Today I want to talk a little bit about collective collaboration and collective leadership because obviously as we see also throughout the summit, collective trauma is something really big and we are dealing with something that’s systemic that concerns everybody on this planet, that is a large topic and there’s a lot of retraumatization happening while we are going through the summit. So this might be disheartening and say, how could we ever deal with all of that pain, all of the trauma, intergenerational trauma? It seems like undoable at first. And of course we have to honor that we don’t want to normalize, which often happens, we don’t want to normalize trauma, and by that to suppress it and make it unconscious.
So we want to begin to relate to what we or other people share and give it back its meaning. Let it breathe again and say, yes, we have to make space for each other. We have to hold spaces where the deep meaning and also the deep pain of what happened in the past in our life or our ancestors’ lives or society’s lives, needs to be able to breathe again, to be reflected on, adjusted, and integrated. And so it’s very important because when we think, “What can I do in the face of this giant iceberg?” Then of course, I just feel frozen, overwhelmed that I don’t really know what to do. But it’s also not the point.
I think for us, it’s important that we contemplate, what’s my contribution? If I say I am a musician in an orchestra, I don’t have to play all the instruments within that orchestra. That’s not my job. I’m a violinist, a piano, or a saxophonist. That’s my job, but I need to play my instruments so that other people can fully embrace their place in the orchestra. And I think as humanity, we are like an orchestra and we are playing music. It’s a symphony. And if I don’t overwhelm myself with the thinking or the assumption that I should be able to deal with all of that, but I will do my part and I trust that you will do yours, whatever is yours.
Whatever life gave you is skills, capacities, intelligence, motivation, creativity. I trust that you do yours and you can trust that I do mine. And together we play, which means your uniqueness, my uniqueness are both important because if you don’t play your instrument and I don’t play mine, we just create a mess and not music. But if every one of us plays the music that was given to us by life as intelligence and skills and capacities, then we take care of our share. And it’s kind of the collective consciousness.
Let’s imagine it as a collective shareholder company or organization. Every citizen, every person on this planet has a share. Some of us have more access to the power and the feeling of the share, and some of us have less access, but it doesn’t mean that we don’t have it and it doesn’t mean that it’s not as important as the other shares. We all have a role to play because it’s a collective human orchestra, and that collective human orchestra means, first of all, that I start to contemplate, look, exchange, share, find out, read, be inspired by other people to find out what’s actually mine to do. What do I want to contribute? How can I contribute to the collective healing movement?
The next step is that I surround myself with like-minded people, gather your tribe, find out who are the people that have similar intentions, similar motivations, want to go into a similar direction. Don’t try to do it with people that don’t want to do it. They don’t have to. We find people that resonate with us and we create our tribe, our tribe of impact. And then as a network, as a small ecosystem or a large ecosystem, we begin to have impact. We allow our agency to flow and see that’s the way how we can create collective impact. Nobody needs to do it alone. And even sometimes it’s detrimental. Trying to do it alone actually reduces what we can do.
We get our tribe, first we find out what’s ours to do, invite the people that resonate with it. We develop collective impact. Then of course, since many of us come out of an era of thousands of years of power over hierarchy. So hierarchy and authority is often connected to a limitation. Limiting my freedom is fear-based. That’s why we often have fear-based motivational systems. If you don’t do this, you lose your job, you get fired. Like autocratic systems, if you voice your opinion, you get put in jail. That’s not a very open space for us to be creative and to make creativity the fuel, so we use fear as the fuel to live our life. And in democracies, we’re already in the change process from power over structures to relation-based, competence-based structures, which doesn’t mean that there is no hierarchy at all, but that hierarchy or authority has a completely different meaning.
But if we come out of this kind of power over era, we often hear and we just hear the word, “authority,” or somebody has leadership, then we often hear limitation. When we hear authority, it’s often kind of a struggle versus when somebody holds a leadership position, that person is completely for us. It’s a complete support of our intelligence. That person wants the best for us. And so we carry still the wounds and the bruises of a long time of power over hierarchy, power over parenting, and we need to develop the relational skillsets in order to truly live in democracies. Because where we are hurt and still traumatized, we externalize our experience and like this will externalize our own agency, so we feel we have less agency than other people had. And so it’s a learning phase for humanity to really build democracies that are based on relational competence, that are based on relational data flow, and that are based on that I know where I can go to learn and receive, where I bow down to get learning as a blessing.
It’s very important. Imagine there’s a mountain and the water flows down the mountain. So if the water comes down the mountain, there are always people that I can learn from and there are always people that I can pass something on to. If I know when it’s time to learn and receive, if I know when it’s time to give, I’m actually part of flow. The water can flows for me. I don’t stop it here because I think there’s nothing for me to learn. I will do everything by myself. No. Why? If there are people that developed amazing skills, why wouldn’t I learn from them? It’s much faster. Their nervous system, their body, their skills can immediately resonate in me and awaken similar parts in my own intelligence that speeds up my learning. That’s amazing.
But if I am holding what I learned from myself, then I don’t pass it on, then the water gets stuck in my house, in my body. So knowing where to receive and knowing where to pass on creates flow. And if I’m in a flow, I’m in a constant learning process. I feel much more creative, other people support my creativity, and I support the creativity of other people. Other people support my intelligence, my purpose, and I support other people’s intelligence and purpose. And like this, we create a flourishing society, not because we’re all the same, not because we all have the same thing to do. No, because we honor the differences and can integrate them into wholeness. And so we detox our nervous systems and collective memories from power over to power with relational based, competence-based systems where data, human data or the data of life, not only human data, biosphere data, can flow very differently and much more intelligently. And the basic fuel of my motivation is creativity.
So from fear, we change the fuel to creativity, which means I’m actually changing from scarcity, fear-based systems, there’s always something that’s not enough. That’s scarcity, creativity is actually abundance. So when I fuel my life out of my creativity, I’m part of abundance. I feel more abundant to give to others, to the world, to a society, and so if more people do that and we support each other in creativity or innovation-based systems, we create more all the time. So the world’s actually growing bigger, and that’s collective leadership, that we can dance with each other, that we know when to step on the stage, when to get off the stage because somebody else should be there and they should take the place because they have more to offer right now in this way. They should be there.
And it’s not only based on skills, competence, and privilege, that’s based on listening to the organizing principle that allows us to move forward, step in, move back, go to the background and be part of that dance. And I think that dance is a result of us playing music together, and I think if we can inspire each other to play the music together and enjoy the music and see the benefit of that music, we create collective resourcing that helps us really to deal with the pain of hundreds and thousands of years of recurrent retraumatization, of the massive retraumatizations, like all kinds of wars and power over systems, and we become the resourcing that can really meet that. And together, we are an ecosystem of healing.
One more thing. It’s good to not forget. Everyone knows it when we hurt ourselves and cut ourselves, the body has the inherent ability to heal. The living system has self-healing mechanism, and healing collective trauma is enabling or working together with the self-healing mechanism of life. That’s important because it means, wow, life wants to heal itself. Life will create opportunities for us to heal. We don’t need to do it alone. We have each other and we have that powerful ally that we call self-healing mechanism. Look at nature, how fast nature can regenerate itself if it has the right environment for it. And we can be together the environment that enables the self-healing mechanisms to work better and better and better. And that’s very powerful.
So that’s why I think working together, creating a collective healing movement is the very thing that we need. And like this, we empower each other and we empower life to heal itself and to create a better future for the next generations to come.
