Becoming resilient l with Chris Tamdjidi | S4E6 | Inner Green Deal - the human dimension of sustainability.

Description

Despite the importance of resilience, many myths continue to exist. In this episode we take a deeper dive and explore the nature of resilience and how to cultivate it collectively.

Our guest is Chris Tamdjidi, co-author of The Resilient Culture and co-founder of Awaris, a global consulting and training company.

Tamsin Walker spoke to Chris about where resilience comes from, the benefits of being curious and how engaging with the natural world can open us up to a deeper understanding of ourselves.

With a focus on mindfulness, enlightened leadership and understanding cause and effect, Chris has notched up more than 25 years working in business consulting, leadership development, mindfulness practices and change management.

Drawing on that experience and knowledge, he has now co-authored a book out in July together with our Inner Green Deal co-founder Liane Stephan: The Resilient Culture – How collective resilience leads to business success. It explores, amongst others the linkage between resilience and natural world and how it can become woven into the fabric of an organisation.

Our podcast is hosted and produced by Tamsin Walker. Executive producer is IGD co-founder Jeroen Janss. For more information, visit us on LinkedIn, innergreendeal.com or write to info@innergreendeal.com . 

In the four years since it has been running, the Inner Green Deal podcast has been entirely self-funded and we are committed to keeping it that way, which means commercials-free. To live up to this ambition, we are inviting you to support us. Every contribution, however small, makes a difference and allows us to continue sharing inspiring stories that highlight how understanding what is going inside can help in tackling the climate crisis. If you would like to donate, click here.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving a review. In doing so you make it easier for people to discover our podcast. We thank you for your support. 

