What’s your role?

 

 

I’m Director and Fashion Lead for a consultancy that works to change global systems in order to achieve the Paris agreement and the UN Sustainable Development Goals. I work a lot on creating collective action and driving implementation in this crucial decade.

 

What was going on for you with your work that inspired you to join the programme?

 

I was feeling a mixture of anxiety around what we needed to achieve and the complexity and size of the challenge and that maybe I wasn’t 100% clear on whether I was doing the right thing, whether I was being an effective changemaker.

 

How were you feeling at the outset?

 

Wherever you look, you see red flags, so I was feeling an increasing sense of anxiety around where we’re at in the transition and overwhelmed with the amount of stuff we have to do and the high ambitions of what we're trying to achieve in terms of impact.. 

 

How are you feeling now?

 

I think there's two things that have changed for me, in what was actually a really short amount of time. One has been turning increasing anxiety into optimism because I have more tools in my toolbox to be really effective in my job.

 

And I’m convinced that the role that I'm playing is the one that aligns with my strengths and values and is really suited to the part I want to play.

 

Any examples of what's tangibly different for you?

 

I felt like the feeling of anxiety of feeling overwhelmed was taking up mental space, keeping me from my actual work, both in terms of content work but also engaging with people, influencing them, managing the team and so on. 

 

It’s freed up mental space for the things that contribute to my mission and goals directly.

 

I’m also better able to help my team. As an example, I have a team member who was really struggling. The understanding I gained about how we all, myself included, sabotage ourselves, meant I could step back and resolve it in a way that I wouldn’t have been able to otherwise.

 

What would you be feeling like if you hadn’t joined the programme?

 

I think I'd still feel quite fragmented and frenzied with every report reiterating how much faster nature is deteriorating than anticipated. I bet my anxiety would have spiralled out of control to some extent by now.

 

What's your biggest takeaway?

 

I’m seeing the future and also the here and now differently, with a more intuitive confidence and optimism.

 

It’s the foundational layer of so many other tools that are important to those working on climate change.

 

Any last thoughts? 

 

Trust me, you will take away and you will learn something really important to your personal journey, but also really, really concretely, pragmatically and tangibly useful in your day to day from day one.

 

I hope it reaches a lot of people. I’ve already told a lot of people about it. 

 

The combination of the structured but very experiential first weeks of the Positive Intelligence programme, combined with the training specific to our field of work with the individual coaching sessions, all came together in a way that was really very impactful.

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