Holding Change by adrienne maree brown

Author:adrienne maree brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: AK Press
Published: 2021-03-11T16:00:00+00:00

Trust As A Fractal Construct

How trustworthy are you? How do you know when to trust others? Do you know how to grow trust between yourself and others?

In facilitation, you want to be trustworthy to your group—don’t over promise and under deliver, and don’t pretend you understand that which you really don’t.

Different levels of truth are required for different kinds of work—some groups, especially movement direct-action entities, need to be able to trust each other in life-or-death conditions. Other groups need to be able to trust each other to move resources together. Others only need enough trust for a broad coalition, light alignment to move towards a common goal.

If the trust needs to be deeper, you will need to give the group more time and space to drop in with each other. Any group that is supposed to make decisions together needs to have some basic trust-building time.

These days, it’s not unusual to sit in a meeting where there is barely any actual presence—everyone is behind a computer or on their phones, sometimes participating in multiple meetings at the same moment. Some of this is a function of modern life—we have short attention spans and a multitude of distractions.

Some of this is because there is a strong need for radical movement leadership and labor, paired with a scarcity of time and resources for deep leadership development, which results in a smaller-than-necessary number of leaders holding a ton of urgent and very necessary roles.

Some of this is the ego that is born out of insecurity. By moving from point to point but barely being anywhere, we can make ourselves look and feel important, covering the truth that we often don’t know what we’re doing, how to contribute, or what our value is outside of constant production.

We have movements whose members struggle to trust each other at a time when those who oppose us can easily track and weaponize that distrust. It is strategic to take the time to build internal trust in our work.

Everything changes when people are face to face. I was once with author, scientist, and spiritual teacher Barbara Holmes in a Beloved Community gathering in which she explained how the heartbeat creates a 360-degree vibrational field. When we are in proximity to each other, she taught, we are literally sitting in each other’s fields, co-creating a vibration unique to us.23 As often as you reasonably can, move people into proximity with each other, into direct conversation and mutual exchange of energy.24

Allow relationships in the room to grow at the scale of reality—initially one to one. Then grow into family sized units, three to eight people. Ten is big, ten is a lot of people to try and find common ground within.

The scale that most movements and groups try to move in is too large for the intimacy of possibility.

Our work as facilitators is to help every group find ways to generate intimacy, deepen relationship, and learn respect for each other. Each connection between two people in the room is

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