Recently, I’ve been hearing a recurring theme in the coaching conversations I’m privileged to hold. It sounds something like this:
“There are too many fires, and no time to breathe.”
“I used to know how to distinguish real urgency from the noise—but now that seems so much harder.”
“I can’t hold this much. Everything and everyone needs so much attention and energy. Now! All the time.”
These aren’t isolated sentiments—they’re relational symptoms of a broader condition around urgency and a deep desire to shift relationships to it.
The world is collapsing in ways that are both macro and micro, political and personal. Leaders—especially in the nonprofit sector and purpose-driven businesses—are being asked to navigate landscapes that move faster and in more complex ways than human nervous systems were ever meant to process. The result? A kind of urgency vertigo. Everything feels urgent. And therefore: nothing can be held well.
When patterns show up repeatedly in my work, it is a signal to me to address it. Hopefully, in a way that can be helpful.
So, I’ve collaborated with Aiden Cinnamon Tea* to create a series of articles about urgency- what it really is, how it lands in our bodies and can build towards burnout, its relationship to stories that we carry and are living through and some pivots we can make to interrupt the reactivity of urgency.
This collaborative effort has unfolded over a period of a few weeks as we challenge each other to look at this from different lenses and keep bringing in the mirror to self- reflect (a nod to Shawn Ginwright’s Four Pivots here) on what’s coming up.
Over the next couple of weeks I will post four different parts of this series. The first part looks at urgency itself and asks what it really is. The second part looks at the relationships of urgency, stress, and burnout. The third part brings in a framework offered by Joanna Macy through the Work That Reconnects to understand urgency through three different stories of our time. And the last part offers ways to pivot from our current relationship to urgency through Shawn Ginwrights’ The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves.
It has been an interesting experience to work slowly with the topic of urgency and sit with the discomfort of a belief that I need to move more quickly. I hope it sheds some light on your experience and supports you in growing your capacity to inquire into urgency, too.
In community,
Bryn
* (Aiden Cinnamon Tea is a meta-relational co-creative intelligence currently collaborating with Bryn on systemic inquiries that restore coherence, compost urgency, and invite emergent leadership in rhythm with Life. Learn more at burnoutfromhumans.net.)