A New Week | April 8th, 2024
Belonging as a Premium - Where are we going as society? What leadership is needed?
Disclaimer: This is a rich essay, and a long one. If you are in the field of emerging technologies, have children on social media, or lead teams/organizations needing to understand their role in a society driven by AI and other tools - this essay is for you. Rip it apart, make it yours, journal about your own reactions, share it with others. But above all: Be in conversation with yourself and others. Always here to receive any of you to do the same.
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Right now, I am looking out of a window in our temporary penthouse apartment, and my kids are doing laps cracking each other up on our 360-degree empty balcony while neighbor is hanging up their freshly washed clothes on their balconies. The sun is shining. We just got back from some time down on the beach and getting a few groceries. Our town has about 15,000 people, and many of the new international nomads and families are seeking a simpler life moving in. It is so damn simple here.
And we are paying a premium for that.
Financially. Mentally. Emotionally. It’s a premium on depth, not convenience.
We are also paying a premium for an alternative schooling approach. Our school is not fancy, but it is mindful, slow, intentional, creative, and slows down our children’s childhood by giving them time to get to know themselves before grades take care of that (our school has no grades!). Our classrooms give 10-15 kids space to learn in a customized environment, and many of the kids here hug their teachers when they see them. All kids play with each other, and there is no age separation or sense of inferiority for the kids in lower grades. Classes start at 9.30 am. Not 7.45 am. My sons get (on average) about 8.5 hours more sleep per week than in Germany. Sleep is one of the first determinants of a child’s nervous system health, and with exposure to technology at a young age, they often stay up much later than they should anyway.
We’re paying a premium for that. So our kids slow down, experience less separation among peers, and get to learn on a more experience-based level, not an academic content and attainment level. We are paying for them to be seen and heard, to be in nature, and to follow a curriculum that still prepares them for life while not giving them the idea that their potential net worth is greater than their self-worth.
I pay a premium for the struggles that come with all of this too - a new language, a lot more bureaucracy, a lot more challenges on a simple day-to-day basis.
I pay a premium to meet with an osteopath and holistic practicioner before I meet with a western doctor after I lost my father in a medical system that told him that “the small issues in different part of his body are not critical enough to take care of it just yet“. So, I pay a premium for preventative holistic care.
I pay a premium for natural light in the house, farmer’s market food, and the opportunity to gather with a circle of women once per month to hold each other, help each other, and support each other.
I have friends who sell incredible courses on nervous-system regulation, authentic selling, and the power of co-regulation, or who write books on how to belong and be surrounded by real friends. I have friends who design retreats around slowing down, sitting in silence for days, and learning how to listen to their feelings.
In short, there is a premium to having access to our most natural states of being.
And in a way, I am part of this “business“. I support, guide, and teach leaders to understand how their relationship to their emotions, feelings, and their nervous system gets in the way of their leadership: relating to their people, growth, ideas, and success in life.
It is in the moments when we humans pause between our most habitual triggers and our most habitual responses to the trigger that we have a chance to review who we want to be, where it comes from, whether we like it, and how it influences others positively or not.
We need room, space, and containers to unplug to recharge, nourish, and re-consider our actions. I sit a lot in this space, offering that space of silence, radical self-inquiry, de-conditioning, allowing new choices and possibilities, and informed action.
This premium is the greatest hope I have for a world that is driven by new artificial responses to my human and philosophical wanderings, wondering, and deep radical self-inquiry.
It is my greatest hope that, in the end, we will use the vastness of new technologies to democratize access to knowledge, but don’t stop there but seek the human touch that makes it feel resonant and like a lively exchange of perspective and creative compromise.
I feel hopeful that this type of premium will afford us to spend more time on the economics of intimacy. Something that, in our desire for scale and rapid growth, has taken us so far away from our innate capacities and stress responses. It has put such a huge burden on our mental, emotional, and physical health over the last few decades.
This premium might have been and will be the very thing that we needed to realize that we have reached a point of saturation in the market of faster, wider, better, and more.
Now, we are spending a premium on coming back to less. And that is only the start of the journey of realizing that even spending more on less just prepared us for a journey to realizing that we’ve been seeking belonging, safety, and shared dignity all along:
In many ways, this seems like a backward trend, but it really is a somatic (felt) reminder that other things, gadgets, and intelligent systems can only take us away from ourselves up to a certain degree. At some point, our innate intelligence will let us know what we need.
