even more polarized or these kinds of things. But in many cases, these issues are moving in a good direction.

Ivy: nature teaching us a lot about cycles. Now it’s winter, and we dont’ see it full of life, but spring comes right after winter, and that begins another circle of life. But if we pay attention closely, you will see that some plants are already in bloom. They take the lead, while the others are taking a rest. As educators, when we take a rest, if we have an eco system view, we know our friends might take the lead. And we can take the time taking care of ourselves. Like the earth is taking care. There are many ways of contributing to life. Nature shows us there is a wide range of creative ways that all contribute to life. New life comes after the great dying. New planets come from collision, seemingly disastrous events, yet it has really prepared the conducive conditions for the next stage to come. Maybe it’s also a time that we change our perception on doing “nothing” / resting or self care. Because if we were to learn from the wisdom of nature, then all stages of that life cycle matters and all play an important and necessary role contributing to the life thriving. In our culture we advocate for trying your best, doing, prolonging daytime as long as possible, it gives you the illusion that the night never comes, there’s no need to rest. This is because consumerism needs that. That’s not how nature works. We are nature. We need dark time. We also need a dark time of the soul. Learn from nature, live closer to the earth and bring back that intuitive natural wisdom can help us a lot in this time, when we are further and further away from the earth.

Elin: people are so worried about taking a break, because the issues are so urgent, but if you look at how change happens, it’s not slow and incremental, it can peak and soar. That’s like nature, I don’t see spring coming at all, but then blossoms emerge everything.

Challenging the assumption that if I can’t see it right now, then I have to force it.

Solutions journalism: looks at what’s moving us in good directions, rather than what’s broken. Look more deeply and make the story more complex. During disasters (like wildfires or nuclear explosions), we tend to report, as if things are broken forever, and when we look after these “disasters”, but when we look at examples like the Bikini Atoll, a decade after, those coral islands are coming back to life. Regeneration, restoration so much healing is innate in nature, and ourselves.

Thinking about these challenges, what might our teachers (leaders, and students) need to survive and thrive right now?

Elin: recognize that we are an incredibly emotional species, and to welcome that. A lot of the work in education about climate presents it as content only, but we can have emotions about facts. Create safe spaces for sharing of emotions in classrooms. Emotional check ins with ourselves and each other. All emotions are valuable to us, they all carry wisdom. 

Hopefulness is not about being cheerful. Hopefulness is extremely hard to do in a society focused on doomism. Its a conscious choice. I take a stance of hope. 

When you choose to be hopeful then you have to actively look in the directions where we need more. The more you can do that, the more you can advance those things, the more you have reasons to feel hopeful. It starts with a choice. Even when I feel helpless, I am choosing to be hopeful. Being conscious decisions about the stance you take. Otherwise I’m blowing around depending on the newstory I just saw, I become a victim, whereas if I’ve decided this stance is the one I’m sticking with it’s powerful, and hard work. I need to give myself the time to feel when it’s challenging.

Ivy: I would encourage people to go outside, to be outside. To start with a fresh mind, as if we are observing nature for the first time. Many of these issues are caused by human life and the rest of the planet. The ways we are connected: air, power, these facts are invisible to us, even though we scientifically know it, we don’t see it.

Deep ecology: yes we know about these facts, but it doesn’t solve the question, how should we be with it. It’s all about relationships. If there is no relationship, we won’t care. What is your question, love is the answer. We need to fall in love with the Earth, again and again.

Connect on the micro level: five senses: smell, taste, see, hear: need to come from real life experience. Education is too much focused on the head, the cognitive. Kids today don’t lack knowledge, but they don’t feel that embodied feeling of what’s happening out there. Always start from deep experience, consistent experience on a regular basis. So we can discover and observe small changes that’s how we develop our relationship and reverence for life.

We are stuck in this artificially constructed self, our artificial identities, but what do we know about our animal bodies. If we can discover more of that, we can discover more of that aspect of earth.

If you see a plant that is super resilient growing under the sun, it gives us sun energy.  LIke lemongrass, we can learn resilience. We need to pick an entry point that fits where we are mostly: if I’m an emotional person, I can start with an entry that is on the emotional side, if I’m more spiritual I can start with that. As educators we need to have the more skillful means to personalize learning to invite students to fall in love again with our beautiful earth and their beautiful selves.

