What is required of us now is to truly understand that change is the only constant.

Joanna Kerr, very nice to have you on the World Beyond Resilience Podcast.

Thank you for coming on board.

Joanna has been leading large complex social environmental change organizations for the last 25 years, and is currently the president and CEO of Make Way, a Canadian foundation and charity that builds partnerships to help nature and communities thrive to get together.

And Joanna, you have a lot more to say, I'm sure about what you've done in the past.

Do you wanna add anything to that?

Yes I am.

You're reaching me on the eve of my departure from Beloved Make Way a fantastic organization.

I'll be leaping out into the world starting a company called Nut Hatch Leadership, the way the planet intended to be providing coaching to young people and change makers and philanthropists were on the front line lines of systems change.

But prior to make way I.

LED Greenpeace Canada and prior to that I was the global CEO of Action Aid International, working across 50 countries.

I've had stints with Oxfam.

I led a large international Feminist Organization Network called the Association for Women's Rights in Development.

So I've had some really amazing gigs along the way with a lot of resilience required, so that's why this podcast feels particularly apt.

It's so, great to have you here and with that amazing CV and experience, I'm sure you will be a wonderful coach and mentor to all these aspiring young people But we wanna learn much more about you and your approach to resilience today and our first question really is to go way back to the beginning.

To understand from you, what is it in your background, in your childhood that perhaps formed your first impression of what resilience meant and what it meant in terms of your approach to the world.

You It's a

very, it's a very clear, very vivid memory.

My father, I was nine years old.

My father got a job in Tanzania, east Africa as a mining engineer, and he and my mother decided to move to Tanzania.

This would've been 77 and My older sisters didn't have a place to go to school in Tanzania, so they were going to go to England to do their schooling.

So it was this trip where my father had gone ahead to get things going, set up for my mother and I in Tanzania.

And my mother and I deposited my elder sisters at boarding school in England.

And we had to sew labels onto all of their clothes in the final days.

And it was just heartbreaking Tear felt goodbye.

'cause it was gonna be months and months before we would see all one another.

And then I.

Basically put my mother on the airplane as she was a kind of bedraggled mess as we flew from London to Doris Salam.

And she had, she'd been the one packing up the whole house and obviously depositing her, kids, and arriving in Tanzania.

To hand my, mother over to my father and him, receiving us and us putting my mom into the hotel bed after this long journey.

And then me just looking at my dad, it's okay we've, taken care of mom now Dad, show me Africa.

And for those several years that I was there as the only child with my two older sisters, it was very tough times.

The, there was a war on, with Uganda, the border was closed with, Kenya.

There were drastic food shortages.

There was cholera epidemics.

And so my mom and I had to figure out literally how to.

Put meals on the table and make clothes and navigate all the things around us from rats in the house to actually finding a place to live with my father, often on the road doing his work.

And honestly, those are the best.

Years of my childhood 'cause it was just so raw so, profoundly connected to nature and yeah, what it meant to be human at this time.

And it was also the time where I, learned about white privilege.

'cause even though we had nothing, we had no diplomatic status and we come from a, just a middle class background in Canada.

But I just knew that I had access to an international school with.

I had access to boiled water all of these things, but that was highly, formative years of building my own resilience, surviving and thriving in this part of the world.

How old were you then?

Just

so, yeah, it was like from 10 to 13 there I was doing all of that and,

already at 10, you were almost taking care of your mother as she Yeah, she remembers it very

vividly.

Very vividly.

Wow.

That I just had this the two of us were, a team trying to figure it out how to, how could we make desserts when there was no chocolate.

All the things that we managed to figure out with using bananas and cashews it was just really, it was quite fun.

Play this way of moving forward with a whole other environment and not the same resources and less resources than what you were used to.

Like an abrupt change.

Yeah.

Completely.

No television, all of a sudden all of my entertainment came through books.

And yeah, there was a drive-in movie theater that we'd go to, but it was just all the entertainment.

And what I got to, learn came through relationships with people and relationships to nature.

We were right on the Indian Ocean.

I was a 10 minute walk from that beach and yeah, that Ocean was my teacher and I.

It's incredible.

What's the

word that you would use to describe resilience as you experienced it back then?

It was a kind of a curious trust in Community, Yeah.

Community in the sense of you and your mother or community in the sense of, so who else was there with you?

It was anybody who's, who has to live through a hardship and there were hardships.

