Tag: Psychological Safety

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Biohacking Community Emotional Work

Day 918 and My Attention Budget

I wrote about the realignment of attention budgets as social media experiences a walled garden fear response to artificial intelligence’s looming tsunami of low cost content.

I myself am going through an exercise of ruthless prioritization of my own focus and find. As in any portfolio, write downs are inevitable. It’s easier to write something down when it’s money. Investments of time, energy, social capital and presence are much harder to let go. A sunk cost never boils? A watched pot never catalyzes? Sometimes a group or a movement chooses to remain outside their power.

I have so much less capacity to be present than I’d like. Others may prefer to be distant and still shower up but I find I’m happier with boundaries that are firm and great remove. That means when I do show up you have my full and intimate attention. It’s only right.

You have to prune in order to blossom. One commitment I’m excited to see blossom is the exceptional work of Jonny Miller. He and I will be hosting a Cultivating Calm Workshop for founders and venture capitalists interested in how to apply nervous system regulation techniques to their startup journey.

August 10th at 11am MTN join myself & Jonny Miller for cultivating calm.

As more of us rise up the acceleration curve of artificial intelligence and must maintain our capacity to sense-make, this will help your mind and body function in a chaotic world.

I myself have taken Jonny’s Bootcamp, intend to be in the next cohort (my code JULIE gets you a discount), and I’ll be sponsoring a founder to attend the September cohort so consider this a chance to see if these tools are right for you. My revealed preferences tell you what you need to know.

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Emotional Work

Day 916 and Safe Spaces

Remember when safe spaces burst into a whole discourse thing? Maybe it was when the timelines got crazy around Harambe. I couldn’t pinpoint it but somehow “feelings aren’t facts” turned into a slur instead of commonly agreed upon consensus reality.

And now everyone is slinging insults to land points instead of finding a way to incorporate the duality of feelings and facts into civil society. Some trickster Demi-god is probably very pleased with his work. Maybe a goat or a Loki type.

There are many spaces that can feel unsafe depending on the context and the person. If I am aware that one of my choices provokes a strong response in another person, I may lay it aside for a minute so we can find common ground on choices and values we do share.

My sense of self is strong enough that I don’t have to hold every piece of myself tightly. I can empathize with someone I disagree with and find my way back to myself. Backbones and core beliefs are important.

I am finding myself in a number of situations right now where I wonder if I am too accommodating. My desire to empathize must meet the hard reality that is some people don’t feel safe empathizing with me.

Some of my reactions and feelings recently have left me feeling a bit abandoned and alienated. I am grieving for a lost matriarch in my family. And my grief manifested as a focused gratitude for finally seeing that I could live her lessons on my own every single day. And I have been living more joyfully because of it.

My reaction hasn’t been considered appropriate in some corners. I didn’t feel safe expressing my gratitude and focus and the happiness it brought me to have her thoughts in my head every day. And I realized then that not everyone will be able to feel safe with all your choices and decisions and emotions. Not every space can be safe for everyone.

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Emotional Work

Day 902 and The Singer Lasts A Season But The Song It Lasts Forever

One of the matriarchs in my life died this morning. I am devastated. Because, of course, you are devastated when you lose someone you love. To not know the pain of mortality is to not know your own humanity.

We spend so much of our lives in the art and literature of the human condition that we can sometimes forget we are actually living it out right now every single day.

Your own life is just as rich a tapestry of meaning anything Dostoyevsky ever wrote. Losing someone close to you who really lived their life occasionally gives you sparkling moments of crystalline clarity on what matters.

All of living is struggle. We find the boundaries of the world through trial and error. We find each other as we negotiate the rhythms of each other’s lives.

The old cunt had the balls to die on the summer solstice. She was extremely Swedish so on aesthetics grounds I feel happy about her moment of passing. Midsummer. What a witchy thing to do. I love it for her even as I am weeping.

The last thing she said to me was so poetic it almost makes me angry. She told me that she had repeated herself a lot across the years. I said I knew and I appreciated that she’d helped me learn the tunes by repeating the songs with me even as I stumbled to commit things to memory.

