Conversations with Georgie #4: Changing My Past, Present, and Future. ⏱️
Crop Rotation Applied to Life. Always a Designer. The Open Doors of Help. Changing my Mind, Beliefs, and Memories.
These thoughts are best consumed when you have a moment to breathe and reflect, a cool drink in your hand and luscious sunshine to lie under. Find a break of 5-8 minutes to unravel this potentially provocative life update and musings. Or just choose 1 section for a short burst of stimulation: (1) Behold the Fallow Season - Crop Rotation Applied to Life. (2) Always a Designer. (3) The Open Doors of Help. (4) Changing My Mind, My Beliefs, and My Memories.
👋Hello Friends,
A lot has changed. And is about to.
I’ve moved back to London, said goodbye to my flatmate, said hello to a new one. Stayed up until 2 am with insomnia for a few nights, sorting and letting myself say goodbye to 10-15years old documents and possessions (creating piles of eBay and charity bags, except for my books, where I only managed to get rid of 5!). I’ve re-realized I am a designer at heart and started an exciting opportunity in the virtual connection design space (see 2. - Always a Designer) with a new collaborator and am en route into the research world (more on this next month I hope). I’m getting ready to say goodbye to half of the governance team at Sandbox, and hello to the newly elected leadership.
And I have spent hours in my imagination visiting memories of places, changing my relationship to these memories, and saying goodbye to them - through EMDR (see 4. -Changing My Mind, My Beliefs, and My Memories). And this, in turn, has completely changed my relationship to myself - I feel a strong a sense of acceptance for who I am, pride for doing the best I could with what I have and an understanding that this will never feel like enough - what happens in the world, the systems we create and I are perfectly imperfect. Everything is dynamic, much is out of my control and you can’t fix the whole world permanently - 2020 has been a reminder of this mess! But we can do our bit to improve an element of it.
Change is happening both inside out and outside in. I feel the excitement and some grief or sadness saying goodbye to many things, places, and people. And I’m learning to let myself feel the paradoxical grief and joy of change. Endings can be hard, but they are simply a reminder of the impermanent state of all things. Something my experiences at Burning Man last year taught me:
‘Each and every moment, in all its ephemeral nature, dies….it is gone, lost to the past. But creating the space for something new, shiny, and wonderful to grow tomorrow. But you can't see or know that shiny new thing. So it's easy to desperately hold onto the beauty of our past experiences in fear that they may not come to us again. '
But the more we see the abundant nature of the universe and trust that it will provide for us, the more we can let go of the past and stride forward into the future.
I can suddenly see some of my future. And it is going to be an exciting adventure!
Sending (Virtual) Hugs & Love,
Georgie 🤗❤️
P.S. Yes, you’re right in thinking that there wasn’t a July edition of Conversations with Georgie. :-)
🍂1. Behold the Fallow Season - Crop Rotation Applied to Life.
I’ve never gelled with the work-life balance mantra that assumes that most weeks’ are alike in form when they are not. Like school terms, much of life is made of short sprints and then phases of rest. I recently read The Power of Ritual by Casper Ter Kuile ( which I highly recommend) and he says:
‘Just like the land, we too will plant, harvest, and lie fallow here and then’
If you want a great harvest (output) then the land also needs to lay fallow sometimes. Getting clear on which phase you’re in can help manage and (often lower) expectations so that we can excel (harvest) when we need to but not expect to every day.
Sometimes life is intense and busy with work or other life priorities. Take the past two weeks - I’ve worked 12-14hr days and some of the weekend to meet key deadlines. But that ends tomorrow for the Bank Holiday weekend.
And sometimes life involves very little output. The week before this I made a spontaneous-ish escape with a friend camping and cycling in the rural UK countryside in search of peace and beautiful nature and sunshine (New Forest, Dorset/ Devon, Dartmoor). A great deal of it involved lying on the ground, resting and sitting in silence. I read a bit but not much, I didn’t come up with many incredible ideas but I did come back home refreshed with a working mind and heaps more motivation and zest for life.
One day a week (usually Sunday) I try and do nothing. Caspar calls it his ‘tech sabbath’. The aim is not to achieve or think much. I turn devices off or use minimally, avoid scheduling planned social time and I follow my body’s needs, which are sometimes to literally lie down and nap. Cognitively, it feels like a wasted day. But without this day, the rest of the week’s productivity, motivation, and energy are affected.
When is your fallow time? When are you planting and when are you harvesting?
🖌️2. Always a Designer
So I think I found my calling.
And it been there all along. I just didn’t see it.
12 year old me, who created this slide as part of a school PowerPoint project ‘About Me’, knew it. (A later slide also said I would love… ‘ a machine that answers every question’. - lol of course I did 😛).
As I child, I designed two schools (‘Nightfall’ and ‘Sun’ School, complete with uniform and equipment lists, floorplans, timetables, and entry exams!), games, a nonverbal language, art, checklists for pocket money allocation, a schedule for who gets the front seat in the car (really!), floorplans and house designs (CAD and the SIMS), a ‘circus’ talent show my siblings and I put on for my family at Christmas, teaching curriculum (complete with tests that I trialed on my siblings - lucky them!), a bring and buy sale for my local village and church, a handmade perfume stall (they smelt awful and only my aunt bought them to be kind) and a tuck shop from my school locker, which was a remarkably successful business.