Honestly, when there were, when I say there were very few things in the stores, it's like scrawny little chickens, rice with little stones in them.

Someone would flash the car down to say a box of corn flakes has just fallen off the back back, of a ship.

Get there.

They're giving out one box per family, and we'd receive it and they'd be stale as can be.

But mom and I would figure out how to toast it and hey, have corn flakes.

So everybody supports everybody.

It was a international and Tanzanian community that we were part of.

So everyone is there to, to support each other in there was malaria, cholera, all sorts of tummy bugs.

There was violence around us.

The resilience comes from that.

Leaning into others.

It was a highly social time.

We'd have people over three or four times a week and you're always trading tips and, yeah how, to take care of one another.

And so I learned that from a very young age.

It sounds remarkable and it's defined part of my leadership.

I, would have to say in terms of the organizations that I've, that

Do you wanna say more about that?

'cause that was going to be, that was gonna be one of our questions, but I am just noticing that it sounds remarkably joyful despite the difficulty and the tears and the And suffering that that you have had leaving your sisters.

Yes.

I would say that part of my philosophy in life has been that change happens at the speed of trust and that I absolutely believe in the power of relationships.

And interdependency and understanding almost systems as completely interdependent.

And so much of that was joy filled in terms of hosting, creating spaces where people could come together.

Any of my close friends will tell you that around my dining room table.

You'll never escape a round of powerful questions.

Where we're asking something very meaningful about what someone is dealing with or whatever, what whatever it is that you're taking at this time.

So to lead organizations whereby the whole is greater than the sum of the parts and the relationality between.

Units, countries, themes, functions, it's all about the more everybody understands how all the different parts of the organization, from the partners to the funders, to the board, to the different regions.

And the more we interact, the more resilient we are.

That comes from nature's teachings to us.

You have a forest that's a one one monoculture crop, and it's hit by a fire.

It will go down and it will probably never regenerate, but a intact and biodiverse force that's hit by a fire will often survive the fire and, but will also regenerate very quickly.

So it's always been about this very profound concept of diversity as resilience, of interdependence of community.

And can I, yeah,

can I ask a quick question on that, because one of the things Angela and I were discussing before we started on this was the fact that there is a kind of narrative around the CEO of the organization being lonely at the top.

Have you experienced that in your roles as many CEOs or, because that's very different from the way you're talking right now.

So what's the difference between the CEO as lonely at the top and what you're describing?

It's not so much lonely.

It's a shit sandwich.

Because you've got the, external or the board accountabilities and then the staff accountabilities and the and the partners.

So it's, you're constantly having to hold the creative tensions between these multiple, sometimes contrasting demands.

And you will, always have parts of the organization that wanna pull it this way, and this is the right way, but there's a thousand paths forward.

So the, sometimes the lonely part of it is how do you continue to shine the light on the tensions and get people to get out of right or wrong thinking or, left or right thinking or national versus international or whatever, all the polarities that you can manage inside related to big organizations.

My department versus your department.

Yes, exactly.

But I always, I always had a community around me that fed me.

I have also had coaches to take some of these difficult polarity questions, creative tensions to, road test some of my own thinking.

I journal, i, and as the years have gone on I've, relied heavily on a meditation practice to, to ground and to become deeply connected to divine intelligence.

Cosmic energy source from the source.

It's not all up to me, right?

This is, I am merely a vehicle to, to, help folks make connections with others and to what is in their own heart and gut in terms of what's the, right thing, so not lonely sometimes at that pinch point of holding all the pieces together.

And I think that's.

Having to hold all that sometimes at the most important intersections I'm looking forward to stepping out of that.

What, would that be like when I'm not, the one ensuring that all those things are woven together and that there neural pathways exist between all of the different parts of the system.

And to, be hanging out much more in the canopy, as we'd say.

Angela, that's that's what I'm looking forward to.

It's, a lovely metaphor, isn't it, to talk about the role of the CEO is weaving things together rather than holding it all yeah.

By yourself,

yeah.

And it really is a, it's a metaphor because different types of CEOs, some will see their organizations as machines.

It's almost at the a kind of their own worldview.

And then other CEOs will actually see their organizations as living systems, which I would argue is a more realistic thing because it's filled with dynamic energy that is very much influenced by the ecosystem.

Climatic economic, political.

