Element Descriptor
We all want the world to be a Much Better Place sooner rather than later. We want to play our part. BUT… You are doing nobody any favours if you go up like a rocket and down like a stick in your involvement. You need to be able to spot any patterns (and underlying causes) of over-commitment/under-delivery, the likelihood of burnout, its symptoms, how to care for yourself and come out the other side.
Level descriptors
| Novice | Practitioner | Expert | Ninja |
|---|---|---|---|
| Able to maintain own equanimity when dealing with a small number of stressful situations, but aware of your own triggers, and have only limited (e.g.) withdrawal ways of dealing with them | Aware of most/all of your own triggers and are able to use a variety of technique to deal with them, maintaining desired level of productivity and functionality, while tackling distressing situations and topics. | Able to consistently model morale maintenance in most situations, keeping perspective and investigating new methods of helping yourself and others. Nothing much can get you down, ever, but that doesn’t mean you don’t care passionately. | The abyss refuses to look into you, because it gets depressed. You are able to maintain morale in the face of multiple interlocking and escalating environmental crises (i.e. the 21st century) and personal car-crashes around broken relationships, friendships, money worries. The Dalai Lama texts you for chillax tips. |
Element Overview Essay
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There are many causes of people not maintaining their own morale. They may be coming with expectations that were too high, or they’re trying to stay in the “honeymoon phase” of it all being exciting and exhilarating and feeling like liberation. Well, you can’t stay in that honeymoon phase. Life doesn’t work like that.
People also maybe feel that they have no right to feel upset or depressed because most people in the world have it far harder than them don’t have clean water coming out of tap, don’t have functioning public infrastructure, don’t have formal freedoms around, you know, freedom of speech information assembly, live under a particularly repressive or stupid regime. Unfortunately, that’s most of the countries of the world at the minute, clearly. And therefore, they bite down on those feelings and think to themselves “got to just toughen up.”
Consequences? If we don’t have individual morale, maintenance skills, and if we don’t have the language to talk about it, then again, we’re probably not going to maintain our individual morale and the consequences are the person will be less useful within a group
And low morale can easily be very contagious with other people who then think well, “if person x is giving up or is in a funk, then what’s chance has therefore, the broader group? I’m going to start to withdraw myself” and of course, they don’t necessarily articulate it as plainly as that, even to themselves
So, the solutions to the problem of ignoring individual morale maintenance, obviously, to bring it out into the light, to have a buddy who you can talk things through with either within your group or beyond your group to be conscious of the triggers that are currently setting you off.
And those triggers change over time. disengaging from the news is a very popular way of sustaining personal morale – getting swept up in this daily shit show of incompetence and corruption and malice that is the official news. (Sometimes you wonder if it’s a psyop devised to keep you distracted and depressed.)
And then to find out the things that actually reinvigorate you rejuvenate, you sustain you. And again, for many people, oddly, given the fact that we are animals, it’s being in, quote, nature, unquote. Yeah. And there’s a whole separate debate about social constructions of nature and nature, red in tooth and claw and what we mean by nature is actually controlled parks, and so forth for another time guys for another time.
And then when you are feeling particularly down, and you do need to step back from High tempos of activity, being able to say that to the other people in your group and for them not to be judgmental or tasking or rolling their eyes, but just accepting of it and letting you take the time you need.
Now, this is all great in theory I have never really I think, seen it in practice
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