Australia burns, Australians unite

Even if you don't read any further in this blog post, I urge you to please support the following worthwhile causes by clicking any/all of the three links below:

1) Red Cross 2009 Victorian Bushfire Fund

2) the Wildlife Victoria Bushfire Appeal or

3) the RSPCA Victoria Bushfire fund
to care for burned and injured animals

This year for Australia, February is the cruellest month. While extreme heat has assaulted the nation, storms and floodwaters have saturated tropical Queensland and parts of NSW. Most tragic and dramatic, however, have been the bushfires raging throughout the country.

The deadliest of those fires have been in the state of Victoria. The bushfire death toll (now at 200 people and still expected to climb) is felt most keenly because the areas worst hit have themselves been primarily small communities dotted across the countryside - many of which have been completely obliterated by the raging firestorms of the past weeks. Over 1800 homes were destroyed, leaving 7000 people homeless. As of this writing, many fires are still burning.

To give some idea of the savage nature of these firestorms: experts have calculated that the storms on February 9th (now simply called Australia's Darkest Day) reached a temperature of 1200 degrees. The areas burnt and energy released from the fires equalled 400 to 500 Hiroshima atomic bombs. Smoke from the fires was clearly visible from space.

This was, quite simply, unimaginable destructive force on a large scale and that incinerated everything and everyone in its path.

Witnesses have spoken of a deafening, howling wind noise like the sound of a dozen jet engines, of choking black smoke blotting the midday sun from the sky and flames that raced across the landscape at speeds in excess of 80 km/h. People trying belatedly to flee from the fire were caught and died in their cars. If this seems inconceivable, take a look at this first 20 seconds of this video to see how alarmingly quickly the river of flame tears through a field.

A wider tragedy

The human losses of this fire have been overwhelming, yet there is another story to be told as well. Regular readers of this blog know that tm consultancy has chosen to support animal-related charities in 2009 and so in relation to that commitment I also want to take a moment to consider how animals have been affected by this disaster.

Over a million acres of bushland has been burned (more than double the amount of Australia's next-worst fire disaster in 1983, dubbed "Ash Wednesday"). The toll in animal lives from this year's fires will be utterly catastrophic, with early estimates of at least a million animals killed in the fires.


Hope from the ashes

An unlikely mascot of hope has emerged from the aftermath, however, in the form of one of Australia's iconic critters: Sam the Koala.

Sam (now most often called Sammie, as Sam proved to be a girl Koala) first caught the imagination of the world when she was filmed drinking water from a volunteer firefighter.

Taken to a local animal shelter by volunteers, her burned paws were bandaged up and, in a happy twist, she found herself being cared for by Bob, one of the other koalas at the shelter.

From tragedy, love seems to have emerged as Sammie and Bob have become inseparable.

Their story is captured in video here and the plight of animals in general is reported here.

I think the reason this story has so quickly caught the imagination of people worldwide is because, on a small scale, Sammie and Bob represent how even overwhelming and deadly adversity can bring out the best in us. These little koalas have shown us that, in the end, we have to pull together and take care of each other.

Most of all, moments like this clearly illustrate one basic truth: what joins us is so much greater than what separates us. Australia is an extraordinary land, and this year it has faced extraordinary natural disasters. Australians have united to face these disasters with dignity, kindness, generosity and the good-natured "no worries" attitude that has captured the world's attention.


The Long Road Ahead

Still, Sammie and Bob are among the lucky ones to have survived. For them and for many other survivors, the fallout will be great, and it will be lasting. Please donate to the charities listed at the top of this blog using the links provided. As reported here and here, animals continue to need help and will do for some time because their natural homes have been wiped out.

I'll close with the following montage of images posted on YouTube in support of the RSPCA (also viewable here).
TM

Are you ready...for the UPturn?

A city broods in the dark...but the dawn will come again.

Greetings from Hong Kong, where, to be frank, things seem a bit grim. Here in the world's third-largest financial centre, banks are busily making cuts to staff and rolling back their recent expansion.

Speaking to one senior VP at a multinational bank here, the thing I noticed was that he seemed less concerned about the volatility of the markets than he was about the impending layoffs...and the rounds of political infighting and bloodletting that have intensified as a result.

A global economic shift is taking place, that is clear. There's nothing like large-scale uncertainty and financial instability to drive people straight into their limbic "lizard-brain" of emotional reactivity - a trend not discouraged by media outlets that seem to want to frighten, not inform. Even the business press is glutted with articles on "surviving the downturn" and "managing through a recession" and "leadership despite layoffs".

As people are driven into survival-based fight-flight-freeze responses, the practical results are: teams fall apart; bad behaviour becomes the norm; secrecy, infighting, politicking and point-scoring become the order of the day. Productivity - the very thing needed to pull a company through these times - plummets and it's every individual for him/herself.


Are you ready for the upturn?

At this point I want to suggest another point of view - being ready for the upturn.

To counter the divisive trends noted above and steer the ship toward calmer seas, it makes good business sense to get people out of their lizard-brain mode and find a way to get their rational minds back in the game.

To put it in a broader context, what's happening now in the economy was largely inevitable. Securitization, the separation of lender from risk, and other speculative and highly leveraged transactions had become unsustainable practices. We have lived through - and enjoyed - a long period financial success - and excess.

