In Part 1 of our interview with Australian psychotherapist Andrew Sloan about his phenomenal, potentially life-changing book Why Things Feel F*cked: Your Practical Guide to Getting Unstuck, he explained how our nervous systems get hijacked within systems of power that make us feel disconnected. He also talked about his own journey, including joining a cult. Over a decade of private practice as an integrated psychotherapist and leadership coach, Andrew has also been on a quest to discover how we can best lead our lives in a world that often leaves us feeling powerless.
In Part 2, we’re looking at getting unstuck. How do we navigate the bombardment of f*cked up things in the world right now, and the systems of disconnection overloading our nervous systems? How should we deal with media and social media? Should we reject hustle culture? In the absence of a secret, Andrew provides a compass. He explains how, one step after another, we all have the capacity to change, shift and transform.
Andrew, let’s talk about social media. We’re more digitally connected than ever before but we’re also more disconnected than ever before?
Yes, we largely grew up with close, meaningful, diverse connections in the physical world. We’ve lost our way. Also, originally we were using social media to connect with our friends. But now, guess what has increased? Connecting with celebrities, creating parasocial relationships. And the algorithms that drive social media engage us by enraging us.
You write that our political systems are in crisis, there’s authoritarianism, dictatorships, and being pitted against each other. How do we approach that?
We need to create more belonging and connective tissue in our communities. At the moment, we’re led to live more globally than locally. But I think we need to flip that. How can we focus on what’s happening around us inside our personal relationships, community connections and workplaces? How can we return to the things we have agency and autonomy to change and shift within our reach? By increasing our sense of autonomy, we create more internal and external safety in our lives.
As shown in the therapy approach of Internal Family Systems, the system inside us is actually mirroring the world around us. We typically have parts of us overpowering other parts of us, like the bully feeding the self-criticism inside us. We need personal change in order to address wider change.
With all the awful things happening in the world, doomscrolling isn’t good, right?
Yeah, our nervous system can only really handle a certain amount but we’re being pummelled with a world’s worth of crisis, fear and mayhem. We can protest. We can have our voice heard. But often we can’t actually do anything tangible to help a person or community. And the amount of information coming at us feels incomprehensible. It’s actually fracturing our nervous system. We’re left feeling very powerless, feeling we lack agency.
How do we reduce the noise?
Well, I don’t plug my phone in next to my bed, so the beginning and end of my day is disconnected from all that. For many years I’ve turned off all notifications. That’s a privilege in the world right now because of how many people live and work inside workplaces and families.
Many people feel they should check emails in the evening, work longer hours and work faster. Should we rethink hustle culture?
We must! It’s so toxic. This ‘go fast’ thing isn’t part of the natural cycles of our bodies. We’re not machines. We’re organisms. The standing against hustle culture in teams [workplaces] is really f*cking important. Workplace science says the key driver of productivity is when wellbeing happens at the same time. One meaningful conversation often makes the difference between sustainable and unsustainable productivity. A half-hour conversation weekly, fortnightly or monthly, where the leader sits down without any distractions and checks in with the person. How are you doing with us and how are we doing with you? Are you clear on what great looks like in your role? Are you learning, growing and stretching? What a f*cking beautiful thing that is, having that conversation.
You write about self-leadership as a process of self-reflection and deep discovery of how we’ve been shaped by the world around us and how we want to reshape our response to the world. Self-leadership is really important?
It’s huge. It’s born out of the last 20 years of neuroscience, including polyvagal theory which is a metaphor for very complex nervous systems. At the centre of all this science is the insight that we all have an indefatigable amount of calm, connectedness, creativity, compassion, courage, curiosity, and clarity inside us. It’s the outcome of a regulated, calm nervous system. It’s the centre of why the systems of disconnection have been born out of our millions of micro-decisions. But it’s also the centre for how we can ease the protective instincts that are harming us in a toxic world. And how do we acclimate to self-leadership? It’s really understanding how power over us is dominating us through a fear-based nervous system. What are the alternates to power over us? There are three roles. The Self Explorer is how can we know ourselves from the inside out? The Choice Maker is how can we flex our agency and autonomy? The Co-Creator is how can we build collaborative power alongside other people in our lives? And this came out of my reading around women’s justice. We have to learn from women, and from brown, black, and trans people.
You write that a CliftonStrengths® Assessment online is the most powerful and practical tool to become a Self Explorer, by mapping a person’s unique personality. I know the full version is arranging 34 themes of naturally occurring talents, but, to get a sense of it, I did the 30-minute CliftonStrengths® Assessment.
What did you get?
Empathy ®, Developer®, Achiever®, Relator®, and Intellection®. It didn’t showing my weaknesses or where I need to improve – that’s not the focus?
It is once someone works with a coach, because these aren’t strengths exactly. They’re talents. A talent is a natural pattern of thought, feeling and behaviour. Talents are neutral. They’re your greatest strengths, your greatest capacities, potentially your greatest weaknesses as well. So I work with clients about these talents.
Sometimes people aren’t sure how other see them but that doesn’t necessarily matter, does it?
How people see us isn’t as important as how we see ourselves. My invitation to people is to decode your own uniqueness first, as an antidote to other people oversimplifying you, or others expecting that you think, feel and behave just like them. A lot of the pain in the world is when we walk around thinking everyone is like us. The chance that you share the same top five CliftonStrengths® in the same order as someone else is an astonishing one in 33 million. But when we unpack that one in 33 million chance that I’m me and you’re you, we walk around with a lot more curiosity and openness. Hello, self-leadership. Hello, core self. Hello, green zone. The green zone is the territory of our nervous system that enables our capacity to step back and connect.
How can we find more calm in the green zone?
I’ve borrowed from some of Dr Peter Levine’s model called SCOPE [slow down, connect to body, orient, pendulate, engage] around how to quickly get back into a grounded nervous system. But I wanted to expand his model to help people to orient themselves. With down-regulating a very activated nervous system, I think sometimes clients don’t know what else they can do rather than watch their breathing. Things like splashing cold water on our face helps. So my model is Connect, Anchor, Look, Move. I wanted it to spell CALM.
We sometimes box off ‘good’ and ‘bad’ emotions. But anger isn’t always a bad thing, right?
I could be angry and create advocacy, clarity and great choices in my life. This is the Assertive Zone. Or I could be angry that I’m angry, or stressed that I’m angry, or anxious that I’m angry.
Your book includes reflective questions and reflective practices for the reader. Was that important to you?
Well, I dislike self-help books that oversimplify complexity and tell us that perfected peace is possible if only we did more. Then there are books which have a lot of science and information without making it personal or practical. Whereas I wanted the book to be like people sitting alongside me in a conversation. I’m hearing from readers that they’re treating it like diving into a mini-therapy session or coaching conversation. That’s exactly the experience I wanted readers to have.
Could you ever have imagined say 15, 20 years ago that you’d be a psychotherapist and author?
Hell no. I’d be shocked. Did I wonder if I could possibly help people in the way I’m doing now? Yeah. Was it clear it could be possible? Absolutely not. I dreamed of having high-trust relationships with individual clients across private practice, and teams [in the workplace]. It’s so profound and rewarding.
You can buy Why Things Feel F*cked: Your Practical Guide to Getting Unstuck at whythingsfeelfcked.com, as a paperback, e-book or audio book. You can also follow Andrew on @hello_andrewsloan on Instagram
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