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OPINION: REFLECTIONS – A CRISIS OF PERCEPTION

by | May 7, 2024 | Articles, Opinion, Reflections

We are living through a critical time for humanity. As coaches we must find an active role to help our clients and ourselves challenge existing world views

Jane Brendgen

 

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honours the servant and has forgotten the gift”  (Einstein, as cited in Kasanoff, 2017)

 

On 6 March I was privileged to give a talk on Dialogue at Coaching at Work’s Climate Coaching Action Day half-day conference, Creating Ripples in the System. 

This gave me the opportunity to consolidate some tentative new thinking in relation to framing dialogue in the broader context of global systems breakdown. 

The central question I was holding was one that I’ve frequently visited: what we might as coaches do to take more of an active role in contributing to systemic change? 

I feel moved to explore this further in this reflective piece. 

Ours is a critical time in the history of humanity. When we look at what’s happening around us through a systemic lens we see the symptoms of the reality of radical change everywhere – it’s in our economic, monetary, energy, biosphere, climate, food and societal systems. 

Last year I attended Jeremy Lent’s 10-week programme based on his best-selling book, The Web of Meaning. This was revelatory. It catalysed an expansion in my meaning-making capacities, deepening my ability to see through a systems lens. It also supported a transitioning, from an ego-centric to more of an eco-centric perspective on things.  

During this time, I encountered the Deep Adaptation work of Jem Bendell, emeritus professor of sustainability leadership at the University of Cumbria in the UK. His clear voice emerged in the field with the seminal paper, Deep Adaptation: A map for Navigating Climate Tragedy (Bendell, 2018), which had been downloaded more than a million times.  

These thought leaders appear to have different points of view. Bendell believes we have already passed the point of no return, that collapse is now inevitable and that our response needs to be that of unprecedented adaptation. In contrast, Lent believes in the regenerative powers of nature, that systems can transform through collective participation and that an emergent set of ecological values can steer humanity away from the cliff edge into a sustainable future. He calls this approach, deep transformation.

This brings me to my growing understanding that perhaps humankind is experiencing a crisis of perception. One of the primary underlying causes of the chaos in the world as we know it today can be traced back to Descartes (1596-1650) who is purported to have said: “I think, therefore I am”. 

In alignment with the ancient Greeks’ perspective, Descartes saw the human being as composed of an eternal soul and a mortal body in conflict with each other. This split view of humans became dominant in western cultures and has led to the over-reliance on our conditioned left-brain linear conceptual processes of reasoning and rationality where values such as domination and competition are the norm. Through this lens Nature is viewed as a machine with resources to be extracted and exploited.

Ian McGilchrist, psychiatrist, neuroscientist and author of the best-selling book, The Master and his Emissary: The divided brain and the making of the Western World  (McGilchrist, 2012) gave a lecture to the Royal Society of Arts where he offered a more nuanced description of the respective functions of the hemispheres: “The world of the left hemisphere is dependent on denotative language and abstraction. It yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, and general in nature but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world but in the nature of things never fully graspable, never perfectly known.” (Slavin, 2020). 

McGilchrist suggests that for a period of time a balance was struck between the hemispheres and that we made sense of the world by harnessing each side equally. It is his conviction that we’re now living as though we’re ‘right-hemisphere damaged’. 

Aligned with this way of thinking, I recently came across Nicholas Janni’s book, Leader as Healer: A new paradigm for 21st century leadership, which received the Business Book of the year award in 2023. In this book, Janni makes a call to break from the chronically imbalanced ways of thinking and functioning that have become the norm, where doing eclipses being and hyper-rational, analytical thinking relegates feeling, sensing, intuiting and the transpersonal to the outer fringes of life. 

As humans, it’s natural for us to rely on what we know, to draw on past experiences and to apply the same thinking to the issues and challenges we’re currently faced with. Herein lies an important consideration: we cannot solve problems with the same mindsets that created them. 

It’s clear that our word view is out of date. As a species we’re in urgent need of an upgrade. We need a radical shift in thinking and perceiving. 

This is the moment where we need to re-establish a democracy of consciousness, bringing the right and left hemispheres back into a harmonious relationship. We need to harmonise our conceptual consciousness with the animate mammalian intelligence of our right brain – the vivid, concrete, sensory experiences of our physical bodies, our heartfulness and our wisdom which connects us to ourselves, our fellow human beings and to Nature, to all of life. And then, to act boldly for inner and outer change from this whole-self intelligence. 

This is where I see the potential of generative dialogue, a powerful form of conversation that can create the conditions to support the integration of the two aspects of our human cognition, leading to a shift of perception. It may be exactly what is needed in this moment in our evolution as a human species. 

This brings the beauty of both Bendell and Lent’s influential thinking into one harmonious whole. In adapting, perhaps we can support each other to turn and open our hearts to the grief, fear and despair that comes with the clear-seeing and acceptance of reality as it is now and “do what we can, to slow the change, to reduce the harm, to save what we can, to invite us back to sanity and love” (Bendell, 2019). 

In transforming, it may be possible to collectively participate in shifting our consciousness where, instead of seeing a tree as a green thing that stands in the way, an inert heap of resources to be exploited, we’re moved to tears as we perceive the tree as a living web of inseparable connections and relationships, the complexity of which evokes awe. 

Conversation is the smallest unit of change. In the holding space of dialogue, we’re invited to let go of our habitual ways of thinking, speaking and listening and enter into a liminal space where love and creativity reside. 

Here, we’re able to experience emotional connections that go beyond superficial interactions. We feel truly seen, felt, heard and understood. This is the resonant gateway into a collective intelligence that is far greater than the sum of its parts, where, as a unified whole, we can challenge our existing worldviews and potentially expand our thinking through shared meaning-making, discovery and transformation. 

With a new perceptual lens in place, we have a greater chance of meeting myriad wicked global problems with the skill, heart and wisdom needed for deep innovation – the sort of innovation that may potentiate evolutionary leaps on multiple levels.

I leave you with two questions for reflection: 

  • How might you respond to your clients from an integrated foundation, where you bring your cognitive, emotional and embodied ‘selves’ into your coaching? 
  • How might you support your clients to recognise the likelihood of their dependency on left-brain processes and encourage them to become curious about fostering a democracy of consciousness? 

 

 

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