How João Sevilhano creates space as an archaeologist of the mind
Happyplaces Stories (video)
We both ran a bit late for our meeting, and because of that, we were both right on time. João told me that he was not a big fan of being in front of cameras, being an introvert. Good that I brought two :) But as soon as we installed and pressed the record button, João set off on a space story uncovering different layers of space, and I was part of something beautiful. I think he added a new chapter to the book of Happyplaces Project.
is one of the managing partners and co-founder of Way Beyond, responsible for strategy and innovation. He discovered his taste and curiosity for words early on: he spent some time of his childhood reading the Enciclopédia Luso-Brasileira. He graduated in Applied Psychology and, since then, has maintained a clinical activity close to psychoanalysis. João was a member of the Portuguese Psychoanalytic Society. As a member of the Portuguese Psychologists Order, holds a specialist degree in Work, Social and Organizational Psychology, with an advanced speciality in Psychological Coaching and lived in a department of people of a large Portuguese company. After that experience, he has dedicated himself to creating and facilitating learning contexts, first in EEC (European Coaching School), where he was Pedagogical Director and Managing Partner and now in Way Beyond. João is a Certified Professional Coach by the International Coach Federation. He often collaborates with academic institutions where he tries to make psychology accessible for non-psychologists. He is a visiting lecturer at Porto Business School, NOVA Doctoral School and others.
Thank you and the House of Beautiful Business for the beautiful connection.
This transcript has been edited for clarity and length.
Reconstructing stories
I used to present myself by saying that as a kid, I wanted to be an archaeologist, probably influenced by Indiana Jones movies. What fascinated me besides all the adventures was that he was able to create a story from the artefacts that people left behind. Later, I remembered seeing a tv show — because I grew up in the tv era — where a detective placed his hand on the hood of a car to see if it was still warm. If it was warm indeed, he knew the car was parked there recently. Then he knew the person driving it had arrived recently and couldn’t be far away. This also fascinated me because it was another way to reconstruct a story from the evidence people left behind. Sadly I ended up as a psychologist. But now, when I look back, I see a link between these three professions or activities. I think that psychologists help people to reconstruct their stories as well. However, the artefacts and the evidence left behind for a psychologist are thoughts, feelings, behaviours and ways to connect and establish relationships with other people. This fundamentally defines me in who I am as a person. I really like to have a detective mindset, but I also have a deep curiosity to learn how people work and how do we as human beings function alone, as well as in communities.
I think workplaces and our relationship with work are making us ill. I would really like to see if we can have a relationship with work that is different from what we have today.
Workspace
My professional evolution has been around these ideas and questions. I started as a clinical psychologist trying to understand myself better to understand better how we as people function and work together. Not to try to understand what is wrong or right, what is health or pathology, but to learn how we can live better lives. It sounds a bit like a cliché, but it is one of the things that drove me to do what I do. I shifted from working in a hospital to working in the HR department of a big Portuguese corporation. That was a very painful experience, but it helped me understand that workplaces could be a context where I could learn and make a difference. I didn’t know how back then; that was 18 years ago. But the seed planted with that experience led me to where I am today. Certainly, it has brought me a lot of struggles, and it still does. I think workplaces and our relationship with work are making us ill. I would really like to see if we can have a relationship with work that is different from what we have today, but I think that will not happen in my lifetime.
Life ≠ work
We always talk about a work-life balance. I think that this idea has been unsuccessfully debunked. And why that is, is simple enough: it doesn’t seem right to put life and work on the same scale because life is life as a whole, and work is just a little part of life. This is not a new idea, but when you look at some words like the Portuguese word for work, ‘trabalho’. This comes from the Latin word ‘trepalium’, a torture instrument. If you look at the word ‘business’ in Portuguese, that is ‘negócio’. That means ‘the negation of leisure’. In the ancient Roman days, ‘negotium’ was the art of the labour of enslaved people. They weren’t allowed to have leisure. Leisure back then was not necessarily associated with sloth or not doing anything. It was associated with culture, human flourishing, art and contemplation, things not possible for enslaved people. ‘Business’ in Latin means ‘not being able to have leisure’ or ‘not being able to cultivate oneself’. Even in English, ‘business’ means ‘to be busy’. It is not okay not to be busy. You have to be busy.
I think these ideas that have been implanted in us for a long time are finally taking their toll. It is not a coincidence that we see a phenomenon like the great resignation, or burn-put being on the rise, or depression being the disease of the century. These are not coincidences. Organising work and living around work is making us worse as people and as a civilisation. The industrial revolution, the scientific revolution and the technological revolution have all promised us to work less or differently. Those promises never came to reality.
Organising work and living around work is making us worse as people and as a civilisation. We need to think and live our work-life differently.