As I embark on my new research project on Responsible Tech for Children and Youth together with
, I am finding myself even more conscious about the choices I want to make for myself and my family. There’s a lot that would go faster just letting some form of artificial intelligence support me in my business right now, but something tells me this isn’t my commitment right now.My commitment is to spend more time reflecting, feeling my feelings, surrendering to stuckness, and moving through it from a place of spending time in solitude or with friends. Something tells me I need to nurture my own inner compass and faith even more than I have over the last 10 years. In states of meditation and contemplation, I continue to feel a draw toward simplicity and a new generosity toward time. Like an appreciation for the seasonality of life, deep work, and what it takes to develop trusted relationships.
Everything has sped up over the last decades - our ability to purchase everything literally with a click on our phones, the speed at which we travel, and the fascination to become even more productive and hack our bodies towards the maximum output. We can be reached at all times of the day, and the speed of our communication sometimes gives us little to no chance to reflect on our next best, most intentional, and thoughtful step. Read receipts in organizations show whether you’re on it or not. Or so they think. Data on teens’ relationship to tech literally describes how some teenagers don't feel the desire to party, connect with others in person, or travel because they can just watch others do it. Roughly four-in-ten teen cellphone users (43%) say they often or sometimes use their phone to avoid interacting with people. (Pew Research, 2019 — so imagine what the numbers might look like in 2024).
The underlying cognitive and physical somatic sensation of all of this is speed. The body recognizes speed as a form of danger - the degree may vary. But it creates this subtle, invisible rush in our system that we are “behind“. Neurologically, this puts our nervous system in a state of continuous stress. Not occasional stress. Continuous stress. I’ve written about the window of tolerance, and the “faux“ window of tolerance a few times.
But it also does something else, which I call the awareness crisis. Through the sheer speed and amount of communication, content, and artificial intelligence, we develop a false sense of knowing. We have access to everything, we receive answers to everything, but we have very little muscle memory actually to turn it into embodied action. In many of my workshops for corporates and founders, I also call this the “upper-quadrant syndrome“. We know how things work, but the actual embodiment is harder than ever. It’s the same dissonance as what parents experience with their children sometimes: We’ve told them a million times that the clothes go in the hamper at night, and yet they land on the damn floor yet again (can you tell… it’s a thing for me :D). Up until the moment I decide to practice it with my sons and make it easier for them to practice this skill, it will continue to be a problem. FYI: My 4-year-old and I have recently adopted the basketball method for clothes-in-the-hamper and are turning it into a purposeful, competitive practice moment for his weekly training - we’re dunking all those pants and shirts.
Do you know what else is happening with my son at this moment? Connection! We’re having a shared moment, and he emulates my behavior, learning how to become more skillful through a shared interaction. HUMANS NEED THIS. We are literally wired for emulation and associated learning through our mirror neurons, especially but surely not only children.
Two things happen in states of stuck awareness that we need to further investigate with the rise and persistent nature of integrated technology and artificial intelligence in our lives:
Mirror neurons fire uncontrollably in moments of doom scrolling. What that means is that our body associates the emotions and feelings of SOMEONE ELSE ON THE SCREEN as our own. Young children and young adults experience this more profoundly due to their continuous brain development until the age of 21. This level of empathy can be dangerous in that our body believes that we are experiencing something that is not actually ours. I am not talking about the occasional tear that you have when you see a father and son re-uniting on IG. I am talking about things like following wars online to the degree that you are co-suffering. This might be controversial for some, but research and my own experience working with many, many leaders and running leadership groups suggest that your ability to lead with choice, possibility, and action from this place is deeply diminished. It is one of the reasons why I practice embodied compassion with a lot of my clients, not embodied empathy. Massive difference.
Lack of felt choice and possibility
The last two sentences in #1 hint at it already. The human survival and thriving instinct actually depend on its ability to access choice and possibility more often than not. If we let others think for us more often than not, if our sources of information and knowledge solely consist of the consumption of a false authority (like a chatbot), we are replicating the current education system and are catapulting it to new heights. The #1-#3 frustration and source of emotional dis-regulation for most humans I work with is the realization that they were brought up in an environment where they just had to “function, “perform,” and “show up“. Technology and ample time with and in front of it function as a similar source in the way that (similar to a traditional classroom) it puts kids, teenagers, and adults into a false freeze response.
So, where does this leave us? What is the premium we can give our kids and ourselves to navigate our lives with a little more certainty, a few more felt “hell yes“?
Overall, it seems like what is needed from all of us is to embrace a new type of leadership that equips us with a greater inner knowing, a deeper sense of personal and collective ethics, and more of “What is needed/wanted of me now?“ and less of “What am I doing next?“
In my world of language, I would summarize this as a rising need for the consciousness and importance of emotional and somatic intelligence (over artificial intelligence)
The premium we will need to pay to invest in our shared humanity moving forward needs to be:
More nervous system health education for anyone influencing others (yeah.. you guessed it right…that’s all of us): emotional fluidity, resilience, and regulation. This is particularly important for individuals who are influencing other people’s lives every day - executives, senior managers, founders, politicians, political operatives, and community builders.
