3. Ensuring Balance
Capacity Three: Ensuring Balance
Key Question: “What is needed?”
Mindfulness Work:
Investing in self-care and what is needed to ensure individual wellbeing and personal sustainability.
Social Change Work:
Exploring what is needed collectively to design solutions collaboratively and holistically.
Mindfulness Work
As much work as we do on ourselves to transform, there are times in the present that we need to take a step back for rest. One of the most important things in CSC work is self-care. This includes not only the personal transformation and self-awareness work that we have already explored, but it means understanding our own needs, our limitations, and taking time to restore and take care of ourselves. If we are not taking care of our wellbeing, then we are less likely to be able to be fully available to help others. By committing to ongoing personal transformation practices, we can more easily attend to our own need for balance so that we avoid burnout, and stay whole, grounded, and completely available to do our work in the world.
Wellbeing is a state of being with others, where human needs are met, where one can act meaningfully to pursue one's goals, and where one enjoys a satisfactory quality of life."
Resilience is a process of positive adaptation despite adversity. It is driven by an inner motivational force for wisdom, self-actualization, altruism, and harmony with one’s inner source of strength. This definition notes that our capacity for resilience is dependent upon our own inner drive or purpose, which we directly cultivate through our investment in self-knowledge.
In pursuit of wellbeing, CSC allows us to:
Recognize our habitual coping mechanisms of stress
Increase our capacity to invest proactively in self-care
Use awareness frameworks for shifting from models of self-sacrifice and burnout to models of resilience and wellbeing
Build a deeper understanding of the stress response system
Invoke a toolkit of evidence-based skills for grounding, mindfulness, and resilience
Create our own practical self-care plan for mental, emotional, and physical wellbeing
Simply increasing self-awareness of the common coping mechanisms for stress or trauma exposure will ensure we will have greater capacity for seeking out and investing in self-care when it is needed. We can also proactively design and invest in a self-care plan for our wellbeing that serves our mind, heart, and body. Ensuring balance and asking ourselves “what is needed?” as we continue to stay mindfully aware of our inner landscape allows us to make a commitment to our wellbeing as a priority for our personal sustainability.
Inoculate Against Stress for Wellbeing and Resilience:
Global Grassroots has made a significant investment integrating mind-body trauma healing into its work with women survivors of war and violence in East Africa. We have learned that mind-body interventions, like specific breath practices, help reprogram the stress response system to allow individuals who have had traumatic experiences to feel sensations and emotions more safely, to assess threat accurately and to activate their parasympathetic nervous system that invites calm and rest. Over time, participants experience improved interoception, or their ability to sense their inner experience (like hunger). They experience less reactivity and greater self-regulation, resulting in more feelings of compassion, love and safety. From this deeper sense of wellbeing, participants can integrate new understandings and adapt and grow to their personal circumstances. This helps to foster resilience over time. Click here for more on our trauma-informed practices and mind-body trauma healing work.
Practices and Frameworks Supporting this Capacity for the Individual:
The Conscious Social Change methodology integrates a range of regular practices to examine and cultivate wellbeing. An ongoing commitment to such self-care practices are critical to innoculate against stress and burnout. These practices include:
Setting intentions
Grounding practices
Examining coping mechanisms for stress
Designing and utilizing self-care plans
Loving-kindness meditation
Breath-Body-Mind, breath-based trauma-healing work. Read more about our trauma-informed work.
Click here for a sample of wellbeing and resilience practices.
Social Change Work
Our founder shares a story from her experience at a wellness center for a retreat:
I was sitting in the audience and a woman stood up to speak about how the last activity had really moved her. She was emotional and crying while speaking passionately about her experience. Sitting a few rows behind her, I noticed the woman next to her seemed agitated. She was looking all around at her feet, then suddenly grabbed a box of tissues, pulled out a huge wad, then reached up and wiped the face of the woman speaking. The speaker paused, stunned, but then went on with her comments, while her neighbor sat down, seemingly satisfied. As a mother I recognized myself for a moment. Then I reflected: Ok, intentions? Good. Delivery? …Not so good.
I think social and political change is often delivered in much the same way. As change agents, we think we know what is needed, but we often impose ourselves through our unconscious desire to fix, or we try to compel people to change with our sticks and carrots. Then we get angry or burned-out wondering why our efforts are neither appreciated nor sustainable. And we never look at our own role in the system or ask what people actually need.
It is not enough to attend to our own wellbeing. In CSC we mindfully employ the question “what is needed” in understanding how we achieve organizational and collective wellbeing too. The question, “what is needed”, also guides a collaborative approach to problem-solving in collaboration with other stakeholders, as mindfulness is applied as a design tool.