And so if you really understand organizations as living systems, then it, only makes sense for the CEO to see themselves as the gardener.

You know that where you're fertilizing, making sure there's light you might be letting certain parts of the organization go fallow or here we are giving greater attention to, but understanding that these gardens are pollinating different parts together.

But if you see the organization as a machine, where it's, everything has to be tuned up and it's performance based, and I'm at the top to make sure that I'm like chief mechanic or driver of this machine.

Then it's a very different way of worldview, way of seeing it.

And then there are those that would see an organization like a family.

And where there's like the head of the family, and so there's like u, those are unions, those are almost academic institutions, military institutions where it's a very hierarchical thing.

Again, at the top it's the responsibility and that's where expert leadership is more perceived to be, like that.

So it is an evolution of understanding of how organizations work and.

You're less lonely in the garden than you are driving the machine, or the, patriarch at the, as the head of the family.

Part of the reason for us doing this podcast is because we've noticed that resilience, the way it's defined, is very much tied to this industrial worldview, this mechanistic worldview.

How do you see the different definitions of resilience changing given the different worldviews yourself?

I, In thinking about this, conversation with you all there's, a, before and an after in my life as well.

So I've told you about my childhood, but 20 years ago, I.

My father died very, tragically from suicide and we didn't see it coming.

And he was a close friend.

He was my rock.

He was very involved in my work.

And for that whole year after, if you had tried to tell me that the world was flat, I could.

I could buy it 'cause everything that I knew to be true was completely turned upside down.

The only silver lining of his death is that I am so much more of a resilient human and leader because I survived the greatest heartbreak that I could possibly imagine.

And it was a, very traumatic experience in our family and it took years to, to process it the, PTSD from it while work, while running a big organization at the same time, and I share this story, I've shared it in other places, but I share this story as well is, What is required of us now is to truly understand that change is the only constant.

And so my example was so disruptive, was so shocking, was so unbalancing it was so heartbreaking.

In, in, in every way.

And then to be able to witness and, benefit from the strength of community to be able to have joy again from that after that, which didn't seem possible in that first year.

And so I think.

Right now what's happening, economically, socially, politically, and climatically or ecologically, is creating small T traumas all the time with people, and the more therefore, we build the muscles after these to say, oh.

Things aren't linear.

We were thought, we always thought that things would just keep getting better, or the moral arc would always bend towards justice.

Oh wait, we're going backwards on this.

This looks super bleak.

This tragedy has happened here, and yet people continue to show up with hope.

With active hope, with joy, with with the ability to, use that experience in a way to learn from it, grow from it, and put actually love back into the system as a result of it.

So that is what I see, Angela, is that what this time offers is to be using.

The small T traumas or some of the big T traumas to actually build very new muscles.

And, for those of us who, who work with, lots of folks who haven't had yet to deal with something very, painful and very traumatic, that we can build the muscles together because the capacity for the human spirit.

To heal or, include and transcend out of trauma and pain into something that is so transformative and so beautiful.

That is, the calling now.

And I, I believe all the crises and all the shit that's going on there is gonna be a major shift in consciousness.

'cause people are going to wake up from.

The material consumerist a sleepness of just, I just need to get my beach holiday in and my my Louis Vuitton and all the things.

But, oh, there's something more to this.

And part of that, this is about community and, what it means to be alive at this time.

Sounds

I really, get you, and this is the conversation we, we have.

And to add to what you've said, it, it's time to let go of the old narratives that we that we get validation from the self made doing it, on our own.

That no longer be this criteria for being the right person.

But really the fact that we can actually do it together and then a new criteria for true open-heartedness.

Yeah.

You've spoken about heartbreak is I think there's so many out there that won't let their hearts break.

Yeah they'll hold it as tight as possible and then they will suffer.

I'm noticing my own jaw like, go really tight there.

Or they'll, grit teeth and force and without any judgment.

I think we have to let go of this.

I.

Paradigm.

There's all this way of thinking, this worldview that I just have to, what is it?

Keep a calm and carry on, stiff up a lip just soldier on Yeah.

That, true resilience from what you're saying sounds like to be open, to let yourself be cracked open and Yeah..

I, wanna add to that you've described two really disruptive and potentially in one case, potentially traumatic.

The other case, quite traumatic experiences.

And how those experiences.

Forced you to work with the community and to open your heart up to being in a community.