I liked pulling things apart in order to put them together in a better way and then making this happen.
I was an avid questioner, designer, planner, and maker/creator.
I still am.
Now I design tools and experiences that facilitate learning, connection, personal development and behaviour change.
So, what am I designing right now?
Well, a few things, naturally! But the most exciting ones are:
a. Virtual Connection Design at UCL, School of Management. 🧑🎓
COVID-19 has presented the challenge of creating a social experience for students, with the absence of shared physical space and potential in-person interaction touchpoints during the week that deprive students, and faculty alike, of the spontaneous interactions and opportunities that form a critical part of the overall university experience essential for collaboration, knowledge sharing and relationship building.
In preparation for the upcoming semester, my new collaborator and I are designing a bespoke human connection strategy and series of connection interventions (based on recent research) that increases student engagement, wellbeing, and performance. I’ve loved spending much of this week talking to students and the faculty to really understand the many layers of the problem and think through the most creative ways to solve them.
Connection design is a super exciting field to get into and I am excited about the impact we can have embedding connection principles into the design of products and services, both during COVID and also after the pandemic.
👉ASK: Do you know any other organizations or universities that are being impacted by the shift to virtual and would value our expertise? I would appreciate any introductions you could make. 🙏
b. Conversation Journeys Tribe - Accelerated Discovery, Growth & Learning ❓
Following the success of the conversation live experiences and menus I’ve created for communities, organisations and at Trigger Conversations, and recognizing the power of learning within a community, I’m designing a Conversation Journeys Tribe that accelerates learning, personal growth, and interesting connections across the globe.
👉ASK: What themes (personal development or intellectual curiosity-based) are you interested in exploring and learning more about?
Comment on this thread or email me directly. Thanks! 🙏
🚪3. The Open Doors of Help
Photo by Toa Heftiba on Unsplash
In CWG #3 I invited you to connect through one of 5 ways:
What came up for you reading this? What did you take away? / After reading this, a way you and I are more similar than different is…. / What is something you need help with? If I can’t help personally I might know someone who can. / Feedback on this email - really, I welcome and am curious to hear your ideas! / Something else that you feel like sharing.
I didn’t know what to expect. Would people even get to the end of the letter, let alone reply? Which way would prove to be the most popular?
I was delighted to get responses from a number of wonderful humans (thank you 🙏) which lit up my face and my day, and made me truly value human connection.
In many cases, it came in the form of requests for help. And not your standard help requests, but very specific requests that made me wonder how or whether I could deliver something useful. I let the request mull, listened out for ideas on social channels and let solutions find their way to me.
I was surprised I could help and it made me realise that one of the barriers to helping others is knowing how we can help. Perhaps much of what we know is tacit knowledge and we undervalue the opportunities, ideas and network our weak ties can bring. Noticing this, I also realised that on the reverse side a barrier to receiving help is not sharing what we need help with.
I have a question on my weekly reflection pages that speaks to this theme: How can I help someone else this week?’. It empowers me to help others and always helps me think through the ways I can. And I think I need to add another question ‘How can someone else help me this week?”. Us independent beings often think we should do it all ourselves, but it’s not an effective long-term strategy - other people highly increase the chances of success and actually want to help. We’re collaborative, social beings after all and part of a relational system that I want to build (and dip into) to survive and thrive. The door has always been there, open, but we don’t always feel okay to step through it.
Feeling into the fears of rejection and worries of having little value, I’ve been asking for help and giving help a lot over the last few months. Here are some examples:
I helped a friend think through priorities and another have a short-term ‘meltdown’, I made introductions, I carried things up and down stairs, I told someone I admired them and why, I encouraged people to take on roles they would excel in, I apologised for something I did, I organised a gathering, I shared my experience of EMDR and helped others work out if it’s for them, I gave feedback on documents, and liked and shared posts online.
I asked for help: finding a flatmate, being coached, finding a cleaner, a conversation to pull me out of my internal mess one day, help taking on governance project actions whilst I was away in nature and needed to disconnect.
I’m sure these lists could be much longer. It’s a fun exercise to both think about and then experiment with in reality, and see what value you can easily (and quickly) provide and receive.
So, over to you. Ask yourself:
How can I help someone else this week?’.
How can someone else help me this week?”.
👉 ACTION: Choose 2 ideas for each (maybe try something new that you wouldn’t usually do) and then execute. And let me know how it goes!
🧠 4. Changing My Mind, My Beliefs, and My Memories.
Over the last 4 months, I have been changing my memories, my beliefs, and my mind through EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing).
It has been one of the most meaningful and transformational experiences of my life. And as someone who is forever putting myself through ‘growth-building’ experiences, this means a lot.
EMDR came into my life as a concept only recently when I read The Body Keeps the Score by Bessel van der Kolk. And then in conversations, I discovered that it has been a life-changing treatment for many friends - relieving them of decades of trauma and PTSD symptoms (caused by everything from grief, physical assault and car accidents to childhood abuse and neglect and producing symptoms of anxiety, depression, substance abuse, phobias, chronic fatigue and pain). And in just 12 or fewer sessions they could fully let go of the past. There is a reason it is the go-to treatment for healing PTSD - not only is it highly effective, but it is also highly efficient.