Her response? Now that you have sung the melody with me, you can sing it on your own. Which is a very beautiful good bye worthy of anything I’ve ever read in a book or seen on screen.

But also the fucking temerity of that woman to deliver folkloric wisdom on the way out. Our elders know a thing or two.

The singer lasts a season long, While the song, it lasts forever

Unknown (to me at least) folk song

May your solstice be as bright and true as mine. I will be trying to carry this tune on my own and if you like I’ll try to teach you to sing along with me. May we have a chorus of love songs on our longest day in the sun.

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Community Internet Culture

Day 901 and Self Regulation

I don’t know why I chose violence today, but apparently I dropped a chaos grenade onto my Twitter timeline. I hesitated, in extremely soft language, to ask if anyone has noticed that kids from conservative households seem have more pro-social behavior. I phrased it with a lot of ambiguity as I don’t know how I feel either.

Going to float a very controversial observation but anecdotally in my limited experience:
The children of my conservative friends are better behaved & more individuated & well socialized than the children of my liberal friends.
Anyone have takes on why this is the case?

Naturally when something pulls on a thread of social insecurity it will unravel quickly. I am a very gifted shitposter. I step on these third rails on purpose. I am not an activist for any cause so much as comfortable being uncomfortable. Alas I have already hit Godwin’s Law on the Tweet so for my own nervous system I’m done.

But I have noticed that as cultural pendulums swing, there is a distinct lack of appreciation for tolerance of other people’s constant dysfunction. Where we draw the line as to appropriate social behavior is a hugely contested space online. Much as it has ever been in literature and history. I hear Socrates got the death penalty for perverting the youth.

My point in all this is that we all benefit from having youth understand the world and their place in it. Our toddlers cannot be expected to have the fully formed rationality of a legal scholar.

Sometimes the answer is no because Mom or Dad said so. Not every social boundary is bad for us. A child throwing a tantrum is asking for you the adult to help them find the self regulation that their environment isn’t giving them. And it’s absolutely ok to be authoritative. It’s not the same thing as authoritarian.

The general consensus on the thread seems to be that multi-generational and multicultural spaces for consistent socialization combine well with firm boundaries. Knowing when certain behaviors are appropriate can often be a winning combination for learning to individuate into your own person. Feeling safe to be yourself looks different for everyone.

Now I’d read all of this mouthing off from me with a big heaping spoonful of that fucking libertarian-pirate-hippie-Silicon Valley-born-Rocky-Mountain raised salt. I don’t know what I’m doing. I’m just a very American kind of mutt.

I personally have found it helpful to be as accountable as I can be to myself while holding as much empathy for the experiences of other people as I can. I will disagree with you a lot. I’m ok with that because I have firm boundaries too. So don’t be an NPC ok? Let’s make civilization work together.

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Culture

Day 895 and Stop Being An NPC

I’ve got a theory that main character energy only bothers you if you are not the main character of your own life.

Which you might not be. Most of us are running around on programming we didn’t write, blithely unaware that we have accepted being a non-playable character in our own lives. We are acting like NPCs even though we aren’t. Fuck.

You don’t have to be an NPC. Life is actually shared consensus reality even if it has rules just like a game. The first step in making sure you aren’t an NPC is treating other humans like they are real people. Yes, cue the record scratch.

This is actually hard. It requires empathy. But it is very simple. It is just the golden rule. When you treat other humans as real players of the game of life, you will find quickly that they treat you as one too.

You need to be emotionally present with another person. It requires a couple minutes of empathy at most. I’d wager it’s like masturbation for men, you could pull it off in a minute flat if you had to.

But so few of us are bothering to show up for other people in any meaningful way anymore.

One of my favorite Twitter vibecamp folks, Critter, made the observation that it’s so rare to meet someone with agency on dating apps that it can cause some whiplash when you engage with “a live one” if you will excuse the pun.