And I personally have experienced being in a war zone where it's a similar thing.

You're under such pressure that all of a sudden you, you become best friends with all the people around you, and it, they're really important to you.

And your heart, like you said, is open.

You talk about the most important things.

And, my question to you is with all these small t traumas.

That are going on.

There is a push, there is a feeling that people have to move more into community, but I'm wondering whether you think that people know how to do that anymore and when they're not forced in the way that you were to do it.

How, do you think people can go down that path right now?

I think that's part of the.

Silver lining or the gift of these really hard times.

Here we are.

I'm calling in from a country.

That's called Canada who, where there's a man south of the border that is challenging our sovereignty.

And what we're witnessing is all of a sudden this groundswell of community organizing to say, what did, what does it mean?

What is it that we cannot lose?

And.

People fight for what they love, right?

Whether it's your family, whether it's your values, whether it's your your, favorite forest that you walk in, whether it's your, so your sovereignty.

And so the more those.

Things become threatened by any of those forces.

Economic, political, social, ecological.

People will be forced to get off of their phones and step out of their homes and get into wait a minute, I don't wanna lose this.

And they'll be looking for many of the folks that are out there to say, what can I do?

What can I do?

And I must be having conversations three times a week.

What can I do?

And I say, find your organizing home.

Start as local as you can, whether it's the conversations that you're having at your dinner table with your book club, with your.

Choir that you're part of your paint class, your dog walker group.

Get out there and talk to strangers and find out what they are thinking about.

And that is piece by piece.

The way that we start building, weaving these communities around the things that we need to protect and.

Save the things that we love and also build the new, the things that we need to be building the new for.

And so it's that.

It's when I see more and more people feeling threatened, they're coming out of the woodwork.

They're waking up.

And the expression in Canada right now is elbows up.

It's a hockey expression, but elbows up.

And my mom said, I want an elbows up T-shirt.

So I just got her an elbows up t-shirt.

This 87-year-old woman, she's marching around in her condo and it says, don't mistake kindness for weakness.

And so here we are in this moment to protect the things that we love.

And that we certainly don't want the man below the border to take away from us.

You have such faith

in organizing and community.

It's the only thing that's ever worked,

but there's joy in it too.

I hear the joy in it.

The joy of connecting with people and the, excitement and the potential and the life.

I wonder whether people feel that.

Do people feel.

Feel that or, understand the, their own capacity and their capacity of join, joining in with people to

I'm fascinated with Denmark.

And so in my mini sabbatical last summer my partner and I spent three weeks in Denmark.

'cause they get all, they win all the the happiness index.

Like why is it the happiest?

And one of the reasons it's the happiest country in the world is 'cause every Denmark is part of these clubs.

They have all these clubs.

The club so they're these social networks are essential.

And as social media has contradictory ironically created more loneliness than ever, we actually need to get people back into social life again.

Join a club, create a club.

Talk to strangers.

These are the things in which we're going to build the future that we all dream about.

And it, takes courage, but yet what you get back from it is tenfold.

Because you now it's not all up to You If I know all my neighbors and I have all of their phone numbers, and if something should happen that I can reach out to them, and I'm not alone in any of this.

And you know that the, day that I got the phone call about my father, I happened to be on the other side of the planet in Thailand, about to put on a conference for 2000 feminists that I'd been organizing for two years.

And it was literally the day before.

And, my phone had been ringing off the hook and, so I got the news and then I had to make the decision, obviously, to leave my colleagues and to head back to Canada.

But I actually happened to be there with some of my closest friends and two of whom had lost parents to also very, tragic circumstances and.

I grabbed them both and I said to them, I think I'm gonna lose myself.

And they said, no, you're not.

You're gonna be fine.

You're gonna be fine.

And it was to, have somebody bear witness who knew me, who'd experienced such terrible trauma to know.

That what comes after is gonna be hard, but you're not going to lose yourself.

You will, come back.

In fact, you'll come back stronger.

And so it is the way in which we can bear witness to one another at different points in our lives.

To fight for what we love and to see one another that is what is possible at this time and going forward.

It's the silver lining of these terrible times.

It also sounds like the deep rich soil of the new growth of these terrible times through them.

Exactly.

Yeah.

You know what I hear as well, it's more from your first example.

Scarcity creates abundance in the sense that you you've lost things that you needed or thought you needed, and all of a sudden it allows you to.