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
It's very interesting to use nature to evoke our internal states and to realize that each of these states is valid. And it's not that one is best, that one is resilient. Resilience comes from the ability to navigate these states. Once you really understand yourself as an organic being, as a natural being, then you understand that there are things in nature which serve not only cognitively as instructional for us, but also experientially.
Speaker #1
Welcome to the Inner Green Deal podcast, where we talk to inspiring guests about the human dimension of sustainability and explore the link between our personal journeys and the positive impacts we can have on the world. My name is Tamsin Walker. In this month's episode, we're talking about how understanding what's going on on the inside is a route to building greater resilience at a personal, organization, and also societal level. To help make sense of it all, I'm joined by Chris Tamjidi. Chris is co-director and co-founder of Avaris, which takes its name from awareness, a global consulting and training company that develops and delivers evidence and mindfulness-based blended learning programs for organizations. In fact, the inner green deal initially incubated within Avaris and remains closely connected, though it is now an independent non-profit. With a focus on mindfulness, enlightened leadership, and understanding cause and effect, Chris has notched up more than 25 years working in business consulting, leadership development, mindfulness practices, and change management. Drawing on that experience and knowledge, he's now co-authored a book, which is due out in July. The Resilient Culture, How Collective Resilience Leads to Business Success, explores the common view of what resilience is, and how it can become woven into the fabric of an organization. Welcome, Chris. It's a pleasure to have you on the Inner Greendale podcast.
Speaker #0
Good morning.
Speaker #1
So I'd like to start by asking you a question that goes to everyone who comes onto the podcast, and it's all about place and whether there's a place that was particularly important or dear to you while you were growing up, possibly a place in nature.
Speaker #0
So my mother's side of the family is from Austria. And I grew up in Asia, but we spent every summer in Austria. So I grew up in, sometimes in the tropics. I lived in Dubai for six years. And Dubai, you know, in the summer was in some sense a dystopian version of what the future might be. You know, it was 48 degrees and hot, and the weather report was always exactly the same. You know, it'll be hot tomorrow. And so in contrast, going to Austria every summer was really like connecting to an oasis. And in particular, we often visited a lake in the southern parts of Austria. So that was something that's very precious to me, connecting to kind of a healthy, nurturing, natural environment. That was a very important part of my life, which stayed with me. I have a strong connection to nature.
Speaker #1
That's nice. So resilience, that's the topic of our talk today. And it is something that we've discussed before on the podcast. But it's a big topic and there's certainly scope to talk about it more than once. And actually recording as we are the day after the European elections, it feels like a very pertinent thing to be discussing. But before we get into it too deeply, I wonder if you could just start by giving me your nutshell version of what resilience is and maybe where it comes from.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about resilience, especially in you Our world, which has somewhat of a mechanistic view of things, we view resilience as a quality of endurance, toughing it out, bouncing back. What I find very important is to dissolve that myth, that's a misunderstanding, and instead to help people understand that resilience is the ability to actually change your own state, to navigate through different states. in response to external stressors, external situations. And in particular, we speak a lot about this in our work and in our book, is the ability to actually go through four different inner zones and to be able to vary those. So it's moving away from stressed to a growing zone, perhaps, or to a regenerating zone, or also to a zone of letting go or letting be. So these are four zones that exist. you know, kind of exist in our inner experience. And resilience is the ability to actually navigate that.
Speaker #1
Right. So taking from that, would you say definitively then that it's something that is cultured on the inside, that begins on the inside?
Speaker #0
Well, it doesn't have to necessarily begin on the inside, but it does have to show up on the inside. So I think there I'm too much of a scientist. I studied physics to not always look for a fundamental causality. So when we talk about stress, what is stress? How does it show up? And I think one way of fundamentally of talking about stress is that it's typically an activation, a heightened activation of the nervous system. So stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and typically also a negative valence associated, meaning I expect a negative outcome. Therefore, I have a, you know, my whole engagement with a topic is more defined by withdrawal or pushing away rather than moving towards. Okay, so Once you understand that, when we talk about stress, that that's actually the inner state what's going on, then anything we do which improves our resilience has to include navigating away from those internal states, okay? But it can be done behaviorally. So you can do this by reading a book. Closing your laptop, you know, is a behavioral change which leads to an internal change. And so. There are three levels of doing that. One is a behavioral level, which is closing your laptop. Another one is a psychological level, which is acknowledging that I can be everything to everyone, for example. And then there's a physiological level, which is being able to directly relax the nervous system. So all of those three are ways of doing it. But in the end, it does have to show up on our inner, you could say, landscape.
Speaker #1
And they're all connected to one another very closely, right?
Speaker #0
Absolutely. Absolutely. And different people relate to them at different levels. Some people are good at the internal side, some people are good at the external side.
Speaker #1
Well, you mentioned your book just there, which is coming out at the beginning of July. So it goes into the importance of resilience in transformational processes within organizations. And what I'm wondering is whether it's possible to then assume that the cornerstones of the resilience that might aid a transformational process within an organization would also be the same when it comes to building or maintaining resilience, both at an individual and societal stroke systemic level.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think you could say a hypothesis or a part of our approach is to actually say, yeah, you know, the individual has to be able to circle through different states and not get stuck in this stressed state and think I have to endure in this state. because actually what's happening and this is, I think, very important, is that we're consuming our internal resources in a stress state. High activation of the nervous system, negative valence, which means negative expectation of reward, is actually a state of stress and a state of consumption of resources. So that's very similar to what's going on societally. And as a society, we have to learn to talk about this inner level. How do we take care of people? How do we cultivate? people's ability to change, to adapt and grow. And that comes back to understanding how we function and how we, on an internal level, how we exist.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a very interesting point. But why do you think it is that we are not good at delving into that internal world?
Speaker #0
I think there's many, many reasons for that. If I talk historically, I think, first of all, just The way we've been educated is to actually look outwards, you know, for solutions, for our skills, our, you know, we look to accumulate riches, to become successful, status and so on. So I think, you know, there's one level, which is that we've been trained to look outwards, and we have low sophistication, actually, when we talk about internal things. And connected to that, the more stress people get, the more their actual internal awareness shuts down. It's very interesting that stress leads to a down-regulation of the felt sense of our ability to sense our internal states and also to regulate. So I think there are these two things which are existent, that in general we have learned to look outwards, have high degree of sophistication about solving problems through technological and through other things, low degree of sophistication about internal regulation. And then, of course, we're stressed. And I think the coming of AI is exacerbating. Because essentially, if you look at what's happening is we are emphasizing cognitive understanding and knowledge and cognition and de-escalating. felt sense? How do we feel about things? If you look at the whole AI discussion, actually, that's interesting enough. You know, AI at some level is not super smart. There's a number of people who are more worried about the fact that AI is super stupid than super smart. But essentially, there's a gap that AI lacks a felt sense of situations. And we are, in some sense, being triggered to go in that same direction, to... approach reality through cognition and not through the felt sense. So I think that that's a third reason why we tend to be actually not good at regulating and learning the sophistication of internal regulation.
Speaker #1