I find this sad because it’s true. It’s rare to encounter people who are present in their own lives. People go through the motions of their lives because it’s the normal way to live. It just doesn’t have to be your reality if you don’t want it to be.

And it’s not an easy change to make for most of us. It’s actually confusing for internet natives to be reminded that there are people on the other end of the algorithm because so many of us simply aren’t acting like full humans anymore.

We are just running social programming and hoping it gets us the rewards we were promised. Gamification and financialization and other forms of nudging spreadsheet brain send us hustling for dopamine hits.

So how do you tell if someone isn’t just playing to their cultural programming script? Or framed another way, how do you stop acting like an NPC in your own life? And how do you find out if someone else is also looking to engage with you as a human with agency?

The biggest clue someone has agency is that they discuss their feelings and emotional reactions to you the person in front of them

They don’t cloak it in ideas & theory or art without connecting it to how it makes them feel in relation to you & your relationship with them

Julie Fredrickson on Empathy & Agency

I can’t believe I’m quoting myself but I summed it up reasonably well on Twitter in response to a mutual asking myself and Critter how you know if someone isn’t an NPC.

You show up in that moment with them and do not run any social scripts on them. You treat them like you’d like them to treat you.

You don’t try to control them with mirroring or other social techniques. If you are serious about being intimately in a moment with another person won’t use any technique. You will just be. It actually is vibes.

You will show up and ask them how they feel and will react honestly to their feelings. And yes sometimes those emotions may be unpalatable (anger, sadness, jealousy) but it’s the first crucial step in building trust with another person. And that’s how you stop being an NPC. Good luck!

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Emotional Work Startups

Day 865 and Permission To Invest In Yourself

I finished a five week nervous system mastery bootcamp last week. I felt like I was failing it for about three weeks as I resisted it’s lessons with excuses and rationalizations, right up until I realized the resistance was the lesson.

When I was a founder I came of age during the hustle porn years. Everything was about doing things faster and harder. Ideally both. And faster and harder was meant to produce “better” because “harder and faster is better!”

We got caught up in the tautology of the hustle. Move fast and break things practically meant we broke as many people as we did things. And I include myself as one of the broken people. It took time to recover.

Now I encourage founders in my own portfolio to prioritize their well being physically, emotionally, mentally and spiritually. If you aren’t putting yourself first your company will suffer. Trust me when I saw we both benefit from you investing in yourself.

But don’t make just about improving yourself. The point of this kind of work is to unfold yourself into the bigger, broader, most expansive version of yourself. Developing emotionally fluidity isn’t about optimizing for a local maxima, but rather about reaching for an even bigger global view. And we all see better returns on our investments with that kind of vantage point on life.

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Biohacking Emotional Work

Day 855 and Tissue Issues

I committed to a five week Nervous System Mastery Bootcamp about a month ago. My goal was to learn more about how I react physically and emotionally by better understanding my own nervous system.

I spent the first two weeks feeling overwhelmed by all the bits and pieces. I came in with more resistance and fear than I even realized, despite writing about how I was excited by what I might learn.

I’m still behind on the materials, but thankfully I’ve let go of some of my rationalizations for why. Being behind was resistance on my part.

Finding and loosing resistance ironically one is one of the reasons reason I even committed in the first place. So I can confidently say the course is working for me.

I’ve learned a lot about the interconnected glorious mess of my nervous system, my mind and my wider reactions to pain both physical and emotional.

Lisa Feldman Barret said: ‘Your body does not keep the score. Your brain keeps the score—your body is the scorecard…’ or put it another way — our issues are actually in our tissues.

The slow journey of accepting where I am in the moment will continue. I’ll be in the next cohort as well if you are interested use code JULIE.

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Travel

Day 843 and Panic Procrastination

I have to pack for a trip to Texas and I’ve spent my entire day panicking about it and not doing it. Mind you I’ve done nothing else of particular value while panicking. Except I suppose my daily health routines. The rest of the day has been me feeling ashamed and massively over texting in group chats to avoid packing. I just don’t want to do it.