Wellbeing mitigates burn-out and ensures personal sustainability. Periodic studies have revealed that 72% of entrepreneurs reported some form of mental health concern, and 15% – 45% of non-profit, humanitarian, human rights workers report burn-out. But the level of wellbeing of the individual, especially leaders, affects the wellbeing of their leadership and organization too. A study by the Wellbeing Project led by Severns & Murphy Johnson in 2010 of social entrepreneurs who had invested proactively in inner work for wellbeing found that it drives effective leadership. On an individual level, participants reported increases in sense of self, presence, purpose, core values, self-compassion, personal power. And decreases in anxiety, anger, judgment, fear of vulnerability and failure.
At an organizational level, as social entrepreneur leaders invested in their own inner work and wellbeing, they found they experienced more positive relationships, including better management of boundaries. They judged less, reacted less, listened more deeply, connected more deeply, trusted more, encouraged and collaborated more, and were more flexible. In terms of problem-solving, they could see more diverse and creative possibilities, build a culture of wellbeing, and develop more holistic approaches to solutions.
Throughout its existence, Global Grassroots has invested in wellbeing and mindfulness within the organization in a range of ways. We started every meeting with a moment of mindfulness or meditation. We offered an annual wellbeing stipend for employees to invest in their own restoration. Staff used the stipend for a range of purposes from massage or family vacations to even purchasing a piano. We assigned wellbeing buddies between existing staff and new staff to proactively support each other’s wellbeing throughout the year. We sponsored staff to study mindful leadership and other trainings in mind-body resilience and inner growth work. We hosted wellbeing retreats for our staff for restorative practices and time together. We incorporated personal growth objectives into our performance and learning processes. We allowed paid time off from the organization to pursue personal wellbeing. Finally, we conducted mindful audits, examining every value, policy, and program in the organization together with our beneficiaries to understand if we had been as mindful as we could be and what needed to change.
The case for individual wellbeing is strong, but how do we proactively employ mindfulness and self-care in the design of social impact solutions? It involves the embodiment of mindfulness in honoring the source of wisdom for solutions-building. The goal of CSC is sustainable wellbeing for all, including quality of life, economic, social, mental, spiritual, physical and material wellbeing, as defined by the person themselves. It is thus critical to ensure the poor, vulnerable, marginalized and exploited should come first and lead the process of defining and achieving wellbeing for themselves. Methods and tools, such as needs assessments, can be designed together and should utilize participatory methods to ensure all members of a constituency are able to offer their personal perspective safely, authentically and confidentially.
Global Grassroots has always partnered with self-organized teams of women who have chosen their own issue of priority and have their own solution to address that issue. We offer tools, resources and high-engagement consulting to support these teams in realizing their own visions. Our teams design and carry out their own needs assessments within their own communities, implement their own program model, develop their own organizations, and conduct their own monitoring and evaluation. We support their problem-solving and design work with a process we call “Inquiry without Imposition”, where we use active listening and a process of asking only questions to help teams come to their own conclusions about the development of their solutions and the answers to “what is needed?”.
Practices and Frameworks Supporting this Capacity in Social Change:
CSC uses the following frameworks in building a comprehensive and collaborative perspective and intention around what is needed in beginning the solutions-building process. These participatory processes, in conjunction with the contemplative and personal transformation practices, are designed to build a sense of compassionate understanding and connection among diverse stakeholders:
Change mapping of interventions and how that will shift the experience of affected parties
Mission – identifying a collective purpose from the inside out
Values - what underlying assumptions and values inform the work and understanding of the system
Community Challenge – inclusive engagement in identifying needs and solutions
Ethics and Codes of Conduct – what boundaries and shared agreements are needed
Budgeting – what resources are needed
Incorporating Mindfulness into the Organization - building a culture of mindfulness and wellbeing
Click here for a guide to Mindful Listening and Inquiry Without Imposition in social impact work.
Meet Team Have A Good Life
Have a Good Life, is a Global Grassroots water venture located within a hillside community of Kigali. The team was aware that vulnerable women in their community had been exploited in exchange for water delivery. Further, contaminated water sources contributed to high incidences of cholera, typhoid and diarrhea. They wanted to know more about the nature of the issue and what might be needed, and carried out confidential interviews with community members to learn more. Conversations among a sample of the population revealed: 95 percent said they had suffered from diseases related to unclean water, 81.4 percent had traded sex for water, 100 percent knew someone infected by HIV while trading sex for water, yet only 25 percent had taken HIV tests. Surprised to find such a gap between knowledge and behavior around HIV prevention, Have a Good Life extended a municipal pipeline from a more populated area and constructed a water access point to bring water into their hillside community. Water access points where women gather made accessing and educating large groups remarkably easy. Not only do they now serve 400 families (1600 – 2000 people) with clean water, they use their water access point as a location where they can speak to women about proper hygiene as well as HIV/AIDS testing.