And I suppose the logical following question from that has got to be, how do we get better?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, I think it really does have to start with kind of exploration of our internal beings. And maybe in some sense, my own life experiences, you know. maybe a good example. So I studied physics, theoretical physics. I think I could accurately have been described as a head on a stick. And I think I did not have good skills. And a nice example for me was when I had a girlfriend in Paris and she used to invite me to visit her on the weekends and she would take me to concerts. She really was a gifted person in terms of her hearing. And she would take me to concerts and she would hear everything that the conductor was interpreting, the way all the instruments were playing. And I was sitting there. and it was dark and it was warm and, you know, I would fall asleep, you know. And it was unimaginable for her. How could you? I mean, she just couldn't fathom that. How could it be that I was such a, you know, whatever, that I did not hear this? And that was really the truth. I just didn't hear it. I did not have a sophisticated hearing to recognize all these details and therefore there wasn't so much going on and therefore I would fall asleep. So I think that you actually have to develop the skills for internal, you know, noticing the felt sense and regulating. And that actually is what many people want to avoid. Many people would like to feel less and not more. They want to get away. But there really is a necessary journey. In the same way, when we talk about climate change, actually, people have to feel more. Feel more connection to nature. Feel more appreciation of nature just around the corner. Notice how things are changing. When you actually help people open the senses and just feel how the world around them has changed or how they feel when they're in certain locations, that actually is a very unifying approach. And so I think that we as individuals, as organizations, as societies have to learn to feel more and notice actually how we are consuming our own internal human resources. And there's a lot of parallels when you look at data on actually how people consume their internal resources and what we're doing to climate resources and what regeneration actually means.
Speaker #1
There's a lot of interesting things there. And I want to come on to the nature connection in a little while. But just to go back to what I mentioned at the beginning, that we had the European elections and you Unlike the results of five years ago, where there was a very visible green wave, this time round, it seems fairly apparent that the climate crisis has slipped down the agenda among voters in terms of important issues. And I guess for a lot of people working on climate, there's a very real need for resilience because the message to a large part still doesn't seem to be getting through. So I'm wondering how, or or what role resilience then plays for people working across the board on environmental and climate issues. Do you have any insights there?
Speaker #0
It's an important point, and I'll stay with the felt sense. So I think, of course, there are a lot of challenges for people working in this space, and they have to indeed manage their energy for the long run, in the sense of that it's not you It takes a long time to move things forward. And therefore, the felt sense, noticing their own internal states and being able to regulate it, being able to have skills of relaxation, and also being able to have skills of positive outlook, noticing the positive, appreciating all the amazing things that have happened. That's a very important starting point. When you pay attention to the felt sense of things, first of all, it allows you to notice your internal states. It allows you, perhaps when you're getting too negative. And it allows you to begin to notice, how do I move into the positive? How do I remain hopeful? How do I remain connected to people? How do I remain positive? And I think this is... crucial in terms of not just for oneself as an activist, as somebody, you know, in the space, but that's how you connect to those people that are not on board. Because of course, there's a danger that people have been receiving a lot of negative messages. And actually, that's an evolutionary response to negativity is to kind of avoid it. I don't want to deal with it, you know. And I really want to stress that I think that it's very important to honor everyone's experience. And there are genuinely people who feel that their experience of their life is not honored. When you have a felt sense of your own state and you're willing to connect to other people's felt sense, you go, actually, yeah, there is a reason. There's a felt reason why people are making these choices. It isn't all illogical. That actually does, from this felt sense point of view, it makes sense. So I think that that's a very important journey that, you know, the felt sense is first very important for you to learn to regulate your own internal state. Notice, okay, my goodness, I am quite negative. How do I cultivate the positive? How do I connect to people? How do I remain positive? And when you begin to tune into that, you begin to actually realize, oh, yeah, as a whole climate movement, we have to do that too. We have to both connect to the positive and also connect to people's experience. For many people, their experience is very bleak. And people who live in a bleak experience tend to be negative in their outlook and their ability to make choices. There's a very interesting podcast by somebody who was previously the leader of the North American neo-Nazi movement. He left that and he talks about his transformation and he says basically the transformation happens because of empathy. You cannot convince people, but you have to have an empathetic. concern for their situation. And that really touched me. And I think that that's really very, very important for all of us that care about our future, is we have to equally care about the future of those people who feel left behind.
Speaker #1
Yeah, just listening to the way you're saying that, you know, there's a sense of calm in the way you deliver, and it also induces kind of a sense of calm in me. And that feels like a very valuable thing, especially now when There is a lot of polarization and it's very easy to slip into thoughts that are essentially polarizing. And you're talking there about empathy, about having empathy with people you don't necessarily feel instinctively empathetic towards, right? Which, yeah, it sounds like a very good thing to be able to do. But at the same time, I guess for a lot of people, it's way out of reach. You know, there's not interested. If you are able to cultivate resilience, is it a logical next step that people can more easily grow into a place of empathy and perhaps less polarizing behavior and thoughts and so on?
Speaker #0
I think people who are engaged for the world sometimes forget compassion for themselves. I think you do have to nourish your own self. You have to nourish your own resources. And again, we talk a lot about this in the book. There are different pathways to moving away from kind of stuck in the stressed, you know, anxious state. So I think, and this again is interesting, when you're in that stressed or anxious state, you're actually reducing the resources of your own system. Also in terms of the biological diversity in your microbiome. So the more stressed we ourselves are, the more we're reducing our internal diversity, the more we are also reducing our... actual emotional diversity, our ability to handle stuff, you know, stuff that's thrown away. So I do think, A, a first starting point as people who are active in contributing to resolving climate change is we have to be genuinely taking care of our own resources and actually learning that. As a model, you could say, you know, we can kind of shift the state of the world if we're not modeling it in ourselves that we're actually able to nourish our own resources. So I think that's a very important starting point. And I say that without any kind of you must, but just as an expression of compassion, which I think I've also learned from myself, that you have to take care of yourself. You know, you have to nourish these things. Once you do that, I think you become softer and you begin to see that actually there's a form of nourishing, which is relaxation, regeneration, recovery. But there's another form of nourishing, which is growing. And it's interesting to look at that. There are certain, I don't want to get too technical here. But there are certain skills that actually help people grow. And it's not the same as, you could say, some of the other skills. So we talk about 12 skills in our book. But actually, the ones that help people grow are connection to others, connection to purpose, compassion and care, and positive outlook. The fact that I understand that is one thing, but I actually have to practice. I have to kind of have it show up in my life. Once you begin to practice that, you begin to see, oh, interesting enough, I'm strengthening basic human connection skills in myself. And that leads you down the pathway of really beginning to take an interest in other people. I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm just a nerd, but I'm not Mr. The social connection is my default way to be. I'm happy about myself. But I certainly have really learned that cultivating connection, cultivating empathy has transformed my way of seeing people. I mean, of course, I've been a long time mindfulness practitioner. There are specific practices which you can do. Tonglen is one of them. I won't explain it, but it's a very powerful practice. And I find that the more you do these kind of practices, the more you're actually curious and open. And so these are things that I find that are important and that happen naturally. But the starting point is always taking care of yourself and nourishing yourself and not being too demanding on yourself.
Speaker #1
And what else is really coming across there is the openness that goes hand in hand with that, with the curiosity of the internal landscape and how then that just kind of breaks you open for external factors to look different, to remove your own personal preconceptions.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And maybe one key point in there is softness. Many people think, I have to be hard, but actually softness means that you feel more, that you're more touched and tickled by the world. And once you become comfortable with being touched and tickled by the world, actually it brings more joy and more sense of energetic richness. So it's very interesting that people feel so poverty-struck. It's a very important aspect of modern society is that people feel tremendously poverty-struck. They don't feel that they have enough. And actually, it's very interesting. The feeling of richness comes from sensory richness, that you feel you take things in through the senses. That's where richness comes from. Richness is always a sensory experience. You might have a billion. I have a very good friend who has been very wealthy in his life, very, very wealthy, you know, beyond most of our understanding. And actually, since he's planted a garden, he says, actually, I feel more rich through the sensory experience of the garden and vegetable garden. than perhaps through all of my wealth. And I think that this is, again, a very important key for people to understand that a lot of this greed is driven by a poverty mentality. Poverty mentality comes from a lack of sensory openness. The more you're open to the senses, the more you feel enriched by your experiences. And that's a very deep level of enrichment. And again, that happens through softness and openness. So I think that it's very interesting that once you begin to go down the pathway, you begin to see actually a lot of the challenges of the world are based because people are closed and not soft.
