Two Inconvenient Women

Are you successful yet? When do you know you've "made it"? And - more importantly - is it a place that we actually want to be 'arriving'? Many of us are living in cultures that have a dominant story of success - often associated with wealth, prosperity, career-ladders and progress. Our mainstream education systems teach us how to jump through the hoops on the journey towards success, and our media is filled with advertising and stories of what success looks like (normally glossy, shiny and always slightly out of reach). But who gets to decide when we've become successful, and is it worth it?In this week's episode we explore the notion of success, thinking about what it means, who grants us the title and what the possibilities are to look beyond the mainstream story and carve out a different approach to life. We explore questions such as: What happens when we don't fit the story or mould of what success looks like? What might it mean to carve out our own version of 'success'? What can we learn from failure? And what if, rather than a destination we arrive at, success is simply a way of living well?In this episode we reference the following:Steve Cutts - illustrator, satirist (website) Life & Music - Alan Watts (cartoon)

Many people find themselves working within organisations or structures that don't necessarily practice the values that are being preached (or laminated, advertised or promoted). It can feel deeply uncomfortable when our actions are out of line with the values we hold within us, and yet it is often not our choice to have to at in ways that contradict our values. Bit what are values? Where do they come from, and how do we connect with the values that shape our lives so that we can align actions and intentions with integrity and authenticity.In this week's episode we explore the values that shape our lives, our cultural stories and the world we're living in; thinking about how to align with our own authentic self and some of the tools and practices we can tap into in order to help shape our lives through the direction of our inner 'north star'.In this episode we reference the following:Common Cause Foundation (website / organisation)Schwartz Values Map - Shalmon Shwartz (article)Rebecca Solnit - writer & activist (website)SMSC & British Values - Department for Education (website)Rutger Bregman on Veneer Theory - Big Think (video)Why you are not as selfish as you think - BBC Future (website)

The sustainability movement has been going since the 1950s, and ‘sustainability’ is now part of mainstream narrative, awareness and growing action. Yet when sustainability continues to be seen and introduced into organisations as an add-on rather than a process or foundation, how much change is it actually supporting? In this week’s episode we explore the inconvenience of sustainability, thinking about where positive change has been enabled, the impact of greenwashing; what some of the limitations may be and what opportunities are emerging for wider-level transformation when sustainable is understood as a ‘verb rather than a product. In this episode we reference the following:There You Go - Survival International (short cartoon)Earth In Mind - David Orr (book)Schumacher College - Education College & movement (website)Inside COP: Is The US Still In? - Outrage & Optimism (podcast)Indigenous protestors demand to be heard - Washington Post (news video)Earthshot Prize - Global mission & award (website)

What do you think of when you think of home? For some it's a building, for some it's a country, culture or identity. For many it's a feeling. Whilst there can be no universal agreement on what home means to us, there is interesting resonance between home and feelings of safety, belonging and sanctuary. Understanding that feeling safe sits as one of our most basic needs as humans helps to elevate deep compassion and empathy for any experiencing homelessness or seeking refuge and asylum; a growing pattern right across our world as ever-more people are forced to leave their 'homes' in search of safety.In this week's episode of Two Inconvenient Women, we explore the meaning of home in many different guises, exploring some of the commonalities and biases that exist within us and reflecting on how and where we can satisfy the feeling of home in our daily lives.In this episode we reference the following:Home - Warsan Shire (poem)Where Children Sleep - James Mollison (video)What does Home mean to you? - Soul Pancake (video)Second a day video - Save the Children (video)"From the Shark's Mouth to the Deep, Dark Jungle" - Holly Everett (blog)Calais Jungle Ethiopian and Eritraean Church (photo)The Hope Trust - Community Non-Profit (website)"A charity is giving people money to stop homelessness - and it says it's working" - BBC News (article)

AI technologies are becoming increasingly intertwined with our everyday lives. From healthcare, transportation and manufacturing to education, we are already in an entangled web of connection with AI being increasingly used by individuals and organisations, often without conscious awareness. Whilst we can see AI as being a really supportive tool to address so many of the challenges of modernity, to what extent is it actually robbing us of our humanity?This conversation is tricky, emotive and deeply complex. Whilst there are so many positive shifts and evolutions that AI can support us with and lots to appreciate, many of the downsides and dangers are only just being realised with the potential threats of generative AI and a super-intelligence beginning to come to life. We are choosing to open a very complex can of worms in this conversation and begin to dance through some of the conflicting feelings, possibilities and questions that arise when thinking about the past, present and future of AI.In this episode we reference the following:AI: What could go wrong? The Weekly Show - Jon Stewart, Geoffry Hinton (podcast video)AI 2027 - D Kokotajlo, S Alexander, T Larsen, E Lifland, R Dean (Website)Teenagers and AI relationships - Guardian Newspaper (article)Burnout from Humans - Aiden Cinnamon Tea & Dorothy Ladybugboss (ebook)Wayfarers and Monk & Robot - Becky Chambers (novel series)AI & Happiness - Mo Gowdat (website)Healing through ChatGPT? Insights from Research into Real-Life Experiences of AI Therapy - Steve Siddals (research)We Could Win the Climate Fight…Thanks to AI | Life With Machines (ep.12) - Gavin McCormick and Baratunde Thurston (podcast video)AI: how can we control an alien intelligence? - Yuval Noah Harari and Stephen Fry (interview)AI, Machine Learning, Deep Learning and Generative AI Explained - IBM (video)

