Deeply and Consciously and Compassionately Reconnecting with Our Humanity

The current pandemic is causing major disruptions to every aspect of our daily lives, causing people to feel differing degrees of discomfort, fear, and emotional pain. This is because people are neurologically wired to react to and move away from disruption and uncertainty, and become psychologically uncomfortable, anxious, confused, and conflicted.

This often results in people being disagreeable, argumentative, and adopting oppositional behaviours as a result of their mostly unconscious cognitive strategies or default patterns, which emerge under stress. 

People are naturally wired to  safely and largely avoid the feelings of anxiety, discomfort, tension, conflict, or confusion and will react through:
• Distorting: people will exaggerate and make the change process bigger, more radical, important, and dangerous that what it really is.
• Disconfirming: people will resist and ignore a different mental model or point of view because it does not confirm their core beliefs.
• Reassuring: people will seek assurance from others to validate or justify what they believe to be true.
• Re-evaluating: people will re-evaluate or change the importance of existing or new ideas and facts.

This creates an opportunity for us to deeply and consciously and compassionately reconnect with our collective humanity–by knowing how to skillfully transform this less useful emotional energy and unconscious set of habitual default patterns into the source of creative energy by:

• Compassionately working both with “what is” going on for the person, having the courage to detach from it and flow with it, essentially, cleansing our own minds of judgement and evaluation, as well as being empathic in enabling the client or the person to do the same.
• Having the courage to move them and others compassionately, tenaciously, and simultaneously towards “what could be” possible for them, in the context of an outcome or a goal, safely eliciting a crack or an opening for learning and positive change.

If we can’t be courageous and compassionate and develop the skillset to maximize differences, disagreements, and deviations, we will not create for the cracks and openings for creative ideas and innovative solutions to emerge to survive the COVID-19 crisis and thrive in VUCA times (times of volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity).

There is a massive opportunity to play a bigger, more co-creative, compassionate leadership and collaborative game that truly adds value to our humanity and to the collective whole through using this period of disruption to retrain and reskill talent and facilitate reinvention processes that maximize sustainable human and machine interactions and their impact in the emerging virtual and new post COVID-19 world.

Janet Sernack partners with individuals, teams, and organisations to help them adapt to adapt, innovate, and grow through disruption–where she specializes in the people side of innovation, culture consulting, leadership training, speaking, mentoring, and coaching.

ABOUT US: We believe in either disrupting or being disrupted, and we chose to disrupt. At the Disruptor League, we want to know you, surprise you and make it easy for you to be a disruptor, too. It’s not all talk; we are changing the world. Join us to see how. We will teach you to use your superpowers and unite with us to change the world. The Disruptor League offers a unique environment to develop, to practice, and to embed design and innovation into your life. You will connect with others who want to make a difference. Relationships will grow, and problems will be solved.