Speaker #1
I registered your use of the word soft when you first mentioned it, and I really like that. I think it's a nice word to use when thinking about a place that we can get to. But also just to go back to the opposite, to the hardness. If I were listening to this conversation, say, as an individual or a leader of some description, And I found myself wondering, am I resilient? How would I know? Because I imagine that there are a lot of people who might consider themselves to be resilient because they've gone through hardship, genuine hardship, and they're still standing and thinking, okay, that equates to resilience. But maybe it's more a case of just hanging on in there. So how would a person know? if they are actually resilient.
Speaker #0
I think a very important starting point is the fact that you are often not conscious of all the things that you're doing. So many of us, you know, actually do things to take care of our resilience because no matter what, we go for a walk with the dog. No matter what, we make sure we have dinner with our family. No matter what, we make sure that we do sports. So I often find, you know, that people who are... unconsciously resilient, that they think it's just a trait, that actually when you speak to them, you realize it's not a trait, but that it's a behavior, which has become so much part of their personality that they think it's a trait and they forget the actual behavioral aspect of it. So I think that is the starting point whenever you talk to people, that actually if they think they're resilient to begin to understand what are the things that you're doing, which actually help you change your state, navigate your landscape. And I think you always find those. And then, of course, there's people who have a situation which perhaps helps them to be resilient and they've kind of overcome things. And they haven't really integrated it consciously. So I think that that's always a very important starting point, is helping people to reflect upon, okay, no, you might be very resilient, and maybe it's partly also because of your upbringing. But I think that the journey always is, if you like to increase your resilience, it's always a journey of learning skills and behaviors. So I think that once people are willing to see it as a conscious process, rather than just as a trait or whatever else, then you can help them on a journey to kind of cultivate that and learn this. And that's a very enriching journey, I think, which everyone then appreciates.
Speaker #1
Thank you for that. And I feel like it's time for us now to get back to nature. And you mentioned your friend there who planted a garden and all the riches that come flooding in through the senses. And you talked about connection and how... connection with the natural world and is something that really unites us all. With that in mind, how important do you think that the natural world is in this resilience puzzle?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think really fundamentally important. I think that there are some things you can do for resilience which are self-oriented. Like going to sleep is a little bit self-oriented. There's nothing bad about it, but it's really about... this system, you know, but actually many other things in terms of connecting to others, positive outlook, connection to purpose, compassion and care, all those things which really also contribute to resilience are actually very much other focused. And I think that's very important to understand that the narrow, you know, I'm going to optimize myself, it just doesn't work in making us resilient because we are not, you know, separate. So you can't kind of optimize something. It's like a wave trying to optimize itself. I'm going to optimize myself, says the wave. Okay, but sorry, you're just part of the ocean. It's just not going to work. So therefore, it's really important to understand that while it's important to take care of the self, taking care of the self alone is not going to cultivate fundamental resilience in terms of how we understand it. And so therefore, there always have to be things which are important connection to other. And I think that in my own life, I certainly am a person. who finds that the connection to other, to things that are beyond me, especially in nature, I do spend a lot of time in nature, really nourishes me. And I think that that's something which unifies all of us. Anyone from any part of a political spectrum actually has treasured interaction with nature, with beauty. So I think that that's really very, very important for all of us. And that's what the data says. And that's kind of crucial. because we are, you know, from the evolutionary point of course it makes sense because of course you know we are dependent on our environment and on others to survive and therefore it's no wonder that when we have good relationship to others and to our environment it helps our survival and our well-being.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah and the time I spend outside is under the trees or just walking in the park is genuinely the most restorative thing that I can do and in fact I recently had a deadline that I was working on. And so it just wasn't really happening. And then I took my laptop outside and went sat under a tree by a little stream in the city. And there it was, you know, everything I needed just came flooding out and the work was done. And it's not even that I was particularly listening to the birds or anything, you know, I could hear them, but I wasn't focused on them. But there's just something about being in that environment under the trees and I wonder what you think really spending time in the natural world, what that can teach us about resilience, if we're willing to go a step further and not just be there, but really to look and to have a willingness to learn.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there's a lot from nature. Once you understand that you're a biological being, then actually you realize that resilience cannot be one state. It just can't be. Nature doesn't abide in summer or doesn't abide in spring. And seeing that, I think, really Helps us understand that there are different phases. And nature, interestingly enough, connected you to a growth phase, the feeling of richness, feeling of learning. And sometimes you go into nature and you go into a loss phase. You go into winter, you go into the desert, you know what I mean? So it's very interesting to use nature to evoke our internal states and to realize that each of these states is valid. And it's not that one is best, that one is resilient. Resilience comes from the ability to navigate these states, to move around them in a natural way. And I think that's also why... None of these states is unhealthy, you see. So I think that once you really understand yourself as an organic being, as a natural being, then you understand that there is things in nature which serve not only cognitively as instructional for us, but also experientially, yes.
Speaker #1
And do you spend a lot of time then in nature maintaining a state of resilience?
Speaker #0
First of all, nature is my go-to place. I mean... Particularly, I'm attracted to unusual places in nature, which historically are power spots. You know, nature power spots, there are such spots which have, you know, a certain intensity to their energy. And I find those very instructive. So I just really want to encourage that, that when you open your eyes, you see things. Just the uniqueness of a situation, the way the sky and the rock and the ocean and the cliffs and so on are. And that actually then if you pay attention to what happens to your internal state, you go, oh, interesting, this happens in my internal state in this environment. And that actually leads to insights in a certain way. Oh, interesting, these things are connected. And at some time, of course, in order to open up the sensitivity to that, you do have to, of course, suspend some critical thinking and just be curious.
Speaker #1
Yes, that's the word I was wanting to get to, curious. So there's an equation between curiosity and resilience.
Speaker #0
Absolutely. Because I mean, it's really this sense of openness, you know, to exploring the inner landscape, seeing the connection between outer and then being alive. And I think that all of this takes you to just fundamentally being alive again. And liveliness and curiosity are very close. Yeah,
Speaker #1
yeah, that's great. I just have one final question for you, which is the bookend that everyone gets. it is if there were one single skill that you had the power to bestow upon everybody in the world, what would you choose it to be?
Speaker #0
Feeling more. So the felt sense of theater experience.
Speaker #1
Right off the bat. Well, thank you very much for that, Chris. And for all your other insights and thoughts. It's been a very interesting conversation.
Speaker #0
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker #1
I hope you enjoyed this dig into resilience as much as I did. If you want to know more about Chris and his work and the upcoming book he co-authored, you'll find links in the show notes. And if you're keen to explore the Inner Green Deal in greater depth, you'll also find links to enlighten you. We regularly hold community events at which you would be warmly welcomed. And a special note, in the four years since it's been running, the Inner Green Deal podcast has been entirely self-funded, and we are committed to keeping it that way, which means commercials free. And to live up to this ambition, we're inviting you to support us. Every contribution, however small, genuinely makes a difference and allows us to continue sharing inspiring stories that highlight how understanding what's happening on the inside can help in tackling the climate crisis. If you'd like to donate, head to the show notes for the relevant link. I thank you for your generosity and for your interest in the work of the Inner Green Deal. We'll be taking a short break over the summer, during which time we'll bring you older episodes of the podcast. And if you'd like to hear other interesting conversations with people working on sustainability and the establishment of deeper connections to ourselves and the world around us, there's plenty to go at in our archives. And as ever, if this conversation captured your imagination, we'd love you to share it and subscribe to the podcast. Thank you very much for listening. I look forward to you joining me again the next time. For now, though, bye-bye.

