Disrupting for Good: Shifting to Sustainability

Sometimes I compartmentalize my work. Over here, I’m working on a report. Over here, I’m planning a meeting. Over here, I’m writing a book.

And then an opportunity presents itself out of the blue, and I look at it and think, I cannot add another separate thing. My brain is compartmentalized to the max. 

This happened ten years ago when the Action Hepatitis Canada role was offered to me. At the time I already had 4 jobs and so even though I was interested, I thought, what am I doing with my life? I can’t take a 5th job. I’ll look like I don’t know what I want to be when I grow up. But a friend helped me see the throughline of advocacy across all of my contracts: 5 expressions of the same thing. MY thing. Once my 5 roles felt cohesive, the compartmentalization fell away, and I felt really good about my work.

Perhaps this is a once-a-decade requirement for me, because it happened again this month. I still needed two people to help me see the connections and say yes, but, the idea of these mindset shifts helped as well. Because they aren’t one-and-done, permanent shifts, they are ongoing mindset choices. 

And these shifts serve nicely as a checkpoint when I’m stuck. For example, I’m currently writing a report where I’ve been feeling stuck for the last few weeks. I didn’t feel like I knew where it was going; it felt like we were just nagging at our intended audience, which is the federal government. No wordsmithing was fixing it, because we were writing from the wrong place and we had lost sight of where we wanted to end up - how we wanted our audience to feel. 

And I realized the problem: we were writing from a place of scarcity. We were not staying curious. We were not possibility-imaging. I wasn’t having fun writing it, and I could tell it wasn’t going to land with our audience, either. 

It wasn’t coming from a healthy, energizing place, and it wasn’t going to generate positive outcomes.

Then, I had a lovely and revitalizing chat with a colleague in BC where we talked about cross-sectoral collaborations and power-building in community. I looked at the post-it notes on my wall outlining these shifts I’ve been writing about and saw that the reason I was enjoying this productive conversation so much was because I was staying curious, possibility-imagining, and thinking across silos about our connectedness, while rooted in principles of justice and solidarity. And then I went for a walk in the sunshine, and when I got back to the house, I immediately called my partner on this report and told her why I thought we were stuck, and a possible way out, and she was in complete agreement. 

These shifts are ultimately about doing things differently so that we can take a more sustained approach (and avoid burnout). It’s more sustainable for us and a more compelling invitation to the broader community into a movement of movements. It’s an antidote to apathy and helps us find our unique role in social change. And along the way, it will probably produce better outcomes. Even as I struggle to put ‘it’ into words, I can tell this is important and I appreciate you coming along with me to try to figure it out. 

Have you, or are you, reflecting on any of these mindsets in your own life? If so, I’d love to hear about it from your perspective. I want to understand better how these show up in different ways (or the same ways) across our sector.