Hope Needs a Nervous System

This week I was live illustrating at a people-leaders day, and psychologist Dr Dougal Sutherland spoke about emotional regulation in the workplace. I found his insights practical, grounded and urgently needed.

It got me thinking. Maybe the reason leadership has so often been top-down, hierarchical, and power-hoardy is because those models were built around people who never learned to regulate their emotions. They didn’t have the tools to lead without control - so they reached for control.

But leadership is changing. It has to. And hope-holders - the ones daring to imagine better - are cultural leaders whether they asked to be or not.

As I have written about previously, hope isn’t a mood. It’s not waiting for the world to feel safe or fair. It’s a muscle. A rhythm. A practice. And like any practice, it lives in the body.

We live in an age of chronic nervous system hijack. Every scroll, every alert, every new "what now?" nudges us toward panic, numbness, or despair. If we’re not anchored in our bodies, hope doesn’t stand a chance - It gets drowned out in the noise.

Emotional regulation is not about being superchill all the time. It’s not about suppressing the rage or pushing down the tears. Rather it’s about staying with ourselves, so we don’t hand the steering wheel to fear.

It is patently clear to me that these aren’t soft skills. They’re hope survival skills for these times. So a hope practice might look like this:

• Breathing, dropping into your body, connecting to bigger stories and a deeper ‘why’ before you launch into the group chat.

• Sitting with the feeling. Naming it. Even welcoming it. Saying to the emotion “you’re here because I care.” 

• Letting the tears come. Letting the body move what the mind can’t fix.

• Choosing water, choosing breath, choosing the next kind thing. Let the stress in your body go with each loud exhale.

• Coming back to the why, the vision, the reason you’re still showing up, and then allowing yourself to rest. Lie, sit with eyes closed. Have a nap. Trust the body settle and digest the experience so that your mind doesn’t have to.

These are all embodied practices. Because your body is your hope instrument;  for resonance, for making noise, for sensing what’s emerging, for divining the next insight.

We don’t think our way into hope. We practice it, with our whole selves.

Emotional regulation is how we stay human when everything’s screaming for us to shut down or blow up. It’s what lets us hold the weight of the world without becoming it.

Personally, I fail on this daily. Ask my daughter : ) But the point is, it’s a practice. We are all learning to learn how to handle this unprecedented intensity.

So to recap - emotional regulation doesn’t mean pretending everything’s fine. It means staying with yourself long enough to choose something that aligns. Until you find something that feels true.

After all, at its essence, the polycrisis is a quest for more truth, beauty and love. That is the ultimate destination. But to get you moving along that path, hope doesn’t need you to be toxically-positive. It just asks you to be present; breathing, feeling and choosing. It’s as simple and as difficult as that.

Lots of love xxx Megan

#Leadership #EmotionalRegulation #NervousSystem #Hope-Holders #Hope #HopeDispatch #Polycrisis #Metacrisis #MentalHealth