Description

Despite the importance of resilience, many myths continue to exist. In this episode we take a deeper dive and explore the nature of resilience and how to cultivate it collectively.

If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing to our podcast or leaving a review. In doing so you make it easier for people to discover our podcast. We thank you for your support. 

Hosted on Ausha. See ausha.co/privacy-policy for more information.

Transcription

Speaker #0
It's very interesting to use nature to evoke our internal states and to realize that each of these states is valid. And it's not that one is best, that one is resilient. Resilience comes from the ability to navigate these states. Once you really understand yourself as an organic being, as a natural being, then you understand that there are things in nature which serve not only cognitively as instructional for us, but also experientially.
Speaker #1
Welcome to the Inner Green Deal podcast, where we talk to inspiring guests about the human dimension of sustainability and explore the link between our personal journeys and the positive impacts we can have on the world. My name is Tamsin Walker. In this month's episode, we're talking about how understanding what's going on on the inside is a route to building greater resilience at a personal, organization, and also societal level. To help make sense of it all, I'm joined by Chris Tamjidi. Chris is co-director and co-founder of Avaris, which takes its name from awareness, a global consulting and training company that develops and delivers evidence and mindfulness-based blended learning programs for organizations. In fact, the inner green deal initially incubated within Avaris and remains closely connected, though it is now an independent non-profit. With a focus on mindfulness, enlightened leadership, and understanding cause and effect, Chris has notched up more than 25 years working in business consulting, leadership development, mindfulness practices, and change management. Drawing on that experience and knowledge, he's now co-authored a book, which is due out in July. The Resilient Culture, How Collective Resilience Leads to Business Success, explores the common view of what resilience is, and how it can become woven into the fabric of an organization. Welcome, Chris. It's a pleasure to have you on the Inner Greendale podcast.
Speaker #0
Good morning.
Speaker #1
So I'd like to start by asking you a question that goes to everyone who comes onto the podcast, and it's all about place and whether there's a place that was particularly important or dear to you while you were growing up, possibly a place in nature.
Speaker #0
So my mother's side of the family is from Austria. And I grew up in Asia, but we spent every summer in Austria. So I grew up in, sometimes in the tropics. I lived in Dubai for six years. And Dubai, you know, in the summer was in some sense a dystopian version of what the future might be. You know, it was 48 degrees and hot, and the weather report was always exactly the same. You know, it'll be hot tomorrow. And so in contrast, going to Austria every summer was really like connecting to an oasis. And in particular, we often visited a lake in the southern parts of Austria. So that was something that's very precious to me, connecting to kind of a healthy, nurturing, natural environment. That was a very important part of my life, which stayed with me. I have a strong connection to nature.
Speaker #1
That's nice. So resilience, that's the topic of our talk today. And it is something that we've discussed before on the podcast. But it's a big topic and there's certainly scope to talk about it more than once. And actually recording as we are the day after the European elections, it feels like a very pertinent thing to be discussing. But before we get into it too deeply, I wonder if you could just start by giving me your nutshell version of what resilience is and maybe where it comes from.
Speaker #0
Yeah, so I think that there's a lot of misunderstanding about resilience, especially in you Our world, which has somewhat of a mechanistic view of things, we view resilience as a quality of endurance, toughing it out, bouncing back. What I find very important is to dissolve that myth, that's a misunderstanding, and instead to help people understand that resilience is the ability to actually change your own state, to navigate through different states. in response to external stressors, external situations. And in particular, we speak a lot about this in our work and in our book, is the ability to actually go through four different inner zones and to be able to vary those. So it's moving away from stressed to a growing zone, perhaps, or to a regenerating zone, or also to a zone of letting go or letting be. So these are four zones that exist. you know, kind of exist in our inner experience. And resilience is the ability to actually navigate that.
Speaker #1
Right. So taking from that, would you say definitively then that it's something that is cultured on the inside, that begins on the inside?
Speaker #0
Well, it doesn't have to necessarily begin on the inside, but it does have to show up on the inside. So I think there I'm too much of a scientist. I studied physics to not always look for a fundamental causality. So when we talk about stress, what is stress? How does it show up? And I think one way of fundamentally of talking about stress is that it's typically an activation, a heightened activation of the nervous system. So stimulation of the sympathetic nervous system and typically also a negative valence associated, meaning I expect a negative outcome. Therefore, I have a, you know, my whole engagement with a topic is more defined by withdrawal or pushing away rather than moving towards. Okay, so Once you understand that, when we talk about stress, that that's actually the inner state what's going on, then anything we do which improves our resilience has to include navigating away from those internal states, okay? But it can be done behaviorally. So you can do this by reading a book. Closing your laptop, you know, is a behavioral change which leads to an internal change. And so. There are three levels of doing that. One is a behavioral level, which is closing your laptop. Another one is a psychological level, which is acknowledging that I can be everything to everyone, for example. And then there's a physiological level, which is being able to directly relax the nervous system. So all of those three are ways of doing it. But in the end, it does have to show up on our inner, you could say, landscape.
Speaker #1
And they're all connected to one another very closely, right?
Speaker #0
Absolutely. Absolutely. And different people relate to them at different levels. Some people are good at the internal side, some people are good at the external side.
Speaker #1
Well, you mentioned your book just there, which is coming out at the beginning of July. So it goes into the importance of resilience in transformational processes within organizations. And what I'm wondering is whether it's possible to then assume that the cornerstones of the resilience that might aid a transformational process within an organization would also be the same when it comes to building or maintaining resilience, both at an individual and societal stroke systemic level.
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think you could say a hypothesis or a part of our approach is to actually say, yeah, you know, the individual has to be able to circle through different states and not get stuck in this stressed state and think I have to endure in this state. because actually what's happening and this is, I think, very important, is that we're consuming our internal resources in a stress state. High activation of the nervous system, negative valence, which means negative expectation of reward, is actually a state of stress and a state of consumption of resources. So that's very similar to what's going on societally. And as a society, we have to learn to talk about this inner level. How do we take care of people? How do we cultivate? people's ability to change, to adapt and grow. And that comes back to understanding how we function and how we, on an internal level, how we exist.
