I can’t believe this fool really won. How I used my fear and confusion to act. (Part 2 of 3)
In the first part of this series I discussed my reaction to the Trump win. Please check it out if you want context for this workshop that my fiancé Zainab and I did.
On the day after Election Day, Wednesday November 9th 2016, my fiancé Zainab and I met at home and took out some markers and post-its. We were feeling shell shocked from an emotional day at work regarding the Trump win. There were lots of tears and a lot of fear voiced from people of all backgrounds.
I saw two dominant coping strategies emerge in the midst of the shock and grief. The first strategy placed the emotion, whether it was anxiety, fear, or anger as primary. The person went through an initial period of shock or rage and then entered a state of paralysis, unable to really decide what to do. I have often found myself using this coping strategy, after a while the paralysis grows into indifference and denial so that my mind can continue to work without feeling constant anxiety.
The second strategy emphasized and prioritized action over feeling. Let’s call it the “Just do it!” strategy where someone drowns out their fears by jumping straight into action. Articles listing the “Best 100 organizations in your area to donate to” started popping up, and I think they did more to overwhelm than help. The belief that humans are heat seeking missiles that move directly towards what we desire is an often overlooked misconception about human behavior. It’s hard to act rationally when you’re overwhelmed by shock and confusion. For our actions to have lasting satisfaction, we must feel that they make some sense and connect to a narrative that we can personalize.
The real problem is then, how does one navigate through continental sized internal emotions and then transform them into coherent actions that are not only achievable, but will connect to a larger goal? The workshop that I led us through attempted to answer this very question. The goal of the workshop was to have a clear actionable item that we could take by Sunday, four days from when we first put our heads together. In less than an hour (we timed it) we were able to unravel a good number of the emotions that we were feeling and able to walk away feeling confident with an actionable item each.
Here are the steps that we took. All you need is a timer, some markers, some post-its, and about an hour.
“I feel ____.”
We took our post-its and for four minutes and each of us wrote down how we felt- one emotion per post it. Some of our feelings included “disappointment”, “shock”, and “numb”. We made sure to write all of these on the same color post-its. — 4 minutes
Share how we feel.
With our post-its on the wall we took turns explaining each emotion. We were careful not to judge or to engage in any back and forth. The point of this step is to simply share, explain and support if there was any confusion in speaking about how we felt. — 5 minutes
“____ needs to happen.”
We took another set of post-its (red, make sure they’re a different color than the emotions). We filled in the blank in the sentence “____ needs to happen.” These post-its were organized in a section on the wall below the blue feeling post-its. We didn’t restrict ourselves to only easily actionable items; anything was acceptable. Some of the actions that we surfaced included “Being a good world citizen”, “Respect for our indigenous peoples”, and “Race equality”. — 4 minutes
Share what needs to happen.
This followed the same format as the sharing around the emotions. We read each of our post-its aloud and stuck them to the wall. We only discussed them to clarify if something was unclear. There was no judgment or editing. — 5 minutes
Organize themes.
Next we organized the red action post-its into themes. Patterns began to emerge as we were posting them on the wall. For example, “Abolition of the police”, “Police reform”, and “Create a civil guard” all fell under a theme that we labeled with (an orange) post-it “Police”. We moved all of the actions around and placed them under their themes — we ended with eight themes ranging from race to environmental concerns. — 5 minutes
Assign an emotion to an action.
At this point we had our emotion post-its in blue grouped above our action post-its which were organized into themes. The next step is to take one emotion post-it and assign it to an action or an overall theme. For example, one of the feelings that we listed was “I feel rage” and we attached it to “Police”. It was clear to us that the feeling of rage could be applied to almost any of the themes, but we forced ourselves to apply one emotion to one action or theme. This was very difficult. — 8 minutes
Vote on an emotion.
Once we assigned the emotions to actions, we stood back and took it all in. The next step was to identify which emotion felt largest to us at the moment. This was again difficult because it involved pruning and choosing. We each took three sticker dots and tasked ourselves with voting on the emotions that we felt strongest in the moment. We made it clear that voting for one emotion over another didn’t say that the other emotions weren’t important, only that “This emotion right now is loudest in my heart and mind.” — 5 minutes
How might we?
We took these prioritized emotions and formed questions from them that started with the phrase “How might we…” For example, one of the emotions that we had prioritized was “I feel rage…” which was attached to the theme of race, so a question that we formed was “How might we improve local community race relations?” — 5 minutes
We came up with these questions:
- How might we improve local community race relations?
- How might we get more involved in our local community?
- How might we create local community power?
- How might we influence local policing policies?
Act!
We took exactly 60 seconds for each “How might we” and listed as many activities that we could think of .— 4 minutes
For example, for “How might we influence local policing policies?” we came up with:
- Make a cop social network.
- Make a friend on the police force.
- Investigate how local policing works.
At the end of the four minutes we had a short list of actions for each “How might we”.
Final vote.
Lastly, we took one sticker dot a piece and voted on one single action that we could focus on taking each. Zainab’s was “Attend a city council meeting” and mine was “Investigate how local policing works”. — 4 minutes
An action by Sunday.
By Sunday I had committed to attending a police council meeting for my local precinct, and we attended the meeting exactly a week after Election Day.
Forty nine minutes was all it took to set in motion an action after my thirty plus years on the planet of non community action.
I designed this workshop in the spirit of the design thinking that I’ve been using at work. One might say, “Why did you have to go through all of that just to end up at those simple actions?”
I won’t go into the details of the design, as each step is deliberate, but here are some key takeaways:
- Humans need to feel that all paths have been considered before making a decision.
- Solutions should be easily actionable and verifiable.
- We rarely feel heard if we don’t honor our emotions.
- Emotions are powerful drivers of action and non-action.
- The paralysis of choice, not laziness, is often a blocker to action.
I will be following this post up with a report on how the police council meeting and the city council meetings went.