Go in a different direction that allows you to connect with people in a different way.

It allows you to do things in a different way that is even richer perhaps, than what you had before.

Yes, I would agree with that.

And it's, we are brainwashed in our societies with this false sense of security, that security comes from the right eye cream.

The right locks on your door.

The deluxe like when you rent a car, how many times are they saying you need this insurance and this insurance, Like we are bombarded by marketing messages as to what will make you a better, more secure person.

But really our security and our sense of self comes from something that is far more innate, far more intuitive, and far more connected to other nature.

And once you wake up to our deep, profound connection that we are, not responsible.

For holding the whole that we are all interconnected.

That security is very, liberating.

And so once you see it in, in those organic terms as opposed to something that is the grand material things I've taken on a quite a large mortgage later on in my career and because I, want to, I I wanna live generously and I want people to be able to come here and stay here in this, house.

But.

My partner and I have said, and if we have to sell it, if we have to rent it out, it's fine.

This is not our sense of security, our sense of security, it comes from our relationships.

And, how, best we show up for one another in these very volatile times.

I can add to what you said.

I lost my house to fire when my three children were small.

I remember we were actually on holiday in another country when it happened, so we didn't, we weren't present to the fear and the trauma that would've yeah generated had we been there.

But I still remember the conversation I had and with my husband at the time when he went, you don't understand, all of my life was in that house.

And I went no, All of your life is here.

Here with yourself and us.

And it wasn't even trying to be positive.

It was just life is where you are in that moment and the things are gone.

Life is where we are.

And I can really, relate to that.

The, being able to navigate uncertainty is knowing where, the life is and in the connection.

We share that.

My house burnt down in 1996 too, and I lost everything.

That's right.

And just, and I was on vacation as well, and so I had I had the suitcase of things, and so all the photos the grandmother's quilts, the beautiful the pieces of jewelry and all, those things.

But no we're, still here.

We are still here.

And the way in which the community showed up for us and threw us, like these incredible parties and the Yeah.

Hand-me-downs that we were given.

Just some hilarious pieces of clothing that I wore for years.

Yeah.

Because it was just all part of the kind, like the, fire sale and and then I went through an end of a, relationship where also I lost almost all my possessions one more time again.

And so it's, I've had to learn to not have much, I have this expression called Poof.

Gone.

Something that you know, something that I might have liked it's and I lost it.

It's oh, poof.

Gone.

Okay, there you go.

So not, to have that attachment to, these material things, but at the same time to to be a caretaker to, take care of them.

And so when I do see people finding their security from material things, it's, I appreciate it.

I understand it, but.

We're gonna see a hell of a lot more tornadoes and floods and all sorts of things.

And so if that is your source of happiness you gotta learn how to let go pretty soon, honey.

And even the source of ground, I think if that's the recognizing that

Yeah,

Everything changes, we're gonna learn very soon that nothing is permanent.

And that source that you were speaking of.

Maybe we can come back to that, your personal practices and how they relate to community as well, that they're not separate.

The reason I'm speaking about this is because often the definition of resilience has been built on such an individual model, and yet the truth is what you are saying.

It's, all in community.

We're we're nothing without each other.

And there's a certain amount of practices that we can have or that, we can continue that whatever happens in times of loss, in times of abundance that we can always connect with.

And I think I heard you say before that your personal practices also connect you to something greater.

It's not just an individual thing

Yeah.

It was probably the.

The hardest leadership transition that I had to make was separating myself from the projections that were on me as a CEO.

Tell us what to do.

It's all up to you.

All of that.

I, was running a very large organization in my early forties.

I I was relatively young and 2,800 staff and there was a crisis every week.

And it's in the quiet moments I would, have a lot of, oh shit, you know what to do.

And it was really then that I had to keep working on, this is not up to me.

I need to source from the source.

What can I let go of?

What can I delegate?

How do I build collective leadership tables?

How can I, when people say what tell us what to do, Joanna.

It's I don't know.

What do you think we should do?

You know where, you have to be?

Enough of a vulnerable leader to, to be able to step in to say, I don't have the answer any more than you do, so let's figure this out together.

And so the practice had to be I'm a very visual person.

It was often meditating.

Just focusing on all the roots that my that my body had into, the earth.

But because I was often traveling and having to move a lot of things forward it was the, swan ilka swan on the river just all of a sudden when you're on the.