Speaker #1
Yeah, it's a very interesting point. But why do you think it is that we are not good at delving into that internal world?
Speaker #0
I think there's many, many reasons for that. If I talk historically, I think, first of all, just The way we've been educated is to actually look outwards, you know, for solutions, for our skills, our, you know, we look to accumulate riches, to become successful, status and so on. So I think, you know, there's one level, which is that we've been trained to look outwards, and we have low sophistication, actually, when we talk about internal things. And connected to that, the more stress people get, the more their actual internal awareness shuts down. It's very interesting that stress leads to a down-regulation of the felt sense of our ability to sense our internal states and also to regulate. So I think there are these two things which are existent, that in general we have learned to look outwards, have high degree of sophistication about solving problems through technological and through other things, low degree of sophistication about internal regulation. And then, of course, we're stressed. And I think the coming of AI is exacerbating. Because essentially, if you look at what's happening is we are emphasizing cognitive understanding and knowledge and cognition and de-escalating. felt sense? How do we feel about things? If you look at the whole AI discussion, actually, that's interesting enough. You know, AI at some level is not super smart. There's a number of people who are more worried about the fact that AI is super stupid than super smart. But essentially, there's a gap that AI lacks a felt sense of situations. And we are, in some sense, being triggered to go in that same direction, to... approach reality through cognition and not through the felt sense. So I think that that's a third reason why we tend to be actually not good at regulating and learning the sophistication of internal regulation.
Speaker #1
And I suppose the logical following question from that has got to be, how do we get better?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I mean, I think it really does have to start with kind of exploration of our internal beings. And maybe in some sense, my own life experiences, you know. maybe a good example. So I studied physics, theoretical physics. I think I could accurately have been described as a head on a stick. And I think I did not have good skills. And a nice example for me was when I had a girlfriend in Paris and she used to invite me to visit her on the weekends and she would take me to concerts. She really was a gifted person in terms of her hearing. And she would take me to concerts and she would hear everything that the conductor was interpreting, the way all the instruments were playing. And I was sitting there. and it was dark and it was warm and, you know, I would fall asleep, you know. And it was unimaginable for her. How could you? I mean, she just couldn't fathom that. How could it be that I was such a, you know, whatever, that I did not hear this? And that was really the truth. I just didn't hear it. I did not have a sophisticated hearing to recognize all these details and therefore there wasn't so much going on and therefore I would fall asleep. So I think that you actually have to develop the skills for internal, you know, noticing the felt sense and regulating. And that actually is what many people want to avoid. Many people would like to feel less and not more. They want to get away. But there really is a necessary journey. In the same way, when we talk about climate change, actually, people have to feel more. Feel more connection to nature. Feel more appreciation of nature just around the corner. Notice how things are changing. When you actually help people open the senses and just feel how the world around them has changed or how they feel when they're in certain locations, that actually is a very unifying approach. And so I think that we as individuals, as organizations, as societies have to learn to feel more and notice actually how we are consuming our own internal human resources. And there's a lot of parallels when you look at data on actually how people consume their internal resources and what we're doing to climate resources and what regeneration actually means.
Speaker #1
There's a lot of interesting things there. And I want to come on to the nature connection in a little while. But just to go back to what I mentioned at the beginning, that we had the European elections and you Unlike the results of five years ago, where there was a very visible green wave, this time round, it seems fairly apparent that the climate crisis has slipped down the agenda among voters in terms of important issues. And I guess for a lot of people working on climate, there's a very real need for resilience because the message to a large part still doesn't seem to be getting through. So I'm wondering how, or or what role resilience then plays for people working across the board on environmental and climate issues. Do you have any insights there?
Speaker #0
It's an important point, and I'll stay with the felt sense. So I think, of course, there are a lot of challenges for people working in this space, and they have to indeed manage their energy for the long run, in the sense of that it's not you It takes a long time to move things forward. And therefore, the felt sense, noticing their own internal states and being able to regulate it, being able to have skills of relaxation, and also being able to have skills of positive outlook, noticing the positive, appreciating all the amazing things that have happened. That's a very important starting point. When you pay attention to the felt sense of things, first of all, it allows you to notice your internal states. It allows you, perhaps when you're getting too negative. And it allows you to begin to notice, how do I move into the positive? How do I remain hopeful? How do I remain connected to people? How do I remain positive? And I think this is... crucial in terms of not just for oneself as an activist, as somebody, you know, in the space, but that's how you connect to those people that are not on board. Because of course, there's a danger that people have been receiving a lot of negative messages. And actually, that's an evolutionary response to negativity is to kind of avoid it. I don't want to deal with it, you know. And I really want to stress that I think that it's very important to honor everyone's experience. And there are genuinely people who feel that their experience of their life is not honored. When you have a felt sense of your own state and you're willing to connect to other people's felt sense, you go, actually, yeah, there is a reason. There's a felt reason why people are making these choices. It isn't all illogical. That actually does, from this felt sense point of view, it makes sense. So I think that that's a very important journey that, you know, the felt sense is first very important for you to learn to regulate your own internal state. Notice, okay, my goodness, I am quite negative. How do I cultivate the positive? How do I connect to people? How do I remain positive? And when you begin to tune into that, you begin to actually realize, oh, yeah, as a whole climate movement, we have to do that too. We have to both connect to the positive and also connect to people's experience. For many people, their experience is very bleak. And people who live in a bleak experience tend to be negative in their outlook and their ability to make choices. There's a very interesting podcast by somebody who was previously the leader of the North American neo-Nazi movement. He left that and he talks about his transformation and he says basically the transformation happens because of empathy. You cannot convince people, but you have to have an empathetic. concern for their situation. And that really touched me. And I think that that's really very, very important for all of us that care about our future, is we have to equally care about the future of those people who feel left behind.
Speaker #1
