Possibilities Newsletter | Jan 2025

BambooBeing
Jan 31
4 min read

How do we thrive in ’25?

When I first met Lisa, she was dripping wet and glowering. I later learned that, as a tall, striking blonde with a theatre background, she’s used to flipping the energy in a room without even noticing. But when she boarded our pitching boat in the Bay of Venice, I’ve never seen a group go from excited chatter to awkward silence so quickly. A fierce and unexpected rainstorm had delayed us: and drenched her. Maybe she dropped the F bomb that first afternoon, I can’t remember, but I do recall how our artsy retreat was lit up by the expletives that dropped casually from her lips like smouldering cigarette butts. Needless to say, we became firm friends.

Last weekend she and I finally managed to have one of our long zoom catch ups. Lisa lives in LA and the previous week we’d exchanged anxious messages in a group Whatapp chat about the LA fires. I knew she’d evacuated but when we finally spoke she was thankfully home with the familiar bright blue wall of her study behind her. When I asked how she’d been in the early news of the fires, I was surprised to hear my statuesque, confident, friend tell me: "I was frozen".

If you're Enneagram-aware, Lisa identifies with the protective, resourceful and decisive Type 8. And if you don’t know your Enneagram from your elbow, well, just think of your favourite Avenger or the action hero you'd want by your side in a life-threatening crisis and you'll likely get the archetype. How then, as the fires grew closer to her beloved neighbourhood, had Lisa found herself stuck?

Fortunately, she has a longstanding friend, Sam, a journalist, author and filmmaker, who’d been tracking the path of the fires from his home on the East Coast. His whole career has been writing about dangerous occupations and in the course of it he's been a war correspondent and worked alongside others in life-risking jobs- including, firefighting. Listening to Lisa he realised she was torn between piling her son and dog into a car (leaving) and protecting her neighbourhood and neighbours (staying), which was keeping her stuck with her wheels spinning. He asked a great question:

“What if you just went on a road trip for a week?”

Rather than 'abandoning' the neighbourhood by evacuating, he helped her see that by taking an early trip, if an evacuation notice came while she was gone, she'd have done her neighbours a favour by not being part of the bottleneck. He also helped with guidelines: “take one hour and one bag to go around the house choosing what you want to take”.

She took that road trip with her son to northern California, dropped him back at college there then visited with friends for a few days. When she returned to LA she was newly resourced with gallons of drinking water and some air purifiers. As we spoke, she was already planning how to offer her spare room to those who had lost homes and figure out how best to serve the recovery efforts.

Getting unstuck

I asked Lisa whether I could share her story because it was the perfect illustration of what we'd been exploring this month in our programme, "Leading with a Coaching Approach”. The programme is for anyone who wants to be like Sam and help others who are feeling ‘stuck’ to take their next step forward. Even though he's an expert in dealing with fire and life-threatening risk, Sam didn't just pile in with his best advice: he listened to what was important for Lisa and the inner conflict she was feeling. Instead of waving away her concerns ("save yourself! forget the neighbourhood!") he helped her reframe her relationship with the question of whether to stay or go, using his experience and expertise to ask well-informed questions that helped Lisa figure out her next best steps.

Systems, scenario planning and strategy are only as good as our capability to engage them at the crucial moments. Organisations may try to paint a picture of a ‘burning platform' to scare us to jump into changes we may need to make. But, like burning neighbourhoods or burning planets, this may instil fear and inner turmoil more than motivation. The higher the stakes, the more we care about outcomes...and the more fear we may have, so the more stuck we may become.

Possibility of the month

If you are reading this as a friend of Bamboo Being you are likely someone who has experienced coaching through our work, or attended one of our programmes built around a coaching approach. At the heart of our work is the faith that when we help each other to get unstuck and respond more skilfully to life from our deeper selves, the whole world is enriched by each of our unique contributions. And boy does it feels like the world could do with all of that from all of us right now.

At the end of our conversation, Lisa's energy for rebuilding her neighbourhood glowed from within her. By taking steps to contribute to what mattered, she was energising herself, rather than spiralling into despondency about what had been lost.

When life gives us lemons, sure, we can make lemonade. But when life gives us emergencies: we need our deeper, resourceful and creative selves to emerge and help us keep moving. When others take the time to listen to and understand us at deeper levels, we also get to hear ourselves more clearly.

In “The Listening Path”, author and creativity doyenne, Julia Cameron, offers a series of tools for listening more deeply. Here is one of her exercises for finding- and being- the sort of 'listening friend' that can help others get unstuck. May we all be blessed with such friends.