I guffawed – unmuted – during a webinar last year. Honestly, it was more like a mocking cackle.
It was not a good look.
But what was being said/suggested just hit me at that moment as completely…absurd.
What followed during an invitation to “get our creative juices flowing” was a three-question Zoom poll! Nothing about an uninspiring and trivial survey in my mind is related to imaginativeness or originality.
Now you (or any of the 100 people listening) may not agree that that invitation was ridiculous, but I did. So much so in fact that my uncensored body responded with an abrupt laugh.
I’m not proud. Though I giggled about it later in the day, it was quite embarrassing and I felt guilty for deriding my fellow, very serious, evidence-minded, well-intentioned professional peers.
The moderator of the webinar remarked after my outburst, “Someone thought that was funny.”
I did. I passionately talk about how more opportunities for creativity must be infused into our day-to-day work in the sector and how hierarchical institutions – by their very design – ensure efficiency, subordination, and homogeneity. None of these make room or give rise to creativity for me. I could work harder to put more content out there and explain my ideas. However, maybe it is just better for my overall health and well-being to just laugh.
We in our “social good” sector take ourselves so damn seriously. I find I have far too little tolerance for the performance of high-minded, intellectualized “goodness” lately. It makes me laugh as people position themselves to be seen as righteous or intelligent because that so used to be me, and of course is within me still.
So if I’m serious about not taking myself so seriously, let me confess here that I am no longer that interested in influencing or building momentum. What I am interested in is flow, in fallibility, in fellowship. I’m interested in steadiness, consistency, maintenance, stopping, discerning so that we can release all this anxiety and ego and pain.
That’s why I want to help create coaching relationships for nonprofit leaders and spaces for practitioners where our whole selves and deepest truths – and tears and guffaws and fussing and screams and giggles – can show up. I want to invite people to be unashamedly “all in” so that we can start and feed the healing and hospicing processes that need to occur across our sector, which require courage and resolve and togetherness. We all deserve spaces where we are seen and heard, where we are safe and celebrated, where we can breathe, and those spaces are so rarely found in our workplaces.
Decolonizing those structures has to start with ourselves first, going deeper, and interrogating our own motivations and fears and dominant culture ways of being.
I want to support serious people to be braver, frankly, and I think the only way we do that is by not feeling alone in our concerns and frustration. I want to tell stories about what it takes to stand up for our own and others’ humanity in hierarchical structures, which may even include some tears, some fears, or an eruption of laughter.
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