Yeah, just listening to the way you're saying that, you know, there's a sense of calm in the way you deliver, and it also induces kind of a sense of calm in me. And that feels like a very valuable thing, especially now when There is a lot of polarization and it's very easy to slip into thoughts that are essentially polarizing. And you're talking there about empathy, about having empathy with people you don't necessarily feel instinctively empathetic towards, right? Which, yeah, it sounds like a very good thing to be able to do. But at the same time, I guess for a lot of people, it's way out of reach. You know, there's not interested. If you are able to cultivate resilience, is it a logical next step that people can more easily grow into a place of empathy and perhaps less polarizing behavior and thoughts and so on?
Speaker #0
I think people who are engaged for the world sometimes forget compassion for themselves. I think you do have to nourish your own self. You have to nourish your own resources. And again, we talk a lot about this in the book. There are different pathways to moving away from kind of stuck in the stressed, you know, anxious state. So I think, and this again is interesting, when you're in that stressed or anxious state, you're actually reducing the resources of your own system. Also in terms of the biological diversity in your microbiome. So the more stressed we ourselves are, the more we're reducing our internal diversity, the more we are also reducing our... actual emotional diversity, our ability to handle stuff, you know, stuff that's thrown away. So I do think, A, a first starting point as people who are active in contributing to resolving climate change is we have to be genuinely taking care of our own resources and actually learning that. As a model, you could say, you know, we can kind of shift the state of the world if we're not modeling it in ourselves that we're actually able to nourish our own resources. So I think that's a very important starting point. And I say that without any kind of you must, but just as an expression of compassion, which I think I've also learned from myself, that you have to take care of yourself. You know, you have to nourish these things. Once you do that, I think you become softer and you begin to see that actually there's a form of nourishing, which is relaxation, regeneration, recovery. But there's another form of nourishing, which is growing. And it's interesting to look at that. There are certain, I don't want to get too technical here. But there are certain skills that actually help people grow. And it's not the same as, you could say, some of the other skills. So we talk about 12 skills in our book. But actually, the ones that help people grow are connection to others, connection to purpose, compassion and care, and positive outlook. The fact that I understand that is one thing, but I actually have to practice. I have to kind of have it show up in my life. Once you begin to practice that, you begin to see, oh, interesting enough, I'm strengthening basic human connection skills in myself. And that leads you down the pathway of really beginning to take an interest in other people. I'm not, I wouldn't say I'm just a nerd, but I'm not Mr. The social connection is my default way to be. I'm happy about myself. But I certainly have really learned that cultivating connection, cultivating empathy has transformed my way of seeing people. I mean, of course, I've been a long time mindfulness practitioner. There are specific practices which you can do. Tonglen is one of them. I won't explain it, but it's a very powerful practice. And I find that the more you do these kind of practices, the more you're actually curious and open. And so these are things that I find that are important and that happen naturally. But the starting point is always taking care of yourself and nourishing yourself and not being too demanding on yourself.
Speaker #1
And what else is really coming across there is the openness that goes hand in hand with that, with the curiosity of the internal landscape and how then that just kind of breaks you open for external factors to look different, to remove your own personal preconceptions.
Speaker #0
Yeah. And maybe one key point in there is softness. Many people think, I have to be hard, but actually softness means that you feel more, that you're more touched and tickled by the world. And once you become comfortable with being touched and tickled by the world, actually it brings more joy and more sense of energetic richness. So it's very interesting that people feel so poverty-struck. It's a very important aspect of modern society is that people feel tremendously poverty-struck. They don't feel that they have enough. And actually, it's very interesting. The feeling of richness comes from sensory richness, that you feel you take things in through the senses. That's where richness comes from. Richness is always a sensory experience. You might have a billion. I have a very good friend who has been very wealthy in his life, very, very wealthy, you know, beyond most of our understanding. And actually, since he's planted a garden, he says, actually, I feel more rich through the sensory experience of the garden and vegetable garden. than perhaps through all of my wealth. And I think that this is, again, a very important key for people to understand that a lot of this greed is driven by a poverty mentality. Poverty mentality comes from a lack of sensory openness. The more you're open to the senses, the more you feel enriched by your experiences. And that's a very deep level of enrichment. And again, that happens through softness and openness. So I think that it's very interesting that once you begin to go down the pathway, you begin to see actually a lot of the challenges of the world are based because people are closed and not soft.
Speaker #1
I registered your use of the word soft when you first mentioned it, and I really like that. I think it's a nice word to use when thinking about a place that we can get to. But also just to go back to the opposite, to the hardness. If I were listening to this conversation, say, as an individual or a leader of some description, And I found myself wondering, am I resilient? How would I know? Because I imagine that there are a lot of people who might consider themselves to be resilient because they've gone through hardship, genuine hardship, and they're still standing and thinking, okay, that equates to resilience. But maybe it's more a case of just hanging on in there. So how would a person know? if they are actually resilient.
Speaker #0
I think a very important starting point is the fact that you are often not conscious of all the things that you're doing. So many of us, you know, actually do things to take care of our resilience because no matter what, we go for a walk with the dog. No matter what, we make sure we have dinner with our family. No matter what, we make sure that we do sports. So I often find, you know, that people who are... unconsciously resilient, that they think it's just a trait, that actually when you speak to them, you realize it's not a trait, but that it's a behavior, which has become so much part of their personality that they think it's a trait and they forget the actual behavioral aspect of it. So I think that is the starting point whenever you talk to people, that actually if they think they're resilient to begin to understand what are the things that you're doing, which actually help you change your state, navigate your landscape. And I think you always find those. And then, of course, there's people who have a situation which perhaps helps them to be resilient and they've kind of overcome things. And they haven't really integrated it consciously. So I think that that's always a very important starting point, is helping people to reflect upon, okay, no, you might be very resilient, and maybe it's partly also because of your upbringing. But I think that the journey always is, if you like to increase your resilience, it's always a journey of learning skills and behaviors. So I think that once people are willing to see it as a conscious process, rather than just as a trait or whatever else, then you can help them on a journey to kind of cultivate that and learn this. And that's a very enriching journey, I think, which everyone then appreciates.