These financial practices have arguably been the logical outgrowth of a mentality and societal goals that are shaped by the ceaseless and senseless focus on profit at any cost. Not only are individuals and companies now paying the financial piper, the planet is suffering from our myopic mania for short-term gain.

On the long view, this correction of excesses may even be timely - otherwise as a species and a culture we'd have careened happily over the edge, setting in motion cascades of consequences that would doom the planet and ourselves.

As the pendulum swings back in the other direction, will it be a pleasant process? No - it has the potential to be a unpleasant as the other extreme was excessive. The process of creating balance and reintegrating a broader view, though difficult, is as necessary for society as it is helpful for individuals.

The long-term, rational policy suggests we get into the best possible position in our organizations and companies to be successful when the current period ends and things have shifted. The current climate (economic and environmental) won't last forever; we face an important turning-point.

At this stage there's great potential here for far-sighted companies to create the high-performance, humanistic and productive environments that will be needed to take us forward into the future.

These are not decisions you want to be making using your panicked limbic lizard-brain in knee-jerk mode, but rather your rational brain seeking signs of resilience and hope.

So although the night seems to be getting ever-darker, keep your eye on the brightest lights as they show a way through the darkness. The dawn will come again...
TM

What makes you stronger? Resilience & meaning-making

Traditional Western psychology suggests that the cause of people’s psychological problems lies in what happened to them in the past. According to this view, at some point early in each person’s childhood something “bad” happens (a trauma or an unfulfilled need). As a result, that person will spend the rest of his or her life repressing, compensating, avoiding or exhibiting any number of other problematic behaviour patterns based on reaction to that initial “bad” thing.

And so we get the simplistic and linear equation:

difficult childhood = problems as an adult

and the corollary:

adult with problems = adult must have had a difficult childhood.

Yet there are countless examples all over the world of people who have had terrible experiences as children – including those displaced by war, famine, poverty and other extreme situations – and yet they have managed to develop into well-adjusted and even happy people. Meanwhile, sadly, there are people who struggle with serious problems as adults who had relatively happy childhoods.

So the linear equation does not hold true – there seems to be something else at work here.


Resilience and meaning-making

Resilience describes the human being’s ability to survive, recover and persevere against various obstacles and threats.

Some people are made stronger rather than weaker by their past life experiences – how does this happen? Interestingly, much of it has to do with the story that you tell yourself about what happened.

Our brains are meaning-making machines. It’s a process that happens automatically and continually. What this means is that we constantly create narratives to make sense of our lives and the world.

The good news is that since we each write our own narrative or story about the world, it is entirely within our ability to change that narrative to create one that serves us better as we grow and develop through life.

You can create a narrative that promotes self-respect and hope without distorting the facts. This is a more comforting and optimistic view than the problem-focused approach most often used in traditional psychology – but is this just being a Pollyanna slapping a happy face on tragic situations?

No it’s not.


Was mich nicht umbringt, macht mich staerker

“What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.”
- Friedrich Nietzsche


In his excellent book It’s Never too late to have a Happy Childhood, Ben Furman cites research on how people recover from catastrophe and crisis which suggests the key factor in recovery is how people choose to make meaning of what happened.

After a bank robbery, for example, it is important that the staff has a chance to talk about what happened immediately and that everyone present during the robbery receives positive feedback. Everyone should be able to think that their reactions were meaningful, or at least understanding and normal in the circumstances. They should realize that each of them acted the best they could in that situation. [p52]

Taking this example to the wider context of how people make sense of childhood traumas and past problems in life, Furman continues:

The past is a story we can tell ourselves in many different ways. By paying attention to the methods that have helped us survive, we can start respecting ourselves and reminiscing about our difficult past with feelings of pride rather than regret. [p56]

You’re not “broken”

Admittedly, “bad” things do happen to people. The view offered in traditional Western psychology is that people are somehow “broken” or “defective” as a result and their life’s task is therefore to overcome past traumas.

What if it’s the case that people are capable of all things, but circumstances and “bad” events cause them to play to certain of their talents and abilities more than others? This is quite a different view, which suggests: people are not broken, they’re just not accessing everything that they were born capable of doing. So faced with life’s challenges, people develop “strong suits,” their default, habitual mode of behaviour - but there is absolutely nothing to suggest that they cannot develop their full potential and diversify across the full range of human abilities.

Viewed in this way, our past difficulties become a rich source of evidence for our own coping abilities and resilience in the face of adversity. We can rewrite our narrative to describe how the things that did not destroy us have in fact made us stronger and better able to withstand adversity. Furthermore, we can explore the full range of our talents and how they can help us to grow into well-adjusted and fully-functioning human beings.

We can come to view our past hardships as something of a gift. I heard a proverb once that is, I think, of Chinese origin:

One disease, long life; no disease, short life.

I take this to mean: if you never face adversity, you will be more likely to succumb to the first major problem you encounter; whereas, if you have been strengthened by the things that have challenged but not destroyed you, your resilience is much greater.

The thought I like best from Furman’s book is that everyone is due a certain amount of happiness in life. If you didn’t have that happiness in your childhood and early life, imagine how much more you can expect to find later in your life!

Wishing the world were other than it is gives you nothing more than a potent recipe for unhappiness...acting to make it what you want is a step toward happiness and satisfaction. So – get started on rewriting your narrative today!
TM