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Show Notes continued…

Elin: I feel like I’m an ecosystem. I can only breathe because (Cosmos Sheldrake – his brother, Merlin Sheldrake did mushroom research). Personhood for non-humans, driven by AI. How do I signal that I know I’m not just me. Mapping how we (get a new skeleton every 10 years, and we’re not aware of it at all, skeletons are only possible becaus eof the stardust we’re made of). Interconnections are a way of moving our understanding of where we are in the planet, into a much richer thing.

We have to accept and talk about the injustice of the world in a normal way, how do I call out that injustice and stay in relationship. Once we are in opposition. The most impactful things I have done is when I have stayed in a hard relationship, and approached it from a reparative approach, and then we can approach forgiveness. I have to find the capacity to consider forgiveness. Forgiveness does not mean the thing is not wrong. It means that I’m willing to engage in something beyond where we are.

Coaching around ideas like navigating my way through unacceptable things in a way that allows me to move towards a direction that is more acceptable or thriving. The easiest thing for me is to be angry, but I don’t want to stay stuck in anger if that anger causes me to be unable to work in alliance or move something

Recognizing the narratives that are causing me to think the way I do: we are bathed in stories all the time. Really seeing the narrative that we’re in, allows us to separate out and give options of choice. A lot of the time people will position a choice: hope or reality. But being hopeful is a reality. We can make choices in how we respond to the narrative that we hear about. Actively unlearning is quite useful because it can open up all types of avenues for moving through difficult times, that we can’t see if we just think this is the way the world works.

Something I find really exciting is to ask people, you know, “tell me a story of something that has gotten so much better than you ever thought it possibly could have”. People always have an answer to that, and they’re varied. Some of them are political answers, some of them are personal growth, some of them are an area that has restored itself. It’s really a helpful thing to challenge this doom & gloom narrative, to actively seek things that are in opposition to it. So we see it as a narrative rather than a truth.

Ivy: When my teacher talked about healing, we overcame that challenge and fixed it, but healing is putting things back into perspective. 

If we are stuck in winter, we don’t feel hopeful, but if we expand our timescale to the whole year, then we understand . When we have a fuller picture, we understand why things are happening. When we only see part of the picture, it’s like we only have a tiny picture without context. Expanding our consciousness to include more context and expanding the time scale. 

Slow down and step back and that somehow automatically expands us. This ecological sself is way bigger if we allow ourselves to go back and find ourselves in this wide web of life. Then our being will be so expanded and so enlarged, and can include way more. Can become a much bigger container where we can hold different opinions. We are all holding that container for our time in humanity, we all have a different role, taller people, bigger hands. We all need to hold that, if we are too busy pointing fingers, than we can’t hold that container.

Elin: Opening up and being able to see anew. One of the most practical things, I find helpful is to make a choice around the content we take in. We feed ourselves media on a daily basis. For 10 days start each day immersed in solutions journalism. Making a conscious choice about what media you take in, and changes the way you see the world. It’s what we feed that allows us to show up in the world. If you start your day immersed in doomist news, that affects you for the whole day.

If we measure only failure, we become very aware of how broken we are. The more I know about the positive action, the more I can be in service to that. Stepping back also allows us to critique and make different choices. I’m intolerant now of doomism. I deserve to hear up to date information about what we are doing. News avoidance because it makes us feel crappy.

Ivy: We have the right to demand healthy food and say no to junk food. We can make the choice to say, I don’t want to click on those sensational news outlets. I deserve better food for my mental health, for my capacity to have courage, fearlessness, and take action. That’s another type of discipline.

Elin: our coaches and teachers can help by picking an issue and looking for where progress is being made. Sometimes we think crucial thinking is only about problem identification, but we can also critically think about solutions. We can hold power accountable by showing where something works and demands more of that.

We can consciously decide to coach for the direction that you care about and we’re going to chart that progress. We have this idea that equates cynicism with smartness. But actually cynicism is a blanket negativity, that’s not intelligent.

It’s important to challenge these norms. We indicate how we care about things by indicating how broken things are.

It’s very hard to be hopeful by yourself. You can make a pact with two other people.

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