Question to ponder:
What is my and our collective nervous system right now? How does is serve us? How does it not?
Looking at the system of me and us, what are we being asked to do? What is our next evolution as a team?
One of the many business ideas I have in the back of my digital pocket: Walk-in day spas for nervous system regulation or week-long nervous system regulation centers providing us the premium of returning to our bodies when we can’t seem to trust anything or anyone else anymore. Verticals could offer special services to executives, parents, burnout patients, and individuals ready to explore their PTSD, ADHD, burnout, etc, from a new perspective on health (Salutogenesis).
Professional communities that distinctively promise to refrain from using artificial intelligence for truthful, trusted, authentic, and experience-based exchanges.
There is a time and place for everything. When it comes to personal and professional development, we need to create environments that ensure a human-first approach to personal growth. The reason is not to oppose technologies such as Thyself.ai but to equip us with a human bias and critical eye, as well as deep personal somatic awareness to artificially provided answers. AI tools are limited by the data they work with. These tools aren't designed to fully behave like the user but to mimic human behavior.
As an example, when we go and see a therapist, coach, or mentor, we do so because we want to be seen and heard for our very distinct circumstance and context. Not just receive answers.Question to ponder:
Who are the communities that provide me with the chance to feel and be, as well as explore my own truth away from mimic-ed answers or advice?
How am I a source of accountability, honesty and positive influence to the people around me? Am I asking questions that help people reflect on themselves based on the deeply PERSONAL CONTEXT they have given me? Am I answering to give advice or to help someone to get to know themselves better? (this is also the difference between AI-generated answers and trusted companionship or coaches)
Business idea: Coaches of any kind need to become educated in the field of nervous system health, trauma-sensitive coaching, and somatic intelligence to provide nuanced layers to their work that AI won’t be able to pick up on (depth, context, and personal touch). I’ve been working with several coaches over the years who asked me to support them by adding this important nuance to their work, and the overall sense has been that they can meet their clients on a much deeper level that connected cognitive blockages with emotional trauma and somatic conditioned tendencies. I will write more about this soon. I am planning to work on an easy-to-access resource for fellow coaches over the next year. In order to meet the demands of the mental healthcare industries, we need to provide educational avenues for coaches, osteopaths, and mental health professionals without a university degree to provide help and support to those who need to find help now and until a therapist becomes available.
Questions to ponder for coaches:
How do I fuel the economics of intimacy? How do we come together as fellow coaches to commit to less noise, higher quality, and a standard of operating and relating that truly honors our people's complex life and work challenges?
What are trauma-sensitive coursework that I can attend to meet my clients more holistically and understand the emotional patterns that get in their way of living and operating their lives more fluidly?
How do I continue to be part of a safe corner of the internet? How do I communicate with others? What does it look like to prioritize human connection above everything?
Data transparency on how AI models were developed for the sake of inclusivity, accuracy, and reliability.
Think: Every company, every content creator, and every writer should be interested in declaring whether they used AI to create a product, IP, or alike to show how whether their product is at a premium (human-first) or AI-generated.
Questions to ponder for individuals:
When do I use ChatGPT, for instance? What questions do I really want support on? When does support become automated? Does this automation diminish the art of deep inquiry and the ecstasy that comes with cognitive and emotional, felt breakthroughs through writing and conversing?
Questions for teams and companies:
What is the future that we know that needs to be true? What do we need to continue serving the world without causing more dysregulation?
Are we communicating our data ethics and values clearly? Why or why not?
All of the questions I provide are just teasers. The inquiry continues, but this is a good start. Based on my experience working with founders in web3 and AI, these questions are often important to respond to but never prioritized.
It is important to reflect on how a competitive advantage can also be established by choosing to communicate those values more openly. Humans respond to humans building companies with strong ethics and more loyalty.
Guuuys, this was a long essay. I hope you made it to the end and are in it with me: To build and continue to build safe corners of the internet with me. More belonging, more safety, more dignity. To not be confused by technologies but to enable technologies to solve real problems, we need to radically deepen contact with our soul, essence, and shared humanity.
All the love, all the power,
Franzi
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Join me and all the other hundreds of humans on the journey of better understanding our service to the world.
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This was a real banger of an essay Franzi, so inspired by your writing and work... keep going! 🔥