Most challenging events are resolved through thinking about it and during REM sleep. When an event that is too painful or disturbing happens, it overwhelms the information processing systems and the memory isn’t processed correctly. Instead, it is stored along with unpleasant emotions, physical sensations, and beliefs, and this is locked into the nervous system. And because we use our memory networks to interpret the present, all experiences in the present can trigger unprocessed memories and the negative responses arise - negative emotions, thoughts, and body reactions (e.g. a chronic stress response).
Simply put, EMDR works by tracking the eyes left and right - activating both sides of the brain, releasing the negative emotional experiences that are “locked” in the nervous system so that can be integrated as normal memories and creating an opportunity to install positive beliefs.
EMDR Therapy changes maladaptive neural networks by connecting the traumatic memory with new information. The distressing thoughts and emotions are blended with new positive thoughts and emotions; embodied awareness allows frozen sensations in the body to resolve through healing movements.” -Arielle Schwartz
The brain is incredibly malleable and plastic so healing means that you don’t lose or forget the memories - but they don’t have a negative arousal state associated with them.
And because it’s a bottom-up approach, it gets to the memories that you can’t access cognitively in conversation with a therapist (perhaps due to memory recall, you were too young or the memory is too difficult or uncomfortable to open up.) It kind of opens up everything (in a safe setting) so that feelings can be felt fully and integrated. It is similar approach to psychedelic-assisted therapy.
I was sold on EMDR. So when quarantine happened and my whole work and life routine went upside down I decided it was the perfect time to do deep work.
And it was deep and intense and fascinating. EMDR allows a person to experience the fullness of all feelings - sadness and grief, anger, disgust, pure joy and love, freedom, and relief. And to experience them viscerally in the body - in muscle tightness and release, in firey heat, in nausea. Every inch of my body has been involved. I am learning that the body does indeed keep the score - emotional experiences stay in our body.
My whole system feels like it has changed. I feel generally physically lighter and my face and body so much less tense. I’m less emotionally reactive to frustrating stimuli, more accepting, and able to let go when I can't control an outcome. There is heaps more self-love, and pride for former me. I feel less of a need to fulfill cravings and addictions that bring pleasure. I’ve been able to feel free to get lost in the moment much more and for longer. There is less resistance to doing stuff, especially the stuff I don’t want to do. I’m generally calmer, more focused, and in flow. The morning existential anxiety when I wake up has decreased…. I don’t feel like I have to be responsible for changing the world at every minute, but that I can if I feel like it.
And I feel like it has got to the root of some of limiting beliefs, which I can now see with absolute clarity just aren’t true at all. I’ve been much less afraid of taking actions that challenge these beliefs.
This is the bit I am most excited about. Small changes in beliefs lead to small different behaviours, which are cumulative. The next 6 months should be interesting!
You might be wondering why I am sharing this….
As a society, we have a problem talking about our emotions - we have not created spaces to fully express emotions without judgment from others or even made it normal to have a therapist to do this with us. And yet emotions are fundamental to what it means to be human. And we all experience trauma in our life, especially growing up.
Almost all of my closest friends have been to therapy. They may not admit it in public, but I’m very sure that many in my generation recognise the value of working on yourself.
To change the world you must first start by changing yourself, so they say.
In order to be a good leader, a good parent and a good partner you need to first deal with your stuff - get to know yourself deeply, know your patterns of behaviours, your triggers, that every story is merely a narrative and ways to help yourself. To learn how to re-write the manual of you. And learn how to help others change theirs.
And given that we are never taught this in schools (although I expect SEL to grow over the next few decades - and I would like to play a role in this) we need to take responsibility for this ourselves.
And that means we need an open conversation about our emotions. Not silence.
Stigmas continue to exist when they are reinforced through silence.
This might strike you as direct, an overshare and you might feel some element of judgment towards me. This is a pretty normal response and I respect that this won’t be for everyone to read. At least maybe not today, but maybe tomorrow. And the reality is that I can’t control others’ judgment, and that judgment is a part of the process of doing something different.
The bottom line is that it may not be comfortable to speak out, but it’s important. Short term discomfort is just a price to pay for meaningful change. And I won’t be complicit in reinforcing a system that creates long-term damage for humanity. My voice, like yours, influences so we have a responsibility to make it okay to talk about difficult things.
This treatment is life-changing, I have absolutely no doubt, so I don’t want to hold back when I can help change lives.
And I hope that sharing my story inspires more stories to be shared.
👉OFFER: Every time I talk about this experience people get curious and ask me a lot of questions. I’m happy and delighted to answer them. So if you’re reading this and want to know more then don’t hold back from asking.
📖 5. A Parting Quote
‘‘Find a way to make beauty necessary; find a way to make necessity beautiful.” - Anne Michaels, Fugitive Pieces
Thanks to Abie for sharing this glorious reminder on the value of beauty. I’m finding ways…