I started the 5Cs podcast because I wanted to learn the truth behind the noise around climate change. That sounds simple. It wasn’t. I came from thirty years in the chemical, plastics, and lubricants industries. Businesses built on extraction, every one of them. I knew how to make money. I did not know what was actually happening to the world my industries had helped build.

So I started asking

And I kept asking. Five years of research. Four years of recording. Guests who have never once said no to me. Scientists, psychologists, philosophers, activists, executives, indigenous wisdom keepers and so many more. People who could have talked to anyone and chose to spend an hour with me instead.

I often think I earned an MBA in how things actually work in the real world. Not the textbook version. The version where the assumptions don’t hold, the frameworks were built for a world that no longer exists, and the people doing the most important work are the ones least likely to be in the rooms where decisions get made.

One of the hardest things

I have ever done is admit I needed help. For most of my life, I believed I could handle whatever came my way on my own. Push through. Hold steady. Power on. I held that belief because it was baked into me. The same story most of us absorbed growing up, the one that says needing others is a weakness.

It took me far too long to unlearn it. None of us can do anything meaningful alone. Not the things that actually matter. We all need someone. Usually more than one someone.

These days, you know the world seems to be completely undone and very different from anything we have ever experienced. For so many the globe over it is incredibly unnerving and destabilising. My inbox is filled with listeners and colleagues begging me for suggestions about how to do things differently, how to cope and how to hang on.

I bet you’ve also had similar kinds of thoughts and conversations 

That’s why I want to tell you about the latest episode with my guest in the Shell Shocked series. She is a clinical psychologist and ecopsychologist with 35 years of practice. She walked me through the cleanest and most immediately usable framework I have encountered. For and by people like you and me. I believe there is an excellent chance you will benefit from listening to her and get a hit of relief, like I did.

There are three types of coping. All three are necessary. Each has an adaptive version and a version that quietly makes things worse. It is a way of understanding what you need to stay viable while doing work that matters in a world that makes it hard. Not what the productivity crowd tells you that you need. What you actually need. I cannot do it justice in a post.

Episode three of this series is where I would start. Thirty minutes. Just you and your quiet space. Nobody needs to know you listened. Nobody needs to know you got something from it. You don’t even need to thank me.

What I am really curious about is, what would change for you if you stopped pretending you could carry all of this on your own?

BTW, I promised you last week that I would continue with Viktor Frankl’s wisdom.  I didn’t forget; it’s in the queue. This week needed something more urgent.