I hate packing. I hate travel. None of it appeals to me. If you’d like to know why I’ve written about my most common recurring nightmare.

I never leave on the trip. The dream never lets me finish packing. I guess my unconscious hasn’t figured out how to proceed that it wasn’t the packing that scared me, it was leaving behind the life that I thought was safe. Maybe I’ll get there eventually. I don’t want to be stuck in a nightmare, packing up my life, being afraid of being dragged someplace I don’t want to go.

I’ve moved thirty eight times in my life and traveled constantly as a child (and still do as an adult) and I’ve never quite shaken how traumatic it still feels to my inner child who just wanted to stay in one place for more than a year or two. If I never had to travel again in my entire life I would honestly be happy.

With that thought I am going to go take some drugs, remind myself I am able to pause between my reaction and my action, and stop procrastinating on this packing. Maybe I’ll cry a little first.

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Emotional Work

Day 823 and Non Attachment

Have you ever read a piece of literature and seen a character described as “a man of great passions?” I feel like it used to be much more acceptable to discuss appetites and the grasping griping hand of man. Perhaps this mentality passed just as Bejamin Disraeli did, unto another era of fallen archetypes. Now we are civilized men with passions well in hand.

Man is only truly great when he acts from his passions.

Bejamin Disraeli

I was raised in a family that meditated. We went to ashrams. We had family vacations in silent retreat. We settled in Boulder where Naropa is as much a part of the institutional fabric of the town as your typical church.

Non-attachment was a concept that was familiar to me long before I felt I had any secure attachment style of my own. I’ve written about my recurring nightmare of packing for a trip or a move. Non-attachment may even be my style of attachment. I am fearful avoidant for anyone keeping score.

Being in chronic pain has been a gift for deepening my understanding of non-attachment. In order to survive pain, you remind yourself it will pass. But accepting that knowledge is a double edge sword. You accept that your joy and happiness is also passing. And you are offered a choice to grasp at them with mean jealously or to hold them as lightly as you would hold your agonies.

Non attachment isn’t just practiced on the negatives in your life. It’s an equal opportunity philosophy. The money you have. The things you own. The beauty you possess. All are fleeting. They are rare intangible things we must value as both priceless and worthless in equal measure.

I believe we can act in greatness in our passion, even if, or maybe especially if, we practice non attachment. I am both saved and damned. I am powerful and meek. I am a woman of great passions and I am capable of separating myself from them as reality dictates.

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Media

Day 813 and You

I took some of today off to watch television as I’ve been in a bit of an overwork tumult. I finished the 4th season of the psycho-sexual thriller You starring Penn Badgley.

I recommend the streaming series on Netflix (I’ve not read the books on which it is based) unabashedly to all women who have ever dated men seeking to save them and to men with mommy issues seeking salvation in broken women.

I may get a bit spoiler-y in this post so now might be the time to peel off if you don’t like knowing anything about a show though I promise to avoid big plot twists.

I was struck recently by an excellent Twitter thread from journalist and my favorite therapy poaster Heidi about how men are socialized to “never be the bad guy.” I felt it was particularly salient as I finished the newest season of You which hinges on the tricks ego plays on you to help you ignore your shadow.

Realizing that what you do and who you are are not the same thing but that we have responsibility for the consequences of our actions is kind of the whole enchilada of therapy. If you’ve ever worried you are a bad person or struggled with shame you recognize this.

You makes some clever stabs (pun intended) at dealing with the darkest manifestations of this by pairing women who need saving with a serial killer. Empire of skulls becomes a bit more than metaphor as it closes in on how wealth intersects with mommy and daddy issues and inter-generational trauma. I really do recommend it watching it.

In true “it’s hip to be square” American Pyscho style, it’s unclear how much we are meant to consider whether it’s possible to have “a good kill” as an intellectual exercise. What we do end up considering is that shadow integration work is invariably a dangerous Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde affair. And what kind of lies we are willing to tell is a function of our relative power as it intersects with a traumatic childhood.