This week is half term for UK schools and we've taken time away from the 'day to day' work at ThoughtBox for a reading week - a week to really dive deep into some of the ideas that we're both currently exploring. In this episode we share some of the insights, explorations, wonderings and reflections from what we're currently learning about.In this episode we reference a large number of texts and ideas we've been exploring over the past months:His Dark Materials & The Book of Dust, Philip Pulman (novel trilogies)The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House - Audre Lorde (essays)Personality, Wholeness and Connection - Dan Siegel (lecture and book)The Story of Triple WellBeing - Rachel Musson (e-book)Rumsfield Matrix (website)Keys to the Enneagram - A H Almaas (book)Wuthering Heights - Emily Brontë (novel) Never Split the Difference - Chris Voss (book)The Life Impossible - Matt Haig (novel)The Listening Book - R Ticic, E Kuschner, B Ecker (book)Tao Te Ching, Lao Tzu, trans.Ursula K. Le Guin (spiritual text)How to do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy - Jenny Odell (book and talk)Earth in Mind - David Orr (book)Homegoing - Yaa Gyasi (novel)

This week on the podcast Rachel is off with the flu and so Holly is joined by guest inconvenient woman Sandy Glanfield, Immersive Experience Curator at Reboot the Future, to discuss the theme of naïvety.In this episode we explore questions around metrics of success, and how naivety plays an important role in bringing creativity, openness, relationship and curiosity to challenges we face. From its etymological roots of belonging to nature and innateness, to its modern association with foolishness - join us as we weave through questions around fear of failure, elderhood, reframing biases and celebrating our own unique ‘genius’. During this episode, we mention:Let’s Reboot the Future (podcast series)Assembly by Peter Burke (Sculpture Installation)We Could Win the Climate Fight…Thanks to AI | Gavin McCormick (Life with Machines, ep.12) (podcast episode)The Dunning Kruger Effect (graph)The Joy of Being Naïve | Chris Jones | TEDxPCL (TEDx Talk) Empathy Action Immersive Experiences (workshop)Sam Crosby (speaker and facilitator)Sending lots of love and a big hug to Rachel who is currently off with the flu - hopefully she'll be back with us next week!

Having a 'gut feeling' about something is perhaps a familiar sensation to many, but what does this actually mean? When we 'trust our gut' what is it that we're listening to? And how are intuition and gut feeling connected?In this episode we dive deep into the 'wider senses' of the human body and think about what sort of additional intelligence we can be drawing on in our daily lives. Gut instinct is a primal element in all of us, but can become quite 'rusty' or dormant when not used - just like any other sense. What is energising is how there are many things we can do to re-awaken our sense of being intuitive and start to welcome in a wider form of intelligence. We look at many elements of both why it might be dormant in many of us, what we can do to re-liven our senses and what exactly might be happening when we tap into a deeper form of consciousness.In this episode we reference the following:The Neuroscience of trusting your gut - Dr Tara Swart (website / podcast) Talking about anxiety - Martha Beck & Sarah Wilson (podcast)Whole Intelligence - Malcolm Parlett (book)The brain-gut connection - John Hopkins Medicine (website)The Nettle Dress (film)Intuition and spirituality (article)Go with the gut - Joel Pearson (article)The Blind Men and the Elephant - fable (cartoon)

A painful truth in our current cultures is how much we are all struggling with our mental and emotional wellbeing. This is especially true in young people who are facing an increasing amount of overwhelm in their lives in this VUCA* world (*volatile, uncertain, complex and ambiguous). And yet the ways of suffering and the ways of wellbeing are actually two sides of the same coin...Holly and Rachel are just back from Europe's largest trauma, mental health and wellbeing conference hosted at Oxford University, under the title 'Healing our relational world'. Bringing together over 3000 educators, therapists, mental health practitioners and healers with world-renowned trauma and emotional health experts, the conference was an extraordinarily rich and deep insight and exploration of how to heal our connection with ourselves, each other and the wider world.In this episode we dive deeply into some of the 'brokenness' of our world (our inner and outer worlds) bringing in our own decade of research along with learnings from the conference. We look at some of the patterns in human behaviours that connect all of these elements of brokenness to better understand how to notice them and how to heal. We explore the impact of early attachment on shaping our relationships and the profound ways of healing in ourselves, our communities and with the planet. We touch on how the ways to respond to the symptoms and root causes of disconnection are the same and explore the foundational routes to healing.In this episode we reference the following:Dr Dan Siegel - professor (website)Dr Bessel van der Kolk - psychiatrist (website)Dr Richard Shwartz - therapist, author (website)Linda Thai - trauma therapist (website)Interpersonal Neurobiology - Dan Siegel (video)The Body Keeps The Score - Bessel van der Kolk (book / website)Internal Family Systems - Dr Richard Shwartz (website)