Things have gotten worse. We must find a way to relate to work differently. I also think that these ideas have implications for, for instance, climate change. I’m trying not to have a political opinion here, but I feel that the capitalist paradigm we live in, where the pursuit of growth for growth’s sake, is not sustainable. It is not sustainable from a planetary point of view and not from a human point of view.
When I say human, I say the emotional, psychological and spiritual way of looking at us as humans. Some pointers in history may indicate that we still have the opportunity to shift into a new and right path. For instance, management. I’m a psychologist, not a manager, but management roles came with the industrial revolution. Back then, they enforced physical restraints on workers to enhance production lines.
A French philosopher Michel Foucault did not specifically study the industrial revolution, but he studied the world of medicine. He also studied prisons. It is interesting to see those management theories evolved at the same time as the evolution of the architecture of prisons and asylums. And also the invention of some instruments of restraint, like, for instance, the straitjacket. This all happened at the same time. He calls these techniques the ‘docile bodies’. Managers, prison directors and asylum managers restrain the bodies of their ‘clients’, workers, mentally ill or felons. Today the limits don’t pertain to our bodies; they pertain to our ideas and feelings. The dynamics and the paradigms are the same; we just shifted where we put our restraints. These are some of the ideas that I have been thinking about for the last few years that lead me to think that we need to think and live our work-life differently.
Designing space
My background is in psychology, particularly in psychoanalysis. I studied psychology at a school specialising in psychoanalysis, but I was against it when I went there. The second I left university, I knew that I would choose psychoanalysis as the therapy to analyse myself. I unconsciously felt that it would probably push my buttons. So I started to analyse myself not because I was mentally ill or had some major problems but because I wanted to become a psychoanalyst. I learned it was about creating space when I was lying on the couch for seven years. And with ‘creating’, I mean designing space.
Energies, unconsciousness, chakras, the inexplainable, intuition; these are all words we use to explain what we find difficult to explain. For me, this is the ultimate definition of space.
Space for unconsciousness
How can we design space not only through words but also through what is not said, the idea of the unconsciousness or a kind of energy that links people without using words? Even today, this fascinates me. It is a theory, but we see it all around us. Different people call it different things: energies, unconsciousness, chakras, the inexplainable, intuition; what is it? These are all words we use to explain what we find difficult to explain. For me, this is the ultimate definition of space. It is what we cannot explain.
When we don’t have meaning, we invent one. One of my major discoveries was that we create a story to give meaning to our experiences. If we urge to find meaning — and we are conditioned this way — it means that the meaning we find to explain our experiences is always biased, which leaves space for constant reinterpretation and for new stories to be told.
There are two fundamental ideas that human beings live by. First, we are afraid to die and do not have constant consciousness about this. It is fear. Some of us grow up and old, not continuously living with the idea that we will die, but as we grow older, this idea becomes more present. Then we accept it or not. Second, I believe our main drive is not to avoid death but to find meaning in things. It is the explanation for a lot of things. It could explain psychopathology in a very simplistic way, for example, where we have difficulty finding meaning in our lives due to traumatic experiences or suffering. Then we create rituals or new worlds where we can live more comfortably, which could also explain why we have so much unconscious bias and prejudices. When we don’t have meaning, we invent one. One of my major discoveries was that we create a story to give meaning to our experiences. And, if we urge to find meaning — and we are conditioned this way — it means that the meaning we find to explain our experiences is always biased, which leaves space for constant reinterpretation and for new stories to be told.
We need to have relationships with other people to better look at ourselves and our experiences and to find new explanations not based on the idea that the old ones were wrong but on the idea that they might not be completely right.
The beauty of this is that it is very difficult to do that alone. To do that, we have to have relationships with other people to better look at ourselves and our experiences and to find new explanations not based on the idea that the old ones were wrong but on the idea that they might not be completely right. Because we shift at every micro-second, we need to have new explanations to be more comfortable. Here is where curiosity comes in.
Curiosity space
Curiosity is one of the levers that might push us to be more creative and find more sustainable and beautiful solutions to living together and working. As a British psychoanalyst defines it, curiosity is a drive that enables us to find new explanations for our experiences and not to be satisfied with the explanations we already have. For me, curiosity is the ultimate space enabler. In relationships, with people — in anything. Take, for example, a couple. For a couple to succeed, it is not important to be specialists to coordinate actions together — they have to invest in the relationship. I know this sounds cliché, but the idea is that you stay curious about the person you live with and yourself. Because when you have fixed ideas about yourself, you’re not curious, closing space for yourself, but also for other people to enter it.
I like the idea of helping myself and others to create space to have new explanations. A famous comedian says that what drives him is to see other people laugh. In my case, what pushes me is not laughter but creating insights for myself and others, so-called ‘aha moments’. That, to me, is the equivalent of the punchline effect a comedian can have. That creates space for new things, whatever that might be.
