I QUIT! Naming toxicity in non-profit work environments. | Andi Grace. Last week I quit my nonprofit job. I’ve decided to step away from nonprofit work in favour of focusing on homesteading, reading tarot cards online and writing. And I’ve decided this will be the last nonprofit I work for. Maybe I will take contract work here and there, but it won’t be my main income source anymore. In some ways this was an unexpected change. I was planning to stay with this job for another year or two – to gradually work my way out of the position and into self-employment. Now I know. Since I moved away from the city my work has actually been one of the most stable forces in my life. So, you might ask, how can I have both gratitude for the people I worked with and see my old job as soul sucking?
I have worked in nonprofits for about 10 years. I have always favoured working in nonprofits because I can’t see myself doing work that doesn’t feel like it is, at least in some way, undermining and addressing the brokenness that is our current system. Here’s why. Like this: Mutiny of the Soul. A Croatian translation of this article can be found here, and a Finnish version here. Depression, anxiety, and fatigue are an essential part of a process of metamorphosis that is unfolding on the planet today, and highly significant for the light they shed on the transition from an old world to a new. When a growing fatigue or depression becomes serious, and we get a diagnosis of Epstein-Barr or Chronic Fatigue Syndrome or hypothyroid or low serotonin, we typically feel relief and alarm.
Alarm: something is wrong with me. Relief: at least I know I’m not imagining things; now that I have a diagnosis, I can be cured, and life can go back to normal. But of course, a cure for these conditions is elusive. The notion of a cure starts with the question, “What has gone wrong?” The answer is staring us in the face. What if there is something so fundamentally wrong with the world, the lives, and the way of being offered us, that withdrawal is the only sane response? So, the soul rebels. Collaboration is not “soft” | quantum shifting. I am occasionally left a little baffled by some of the stuff I read about digital social tools. In a lot of what I read and hear, there is no lack of intelligent analysis about social tools and their potential usefulness, however I do think that there is a huge dimension that is just absent.
That is the “social” bit. I know, I know…. I only bring my understanding of what it means for human beings to be social from my own trajectory in life. Sadly (or maybe not) in an increasingly technological world, that trajectory has not had a huge technological dimension to it. I happily use digital social tools regularly and have learnt how they can assist me to connect and collaborate with others.
I also sometimes struggle with having to learn how to interface with the machine, often frustrated at why it doesn’t interface with me, but that’s another conversation. In other words, as far as I’m concerned, the “state of social” in 2015 is as follows. How do we get to the beginning of this? Getting Back to the Body: Leadership Lessons on Power from the Martial Arts and Somatic Tradition. Getting Back to the Body: Leadership Lessons on Power from the Martial Arts and Somatic Tradition John Tuite Why the Body Matters to Leadership Some twenty plus years ago when I began training as a secondary school teacher, I had a few run-ins with a difficult class or two.
There is a particularly sharp anguish that one experiences when a classroom of teenagers disintegrates beneath your hands. But it does compel a healthy desire to study good teachers handling challenging situations or tricky transitions in class. “Okay, that’s how you do it! That’s what you say!” That’s because teaching (and leadership of all kinds) is an embodied skill.
Later when I was in school leadership, I was responsible for pupil behaviour and the inclusion of challenging children. Of course, sometimes in a school, like in any other organisation, there are whole days or weeks that feel like that archetypal discordant Friday afternoon. Studying Contraction and Possibility Here is the point. Recognizing our Patterns. Rebuilding my Life OS. Getting Back to the Body: Leadership Lessons on Power from the Martial Arts and Somatic Tradition. 5 Steps for Being Present. The other night I was discussing the "how to" of being present with a friend of mine. I fell back on the old Zen standby, "Chop wood, carry water. " Her 13-year-old daughter, who was sitting with us, chimed in with the incisive understanding of delicate concepts that belongs only to a child, "So, don't chop water when you should be carrying wood.
" Exactly right. Contrary to popular belief, human beings cannot multitask. What we are capable of is handling a number of serial tasks in rapid succession, or mixing automatic tasks with those that are not so automatic. So, how do we stay present? Rehearsing - and that's all we're doing is rehearsing -- the past is problematic because it's something that can't be changed. Anticipating the future is also problematic - even futile -- because, no matter how much we'd like to convince ourselves otherwise, we can't really control the direction in which things will go. What are you doing right now? Not being present is easy. . © 2011 Michael J. Transformative Learning.