River Bank the swan is very gangly and awkward and can't move very much, very smoothly.

But the minute she slides into the river is now carrying her and she can travel with such ease.

And so I would just constantly visualize about the river and how it's carrying me with such ease, and we're bringing along all the other.

All the other life forms.

It took a very, long time to probably several years of actually embodying that.

I could imagine it, but before I could embody it that was a lot of heavy, not heavy, but much more focused practice to really embody that source from the source.

We share similar practices, Joanna, if you had something to say to other leaders, and of course close to our hearts, other women leaders who are dealing with leadership in a whole different way in, in the world right now what.

I'm, gonna say advice 'cause I can't come up with a better word.

But, so what advice would you give them to, to build source within themselves because it is a practice.

So what would, you say to them that would help them get into the flow of that river and, let themselves be carried?

It's, just carving out as much time as feasible to be in silence.

To open up whatever way they need to do to be able to open up communication pathways between their minds and their parts and their guts, their intuition.

And people have different ways of going about it, but too much of what is expected of leaders has to come from something that's very cognitive from the mind.

But the more quiet you can create to actually source the intelligence or the answers from the heart and the gut, that and that presencing that you do that quiet, the more you can do that with the appreciation that you're not alone in this, you know that there are.

There, the air that you're breathing that was created by the trees that are out there, you know the flowers that have brought you some joy and a sense of beauty around you, all the ways in which the earth and all the other species are giving to you.

Rely on that, but find the space and the quiet to connect to heart and gut.

That is the path for good leadership, and you basically just need to make sure you're doing that five times a week.

Just, it's like the doing, not doing really.

You get sleep in on Saturday and Sunday or, yeah, but yeah.

Yeah The, importance of that practice as a commitment, that's like the strongest leadership practice, and that allows you to build that.

Beyond resilience.

Be in the interconnectedness that we cannot have if we're speeding over everything and up here in our heads, trying to figure everything out and get it right and, not make a mistake's.

Yeah.

And, some people have told me that I've coached on this.

They said, oh when I did it, actually, I solved this problem at work that I, hadn't been able to figure out just because.

All of a sudden there was space to just allow the solution to come through the body.

And it didn't have to be figured out up here.

The slowing down, the spaciousness, the groundedness, the connecting that's, what we all need to be doing right now.

And that slowing down, that only has to be 20 minutes a day.

And if you can't find that time, like then what the hell are you doing?

I love to hear you say that.

So Joanna, I'm so conscious that we're running out of time and it's been such a fabulous conversation and I've learned a lot from it, so I really appreciate it.

Is there anything else you wanna add to what you've said already about resilience or beyond resilience?

Yeah I think you're, doing a really great thing to help us think in new ways around resilience and around coping.

These aren't coping strategies.

This is about beyond resilience.

It is about, community building, right?

What, I'm talking about.

None of us want to sweep under the carpet all of the suffering that is happening.

And I certainly acknowledge all the privileges that I've had that have enabled me to build beyond resilience.

But I guess I would just say.

You don't have to go through extreme trauma or have these extreme experiences in order to build this stuff.

I'm envious of this generation that's coming into the world that where meditation is a given, right?

It's just talked about when I was in my twenties, like witty, whatever.

Talk about this as something that was.

Beneficial to one's leadership, mental health, and state of the world.

So it's beyond coping, it's beyond resilience.

And.

Yeah, I just hope everybody finds their organizing home, their community, and are just really, clear about the things that they want to save and fight for the things that they love and get out there and do it with others and have fun.

Thanks so much.

Thanks for bringing it back to so much opportunity and possibility at the end of our conversation has been all the way through, but that was just a beautiful ending.

Joanna, how can people find you?

If they would like to contact you and have more of your wisdom.

All right

As of this week I have a new email address, Joanna at Nuthatch dot World.

World That's awesome.

And nut hatch, for those of your listeners who dunno, she's the most amazing little bird.

They're amazing little bird they're found in every continent.

I got to know them very well through Covid when I had to stay in place, and they jump up and down trees upside down in order to have a very different perspective to find food.

Just a great little metaphor to, to head into the world.

Sometimes we need to go right upside down to find new perspectives.

I love it.

Thank

you so much for being with us and I'm sure our listeners will want to come and find out more about new perspectives and jumping upside down and and, reinforcing your leadership with you for the world that we're creating through this.

