Sacrificing Joy on the Altar of Impact
Photo by Eduardo Flores on Unsplash.
For leaders in climate, work is often so much more than work. It’s making a better world for our children. It’s influencing systems change. It’s about safeguarding the future. For my clients, this is often hugely meaningful. The problem is that the pursuit of impact can also become all-consuming.
When do we get to just be? Sometimes, climate action is even a way to avoid feeling what we’re really feeling. We’re scared that if we really allow ourselves to slow down and be with whatever’s coming up for us — grief, rage, helplessness, despair — we’ll be swallowed up. And so we put our heads down and power through, doubling down to make a change, afraid to say no to opportunities to keep doing more because there’s already so little time. Climate action, originally a way to do something useful for our pain, becomes one more way to distract ourselves from our pain.
For a good chunk of 2021/2, this was me.
In 2021 I became so desperate to play my part that I drove myself into the ground. I worked until 11pm most nights, catching up so I could go out and do more impactful stuff during the day. I deprioritized my rest because there was so much to be done ‘out there’. I told myself I was hustling to make the world a better place for my son. This was the price to pay for changing the world, right? Sure, I was burning out, but it was in service of love.
It wasn’t just my sleep that suffered, though. It was my joy. When I marvelled at autumn colours, my throat clenched with foreboding at the beauty we might lose. When I breathed in the smell of my sleeping toddler, I felt a stab of guilt for the parents losing children to famine and violence. My joy was radiant, but it felt unfair or frivolous to bask in its light. It felt safer to acknowledge its shadows instead.
Perhaps predictably, I ended 2021 burnt out, dispirited, and deeply disconnected. And as 2022 unfolded, this feeling of emptiness and grief stayed with me.
I watched children die in foreign countries and read reports of impending catastrophe. I watched powerful people – mostly, older white men – stand back and consistently choose self-interest over the lives of other humans and other beings. Stories of tragedy, war and loss stalked my dreams. For a week in February, I became incapacitated by grief.
As I said to a friend: I felt like an open wound walking the streets, bleeding everywhere.
My story isn’t unique.
I work with people who share my drive to heal and repair the climate emergency. People who are mobilised to act in the face of great crisis. My clients often identify with their careers more than any other part of their lives. They’re great at what they do, are driven by their mission, and see opportunities to create change everywhere. There is always something bigger, calling them forwards.
It’s easy for my clients to sacrifice joy at the altar of impact.
They know full well: there is still so much to be done. Do they really have time to celebrate? Do they have the right to say no to important tasks – tasks that nobody else is doing – if they don’t feel right at a gut level? Do they get to ‘waste time’ on wonder?
The answer to all these questions must always be yes, yes, and yes.
Here’s what I’ve been learning so far:
1. Holding the ‘both/and’ is a spiritual practice.
It’s easy to collapse into despair and feel like everything else is irrelevant. It’s also natural to numb ourselves to pain and lose ourselves in pleasure. Holding both – without diminishing either – is a discipline.
For me, this looks like marvelling at our garden daffodils even as I know that bulbs are coming up earlier this year. It looks like allowing myself to fully feel my delight in my son even as the radio has just told me about children dying abroad, and my heart is breaking. It looks like celebrating a birthday meal with family even as I feel a lump in my throat about the future.
Holding the ‘both/and’ isn’t turning away from others’ suffering.
It doesn’t mean we’re less empathetic or connected with the world.
Instead, it’s a way of honouring all that is true in this miracle of being alive.
It’s a way of protecting our capacity to be awake and engaged.
In some ways, it’s even a mysterious stand for leadership; for not permitting Goodness to be swallowed up. It’s like we’re Gandalf, standing in front of the Balrog and thundering: ‘you shall not pass!’ This goodness that lies behind us, we declare, is sacred land. Darkness and destruction: you have already taken so much. You shall not take this, too.
We refuse to let our capacity for joy atrophy.
Credit: New Line Cinema
2. Each of us is called to take 100% responsibility for how we show up.
One way of seeing the world is that in every given moment, we’re either above the line, or below it. Above the line, we’re living from trust, openness, and a commitment to learning. Below it, we’re living from threat, fear, and a commitment to being right. As leaders, our job is to notice where we are at any given moment, without making ourselves wrong. Then if needed, our job is to do what it takes to move back above the line.
This is a simple and brilliant model. There is much that we cannot control about our world. What we can control, however, is how we choose to be in the midst of it. Who we be is a far more fundamental choice than what we do, because it radiates out into all our actions. When we look back at this time in our lives …
Who will we be proud of having been in the midst of it?
