Jane Brendgen has taken up the baton from Lindsay Wittenberg in this new series of reflection columns.
This issue: working with uncertainty
The end of summer in the Northern Hemisphere is a time that many of us in Britain associate with holiday: schools are out for six weeks, we have the opportunity to take a break from well-trodden routines, step out of our roles as coaches, slow the pace of our lives, untether our minds from thoughts of work and engage in nourishing and relaxing activities that replenish our resources. As it is with life, though, things don’t always go to plan.
This year, I’d hoped for a quiet August, where I could strengthen my recovery from years of difficult health issues, to lavish in just being. At the end of June, however, my landlord of ten years notified me that he and his family wanted to take occupancy of the property by the middle of October.
This plunged me into the cold reality of the housing crisis we’re facing as a nation. The quality of rented housing has become significantly poorer, demand far exceeds supply and agents are inundated with inquiries. Interest rate hikes are forcing many homeowners out of their properties and into the rental stream, landlords are needing to either pass on higher mortgage costs to their tenants, contributing to record rent increases or they’re selling their properties which is further reducing market size.
After a tumultuous period of seven weeks, fortune smiled on me. I miraculously found a property in Lewes, Sussex, where I’ve been living happily for the past 18 years. It’s affordable, quiet, suitable for my work and the landlords welcomed Tao, my sealpoint Siamese cat. The cherry on top is the expansive vista, with views of the South Downs as far as the eye can see. I’ve been here for ten days as I write this and it’s idyllic. The peace of the rolling hills is a minute’s walk from my front door. I’m as close to the sanctuary of nature as I have ever been.
This period was significantly developmental for me and offered a surge of vertical growth. The mix of fertilising ingredients included uncertainty, insecurity, loss and grief, disruption, disorientation and stress. It also included the attitudes of a growth mindset that I have been cultivating over many years – curiosity, acceptance, self-compassion, humility, being connected to my feelings and trusting in my capacity to lean into the difficulties. There was also an embodied sense of knowing that this process was energising the evolutionary adaptive drive in the mammalian organism I call myself. This deepens trust in confronting the realities of life’s unfolding.
For the first time in my life, I touched into the existential fears associated with housing insecurity. The veil of my ‘privileged’ life lifted and my heart resonated empathically with millions of people all over the world whose basic needs for shelter and security are either threatened or not met.
Moving house is considered to be among the top five stressors in most people’s lives and all of us as coaches will have experienced this and coached clients going through this process too. The high stress associated with moving is due largely to the combination of major change, high-stakes decisions, financial stress, lack of control and unexpected setbacks, all of which I experienced. I completely lost perspective on a number of occasions and got caught in erroneous assumptions, future-focused what-ifs and painful scarcity narratives.
Fortunately, I woke up out of this drama relatively quickly and was humbled to see just how ungrounded my mind had become. My pre-frontal cortex, high on the fumes of stress, lost capacity to hold the volatility, uncertainty and complexity of the unfolding situation. I now have much more of an embodied appreciation of our very real mammalian needs and just how stressful uprooting from one’s place of abode is to the human organism.
I’ve been working with uncertainty for many years, related to health challenges I’ve experienced, and I can see how this has changed my relationship to it. I was surprised to discover a qualitative difference in the uncertainty associated with finding a home. In some ways it was more challenging, unsettling and edgy to be with. I’m reminded of Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs and particularly how important the foundational needs are for human flourishing. We can so easily take this for granted.
One of the areas of growth that was an unexpected gift was related to the process of letting go of about 50% of my material belongings through a combination of necessity and choice. The place I was moving to was one-third the size of the house I’d been living in. I decided to use this opportunity to head more intentionally in the direction of a minimalist way of living. Someone recommended the YouTube channel called The Minimalists and I watched a number of their episodes which I found so helpful. I particularly liked their top five tips, the first of which was to imagine the item suddenly combusting and then noticing how one felt. If it felt good then there was a readiness to let go of it and if not, there was some further work to be done or it was something to choose to keep. This brought the lightness of humour into the process. The more I detached, the emptier the house became, the more liberated I felt.
What a wonderful surprise!
Serendipitously, minimalism as a conscious choice was the perfect fit with my holiday read – Jason Hickel’s book, Less is More: How degrowth will Save the World (Windmill Books, 2021). This is a brilliant essay on capitalism, which he defines as the imperative of constant expansion or growth linked to ever-increasing levels of industrial production and consumption.
Capitalism has set itself at war against life itself and paradoxically, growth has now become primarily a process of breakdown (Hickel, 2021). In this economic context, most of us living in the western world are conditioned into a scarcity mindset which keeps us wanting more and more. Choosing a minimalist approach to living aligns us with eco-centric values and can connect us to a deeper sense of purpose, well-being, responsibility and contribution.
These rich experiences have nuanced my understanding of the reality that we’re contextual beings rather than isolated independent individuals. Our lives are inextricably embedded in a multiplicity of contexts which shape who we’re becoming, moment by moment. We’re in a reciprocal and ever-changing state of relationship with others and the world around us, connected to everything.
In closing, I’m drawn to reflecting on a number of questions that have emerged from writing this piece:
- In what ways am I encouraging the cultivation of a growth mindset in my clients?
- What might I be blinded to as a consequence of my living conditions that might lead me to make inaccurate assumptions about my clients?
- How might I sensitively approach the topic of minimalism with my clients in support of raising awareness regarding eco-centric choices for consumption?
- Regarding the process of letting go of possessions, what factors contribute to attachment to the item? What is it that I am really letting go of that may be symbolically represented by the particular item?
- What do we need to pay attention to in the various contexts of our lives that might support us to recognise that we are contextual beings in a state of flux?
- Jane Brendgen is founder of Compassionate Cultures. She is an executive coach specialising in authentic leadership, adult development and therapeutic coaching. She is a mindfulness supervisor.