Speaker #1
Thank you for that. And I feel like it's time for us now to get back to nature. And you mentioned your friend there who planted a garden and all the riches that come flooding in through the senses. And you talked about connection and how... connection with the natural world and is something that really unites us all. With that in mind, how important do you think that the natural world is in this resilience puzzle?
Speaker #0
Yeah, I think really fundamentally important. I think that there are some things you can do for resilience which are self-oriented. Like going to sleep is a little bit self-oriented. There's nothing bad about it, but it's really about... this system, you know, but actually many other things in terms of connecting to others, positive outlook, connection to purpose, compassion and care, all those things which really also contribute to resilience are actually very much other focused. And I think that's very important to understand that the narrow, you know, I'm going to optimize myself, it just doesn't work in making us resilient because we are not, you know, separate. So you can't kind of optimize something. It's like a wave trying to optimize itself. I'm going to optimize myself, says the wave. Okay, but sorry, you're just part of the ocean. It's just not going to work. So therefore, it's really important to understand that while it's important to take care of the self, taking care of the self alone is not going to cultivate fundamental resilience in terms of how we understand it. And so therefore, there always have to be things which are important connection to other. And I think that in my own life, I certainly am a person. who finds that the connection to other, to things that are beyond me, especially in nature, I do spend a lot of time in nature, really nourishes me. And I think that that's something which unifies all of us. Anyone from any part of a political spectrum actually has treasured interaction with nature, with beauty. So I think that that's really very, very important for all of us. And that's what the data says. And that's kind of crucial. because we are, you know, from the evolutionary point of course it makes sense because of course you know we are dependent on our environment and on others to survive and therefore it's no wonder that when we have good relationship to others and to our environment it helps our survival and our well-being.
Speaker #1
Oh yeah and the time I spend outside is under the trees or just walking in the park is genuinely the most restorative thing that I can do and in fact I recently had a deadline that I was working on. And so it just wasn't really happening. And then I took my laptop outside and went sat under a tree by a little stream in the city. And there it was, you know, everything I needed just came flooding out and the work was done. And it's not even that I was particularly listening to the birds or anything, you know, I could hear them, but I wasn't focused on them. But there's just something about being in that environment under the trees and I wonder what you think really spending time in the natural world, what that can teach us about resilience, if we're willing to go a step further and not just be there, but really to look and to have a willingness to learn.
Speaker #0
Yeah. So, I mean, I think that there's a lot from nature. Once you understand that you're a biological being, then actually you realize that resilience cannot be one state. It just can't be. Nature doesn't abide in summer or doesn't abide in spring. And seeing that, I think, really Helps us understand that there are different phases. And nature, interestingly enough, connected you to a growth phase, the feeling of richness, feeling of learning. And sometimes you go into nature and you go into a loss phase. You go into winter, you go into the desert, you know what I mean? So it's very interesting to use nature to evoke our internal states and to realize that each of these states is valid. And it's not that one is best, that one is resilient. Resilience comes from the ability to navigate these states, to move around them in a natural way. And I think that's also why... None of these states is unhealthy, you see. So I think that once you really understand yourself as an organic being, as a natural being, then you understand that there is things in nature which serve not only cognitively as instructional for us, but also experientially, yes.
Speaker #1
And do you spend a lot of time then in nature maintaining a state of resilience?
Speaker #0
First of all, nature is my go-to place. I mean... Particularly, I'm attracted to unusual places in nature, which historically are power spots. You know, nature power spots, there are such spots which have, you know, a certain intensity to their energy. And I find those very instructive. So I just really want to encourage that, that when you open your eyes, you see things. Just the uniqueness of a situation, the way the sky and the rock and the ocean and the cliffs and so on are. And that actually then if you pay attention to what happens to your internal state, you go, oh, interesting, this happens in my internal state in this environment. And that actually leads to insights in a certain way. Oh, interesting, these things are connected. And at some time, of course, in order to open up the sensitivity to that, you do have to, of course, suspend some critical thinking and just be curious.
Speaker #1
Yes, that's the word I was wanting to get to, curious. So there's an equation between curiosity and resilience.
Speaker #0
Absolutely. Because I mean, it's really this sense of openness, you know, to exploring the inner landscape, seeing the connection between outer and then being alive. And I think that all of this takes you to just fundamentally being alive again. And liveliness and curiosity are very close. Yeah,
Speaker #1
yeah, that's great. I just have one final question for you, which is the bookend that everyone gets. it is if there were one single skill that you had the power to bestow upon everybody in the world, what would you choose it to be?
Speaker #0
Feeling more. So the felt sense of theater experience.
Speaker #1
Right off the bat. Well, thank you very much for that, Chris. And for all your other insights and thoughts. It's been a very interesting conversation.
Speaker #0
Thank you. I really enjoyed it.
Speaker #1
I hope you enjoyed this dig into resilience as much as I did. If you want to know more about Chris and his work and the upcoming book he co-authored, you'll find links in the show notes. And if you're keen to explore the Inner Green Deal in greater depth, you'll also find links to enlighten you. We regularly hold community events at which you would be warmly welcomed. And a special note, in the four years since it's been running, the Inner Green Deal podcast has been entirely self-funded, and we are committed to keeping it that way, which means commercials free. And to live up to this ambition, we're inviting you to support us. Every contribution, however small, genuinely makes a difference and allows us to continue sharing inspiring stories that highlight how understanding what's happening on the inside can help in tackling the climate crisis. If you'd like to donate, head to the show notes for the relevant link. I thank you for your generosity and for your interest in the work of the Inner Green Deal. We'll be taking a short break over the summer, during which time we'll bring you older episodes of the podcast. And if you'd like to hear other interesting conversations with people working on sustainability and the establishment of deeper connections to ourselves and the world around us, there's plenty to go at in our archives. And as ever, if this conversation captured your imagination, we'd love you to share it and subscribe to the podcast. Thank you very much for listening. I look forward to you joining me again the next time. For now, though, bye-bye.

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