What stories do we want to be telling ourselves and others?
What are we willing to give up in pursuit of our goals?
What we are unwilling to give up?
What do we want to fuel us so we can contribute at our highest level?
From that place, we can observe the lives we are creating, and whether we are out of alignment.
As leaders, our highest responsibility is to ‘protect the asset’: ourselves. Each of us is responsible for cultivating the energy that we need in order to contribute at our highest level. That might mean making hard choices. It might be doing less in order to do more.
A personal example:
Last year, I felt like I wasn’t engaged enough as a citizen and voter. And so I jumped head-first into climate advocacy. I trained with Al Gore’s Climate Reality Leadership Corps, joined a climate-concerned group coaching programme, and became involved with a parent climate network. There was no end to the ways I could volunteer. I saw gaps everywhere that I could step into. And this was alongside my paid work with Climate Change Coaches, Climate-KIC, nature-based accelerators, and three leadership programmes.
It was tough to step back and acknowledge that I couldn’t do it all. But in saying yes to everything — even though all of it was good, impactful, needed work — I was becoming scattered, overworked, and exhausted. My anxiety and grief weren’t being helped; they were being exacerbated. And I wasn’t bringing joy or creativity to these opportunities. I was bringing anxiety, distraction, and resentment. It was also threatening to impact my coaching. I was having to fight hard to maintain the key quality my clients pay me for: my presence.
I realised I needed to create a filter. Moving forwards, I’d only say yes to opportunities where (a) I could operate in my zone of genius, (b) have a climate impact, and (c) align with my personal and career priorities for 2022.
For me, my zone of genius intersects at coaching, teaching, creating, and connecting. I’m good at organising, planning, and creating systems, and it’s often where I’m asked to step in. But it’s not where I find flow.
In line with that commitment, I said no to eight offers of work so in the first half of 2022. Many were tempting. But they didn’t pass the filter test. By taking on less, and doing it better, I’m making a far more valuable contribution. I’m also allowing others to step into leadership roles that they’ll enjoy far more than I will.
3. Each of us defaults to a particular (justified) sacrifice.
In the face of climate change (and many other huge systemic crises), it’s easy to offer up all kinds of things at the altar of impact. Some sacrifices make sense. Our money, our convenience, and our time are sometimes obvious choices. They’re in line with who we want to become. They’re also a way of resisting the machine that keeps unjust systems going.
But some sacrifices are the very quality of our lives, and we never really intend to give them up. Our joy. Our playfulness. Our health and energy. Our family time.
Sometimes we make these choices consciously, for a limited period of time.
Our challenge is to be ruthlessly honest about ongoing behaviour that we dress up as noble, but is actually undermining us (or hurting others). Workaholism disguised as ‘a passion for justice’ is still workaholism.
When I worked more than I intended, deprioritised leisure, and turned to work as a way to numb my own anxiety, my own health took the brunt.
When I made my life all about my impact, I missed out on the ordinary joys that I needed to fill me up and keep me on the pitch.
And so the energy I brought to the very cause fuelling my drive was diluted.
4. We aren’t meant to do this alone.
When I did my annual review of 2021, I was struck by how one of the best investments of my money and energy had been in finding professional support. My coaches, my counsellor, and group work had all helped me to make sense of my grief and despair, to give myself permission to rest, and to hold the paradox of the both/and.
The climate crisis isn’t going away any time soon. The world will likely continue to be ravaged by war and drought and violence. So, how do we develop the resilience to stay engaged and awake without collapsing into despair, or numbing ourselves into distraction through work? A vital part of the answer is connection.
I’ve found a great counsellor through the Climate Psychology Alliance. I’m in a group I found through The Work that Reconnects Network. I have a coach who gets the emotional complexity of working in climate. And I’m in ongoing conversation with a small circle of friends (What’s App audios, while on dog walks, are a whole new thing for me.)
It might take some trial and error to find the right support for each of us. But it’s essential.
Perhaps, like me and many of my clients, you sometimes think you need to be some kind of tank of productivity and purpose, powering through life making change left, right and centre.
The good news is that sometimes acknowledging our humanity and our limits might be just what’s needed to start healing ourselves, as well as our world.
Honouring the both/and as a spiritual practice. Taking full responsibility for our energy and our contribution. Compassionate and ruthless honesty about what we tend to justify in ourselves. And not doing this alone.
Something to chew on: What here do you most recognize in your own relationship to impact? If you’d like support to work with one (or more) of these behaviours in yourself, contact me today.