Creating favourable conditions
For your life, work and creative practise
If you're building/maintaining your small or micro business with some aspect of social media marketing involved, it might be that - like many of the clients I work with - you’re not seeing the whole picture.
Especially if you’re in the negative loop of comparing yourself to others like you marketing what they do and building a "personal brand" (vomit) on social media. Others who potentially: a) outright lie; b) prioritise and want different things; c) don’t have the same life situation/caring responsibilities/access to material resource as you.
It is such a waste of time comparing apples with pears, don't you think? And this is what social media algorithms encourage us to do. At a rate of knots! Making it almost impossible to get enough distance to see what’s happening. We know we shouldn’t compare, and yet we just can’t seem to stop. The draw is so very intoxicating.
Photo from Unsplash by David Young
Rewilding for natural variance
Recently I visited Knepp - a 3,500 acre rewilding project and the largest of it’s kind in the UK (I really recommend a visit if you need an injection of optimism about our future). At Knepp, the farmland has been allowed to regenerate over the past 20+ years creating a patchwork of different landscapes - same plants, same species, but slightly (or sometimes very) different makeup and visual impact walking through.
How the land has evolved has been dependent on how the farmland had been used previously – which cattle it was home to, which crops were grown there if it was arable land, as well as which differences were already existing there prior to farming, such as available water running through lakes or streams, and a myriad of other factors.
The beauty of each patch - each unique natural mix of qualities and experience, plus manmade decisions out of the control of the land - is it has led to the greatest biodiversity of animal and plant species. The guide who led me and other participants round on a dusk safari shared that Knepp is home to 13 species of bat. Plus we got to see storks in flight and nesting and evidence of the beavers living there.
Introducing diverse herbivores (there are cows, pigs and ponies at Knepp - all wild) leads to diversity of plant species, combinations and land mass, and the opposite is true also.
Nature does not want or need uniformity, it thrives best where there is difference and variety. It’s this that drives abundance: Interconnection, reciprocity, difference.
Coaching as rewilding
I relate this back to what I see in the work of the clients I coach. Everyone’s work, life situations, desires, values and ethics are different. No two clients are the same. Respecting this, rejecting uniformity and encouraging a tuning in - for each person - to what is right for their unique set of conditions is what coaching is all about. It feels experimental and empowering to explore finding one’s own "favourable conditions" for what one wants to make of life and work.
A tale of two rooms
For Virginia Woolf this meant a room in a beautiful garden off her 16th century South Downs cottage, Monk's House, and a strict routine (maintained by her devoted husband, Leonard Woolf). He woke her at 8am everyday with breakfast, ensuring she ate before crossing the garden to her converted potting shed where she wrote till noon. A light lunch would be served by their live in housekeeper and cook, Nellie, before the Woolfs embarked on an afternoon tramp across the South Downs, just beyond a field they’d acquired so as to ensure their view of the Downs was never hampered. In the late afternoon and evening, they’d take supper, read and write letters, write in their journals and listen to music in the drawing room. Dreamy, right?
When Woolf wrote:
“a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction”
and quoted her own inherited income of £500 per year left to her by an aunt (equvalent to about £30,000 in today’s money), she was making reference to her own “favourable conditions”. Whilst also negating to mention the housekeeper, gardener and her (lifelong socialist) husband, who recognised his wife’s genius and her frailty and seemingly did everything in his power to accommodate her in a way quite unusual to the era. Quite unusual for the present era too with all the discussion of disability cuts!
In contrast, Claire Hynes in her essay “Room” talks of her life as an academic, dealing with extremely unfavourable conditions of racist treatment from white professors and peers in academia, not to mention single parenthood and sharing a tiny room and single bed with her young daughter in a women’s refuge with limited funds. Certainly no staff or partner seeing her genius and supporting her routine to unleash it. No leg up at all, only a firm holding down. Where are her favourable conditions in which to write? Her options are a far cry from Woolf’s. Yet write she does. Slowly, perhaps not quite so steadily.
Favourable conditions can’t negate all struggle
It’s notable that even with the favourable conditions Woolf experienced – her first book was published by her stepbrother who owned a publishing house, The Woolfs then bought a printing press and founded their own publishing firm, Hogarth Press, so no need for agents, submiiting work or dealing with rejections. Plus her husband was an editor – still she experienced mental breakdown with the publication of every book she wrote. To me. this highlights the vulnerability inherent in creating for public consumption, no matter the material conditions.
As valuable as I think Woolf’s work is and there’s lots that is inspiring about her way of life (aside from her not-at-all inspiring racism, deep classism and self-professed snobbery), her favourable conditions are a far cry from what most of us can ever hope to achieve.
Inspiration in complex lives
At least as inspiring, if not more so, is Hynes, existing in challenging contexts on all levels and still managing to write. Slowly and steadily. Or Maya Angelou, writing her life after many lives and careers experienced with huge compromise involved – she left her child with his grandmother so she could work and when she wrote her memoirs, checked into hotels to do so without being disturbed by her child. Or Zora Neale Hurston, writing from the position of having been raised in Eatonville, one of the first all black towns post Antebellum, who, interestingly, was a Republican and wanted nothing to do with what she saw as the “victimhood” and lack of personal responsibility underpinning the Civil Rights Movement of the 60s. Or Alice Walker, activist, prolific writer, Womanist and mother whose only daughter's memoir describes feelings of neglect.
The point is, we are all multilayered, complex beings with equally complex lives, values, needs, desires and relationships. With varying levels of compromise to make and marginalisation to face. We each have to find our own path in a world that can be brutal and lonely, just as much as it can be beautiful and supportive. That’s the best it gets, as we work towards dismantling and replacing existing systems and that's for the long haul.
The perils of social media
My own experience of almost 4 years off Instagram and Facebook is that social media - it’s algorithms dictating what we view and driven on behavioural science encouraging stronger and stronger emotion to keep eyeballs hooked and malleable to advertising in ever more insidous ways – compels us to urgency and simplistic thinking that restricts our agency and empowerment. This is hugely impactful.
In my work with clients, I find that more and more people are questioning the paradigm they’ve spent a decade or more in, and I encourage this! Because the more people break away from these systems in pursuit of thinking about life differently and daring to act on their daydreams, the better for everyone. Nature abhors uniformity. Abundance is found in diversity and difference.
Be different. The creation of a liveable future depends on it.
Invitations for consideration...
What are your “favourable conditions" for supporting your working life or creative practise? What do you need to sustain a way of living and working that supports you?
How might these favourable conditions have changed over time? How might you experiment with altering things to reach what might be more favourable now?
Where do you work best? How might a change of location/context/way of working shift your being?
Who supports you in your work/life/creative practise? Who is inspiring/energising/grounding? What type of a person is missing from your network if a specific person is hard to identify?
Where/how might you (re)connect with them/this type of person?