Thanks a lot.

Thank you so much.

Have a beautiful day.

What struck you about the conversation?

I thought there was amazing amounts of depth in that conversation, but what really she came back to again and again was community.

And I got the message that interdependence is not a weakness.

It's a strength.

And we always hear independence.

Independence gotta cope on your own, gotta deal with things on your own, and that that.

Narrative is just so back to front.

Yeah.

And then again, what struck me right from the beginning was this idea that what we understand about scarcity versus abundance is all back to front too.

This idea that if we don't have all these material things, then we're gonna be vulnerable and actually more, more vulnerable because we don't have the relationships.

Yeah, totally.

And what I got from her as well is it's not about not enjoying these nice things.

It's when we use them as armor to shore ourselves up to be, to make ourselves invulnerable.

And, and that just doesn't work.

It's an outside in approach and it can never work.

And you and I both convinced this, but I think what we really want, you really in the listening to this to hear that life is interconnected.

There's no getting away from it.

So you are there is, you can separate yourself from it, but that's where the pain is.

That's where the true long lasting pain is.

And what I particularly loved was the way Joanna spoke about that.

So there's an interconnectedness of life that I think on an intellectual level we can see like you almost, if you were looking above the earth, you can see like satellite systems almost.

You can draw lines and see interconnectedness.

But I particularly loved the way Joanna spoke about.

Life loving you back.

The gift that nature gives to us and the interconnected, like the air that we breathe, which is given by the trees and the processes.

And I know again, that scientific and that we can see it like from that flat perspective, but when you really get it.

It feels so rich and deep.

Like you said at the very beginning, it was a, it's it, there's a rich depth to it and it feels, it feels quite miraculous in a sense, and I wish other people could feel that.

And the beyond resilient world is that actually really being more connected to what is already there.

It's not as if it's not there.

We don't have to go and get it or make it.

It's there and on that, which I thought she brought out was.

This interconnectedness between the mind and the heart and the gut.

And actually that is the first step is actually a part of our problem, is that we're living in our heads and we're not even connected to ourselves, let alone anyone else.

So making those first effort in internally to really embody that connectedness with ourselves and with ourselves is what then can allow us to.

To others and to nature and to the wider world.

Yeah.

Yeah, I know that.

And the adding to what you've said also, that the, and that requires slowing down.

And I find it more and more crazy that when I speak about this with my clients, that it counterintuitive to slow down.

I find it crazy that it be counterintuitive.

Because, uh, that we've gotten to this stage in the world.

'cause it wasn't that long ago that our, I'm gonna say ancestors, but I'm thinking of my grandparents and even my parents, but more my grandparents and of course their parents and grandparents.

Slowing down was actually normal.

It was reflection time.

And somehow we've lost that and it's even become counterintuitive.

Yeah.

Ah, well, I was just so pleased, Joanna, on it was a fantastic conversation.

I hope that our listeners have been able to retain some of that wisdom, or if any of them, any of you were thinking of like feeling any guilt and slowing down, or if you are still having doubt about it, that you test it out and saying that on the eve of leaving tomorrow for my own.

Week long retreat, which is all about not only slowing down and meditating, but deeply connecting heart, body and mind, and being very present in ourselves.

I started doing this in 2009 when it seemed impossible with three young children in my own business and, and how could I take time away and committing, I think to that as a practice first, and I would like to add, to make it a commitment rather than a.

A conditional, rather.

They're waiting for the right moment.

So I will be sending peace and love from there for everybody as well.

I'm gonna end with one thing that I thought she was her one phrase that just jumped out at me.

She said, change happens at the speed of trust.

And I just love that quote, and I thought, in this world where we're feeling scared and lonely, that to just open your heart out to reach out to people, to start to trust people is so important.

And I, I urge every one of our listeners to take that as a, as an action today and try and figure out how they can open up their hearts a little bit more and trust people more.

A few things to take away the trust, the self-trust the flowing down, and we will be back with another episode soon with more wisdom and more ways to.

Lean into that beautiful river that the to be that swan on the river.

Thank you.

And that brings us to the end of another episode of the World Beyond Resilience Podcast.

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So.

If this conversation interests you and you start to feel that spark as well, and you think it would be useful for yourself or within your organization, feel free to get in contact.

So until next time, remember, there's a whole world of possibilities beyond just being resilient.

Take care.

Take care.