Practicing visionary organizing to feel less overwhelmed
Matt Birkhold
It is really easy to feel overwhelmed these days. In the last 90 days, our collective sense of what’s normal has been taken. I’ve got friends who are losing jobs and friends whose jobs are being threatened. Legal rights I’ve long taken for granted no longer matter. The amount of money my partner and I spend at the grocery store is absurd. Large scale war and economic instability feel like they could be right around the corner. Doom Scrolling is easy to start and hard to break. Escape–geographic or through any other means–is enticing. It is a frightening time to be alive. Despite this fear, we don’t have to be overwhelmed.
Visionary Organizing creates a framework and practices to cope with feeling overwhelmed. It is an approach to solving social, individual, community, and organizational problems that equally emphasizes our material needs for survival and our nonmaterial needs for thriving. It solves problems by applying six components to a problem and facilitates change by nurturing interdependence, transforming relationships, and creating new systems that can replace what already exists.
When I’m overwhelmed, I find the personally transformative components of Visionary Organizing can be especially helpful. They are:
Locating Ourselves in Systems and History
Connecting to and Trusting Our Inner Wisdom
Recognizing and Nurturing Interdependence
When I locate myself in systems and history, I’m provided with a framework to make intellectual sense of what’s happening around me. I’m reminded that our current experience is not exceptional because the history that gave birth to patriarchal racial capitalism–genocide, colonization, enslavement, burning women, and separating ourselves from nature–is filled with achieving social control through fear. When I see this, I get a measure of humility and hope from knowledge that people before me also lived through periods of systemic chaos. This humility somehow makes the moment less overwhelming.
After locating myself and systems in history calms me down, I can get centered enough to connect to and trust my inner wisdom. For me, meditation is a vital part of hearing my inner wisdom because it allows me to differentiate between what my brain is scared of, reacting to, and what my inner wisdom might share with me. Sometimes I find this guided meditation especially helpful. My inner wisdom always provides me easy steps to take that contribute to collective wellbeing. Last week, it told me to ask my friend Corbin about ideas for this month’s column. This article is the result.
When I recognize and nurture interdependence, I know I have the power to act on what my inner wisdom is telling me to do. I know I have this power because I see the inescapable web of mutuality that I am literally trapped in and the power it provides me with. In this web I have relational power, or the power that is produced by being in relationship to something or someone else. The beautiful thing about relational power is that it doesn’t have to be built or created. It is always there. Recognizing and nurturing interdependence happens when I assume responsibility for using the power this web of mutuality gives me in ways that benefit others.
Because they empower me to get grounded, see what I can contribute to a situation, and connect me to my relational power, practicing these components of Visionary Organizing make me less overwhelmed by any problem. In this moment, these components don’t necessarily remove my fear, but they do give me a sense of power in the face of fear. This sense of power then allows me to navigate the overwhelm of the moment in ways that make me stronger and benefit others. If you want to learn more about these components, sign up for Visionary Organizing Lab’s upcoming workshop series, “See Yourself Differently: The Personally Transformative Components of Visionary Organizing.
