Beyond Triggers - The Power of Glimmers
Beyond Triggers - The Power of Glimmers by Elaine Rumboll
Intro: In an age of "Triggers," a counter-impulse known as "Glimmers" emerges, offering an accessible means of fostering joy and peace.
In Patrick Rothfuss' captivating novels, "Glamours" are enchanting spells that project an illusion of wealth, beauty, and well-being to enhance the appearance of people and objects. While these illusions may be fleeting, there is a way to build your own version of Glamours through "Glimmers." Researcher Deborah Dana has identified micro-moments that can have a lasting impact on our happiness. In a world full of "triggers," it's not surprising that "Glimmers" are gaining recognition. These brief moments can evoke feelings of joy or tranquillity, signalling to our nervous system that it's safe to relax.
Deb Dana, a licensed clinician social worker specialising in complex trauma, first coined the term "Glimmers" in her 2018 book, "The Polyvagal Theory in Therapy." Glimmers are fleeting moments that incrementally transform our systems. They can be found in nature's beauty, the company of animals, and the warmth of a stranger's smile. These Glimmers resonate with our minds due to the energy they emit. While everyone can benefit from acknowledging Glimmers, those who have experienced trauma may find them particularly valuable for fostering compassion and resilience. Our minds are wired to detect and solve problems, keeping us physically safe but potentially draining our emotional and psychological resources. By consistently recognising and appreciating minor, positive experiences, we can reshape our systems to foster mental and physical well-being. In this way, "Glimmers" evoke feelings of relaxation and hope, contrasting sharply with "triggers," which can activate stress responses.
Glimmers manifest in various forms, such as transient moments of natural splendour, a stranger’s kindness, or brief sensory experiences bringing inner calm or delight. Glimmers are tiny, often private moments that serve to lift the corners of your mouth for an instant. It could be as small as experiencing the texture of a fabric, the smell of jasmine on the wind, a birdcall in the early morning, a smile from a stranger in traffic.
Glimmer hunting can also include:
An intentional Awe walk immersing oneself in nature's grandeur, whether through strolls in the park, lakeside relaxation, or sunrise and sunset viewings.
Listening to uplifting or soothing music to improve mood and calm nerves.
Engaging in acts of kindness for oneself or others to elevate collective spirits.
Practising meditation or deep breathing to reduce stress and anxiety.
Cultivating gratitude by reflecting on blessings or maintaining a gratitude journal
To embrace Glimmers, set an intention for yourself, such as seeking out one Glimmer before lunch. A Glimmer journal can serve as a repository for daily reflections and discoveries, and sharing your Glimmer journey with loved ones can foster deeper connections. By granting ourselves permission to pursue positive feelings and experience these ephemeral Glimmers, we signal to our bodies a state of well-being and ease. The more we practise Glimmer-hunting, the more likely we are to uncover a wealth of Glimmers that anchor, protect, and soothe us. By consciously attending to these moments and intentionally seeking them out, we can create our own lasting enchantments and ultimately attain a more sustainable sense of ease, contentment and calm. In a world focused on triggers, Glimmers provide a vital counterbalance, reminding us to cherish the small moments of joy and serenity that fill our days.
Building Your Own Glimmer WorkSheet
Set aside an hour for this exercise. Find a comfortable position to sit in. Put a heavy shawl around your shoulders as you do this exercise. Do three rounds of breathing in through your nose for 4, holding for 6 and breathing out through your nose for a count of 8. Drop into your body and stay there. Repeat the breathwork when you feel like you are going back into your head.
1. Explore what makes you happy, what makes you feel peaceful and comfortable, and what sparks pleasant feelings for you. The following suggestions could serve as prompts for you:
What activities in your free time bring you joy?
Which sensations (sights, sounds, smells, textures, movements) do you find the most calming or enjoyable?
When you think back on your life, what small moments or experiences have made you the happiest?
Make a list of all these things and don’t self-edit yourself.
2. Once you have a list of possibilities, pick one or two that you want to actively pursue and enjoy in the days ahead.
3. Make it your mission during the following three days to actively pursue and enjoy the glimmers of happiness that most appeal to you. Planning a specific activity or just keeping an eye out for happy moments in your daily routine can help.
4. Pay close attention to the physical and mental effects of your chosen glimmers as you seek them out and experience them. How do they make you feel? How does your body react when you go through these things? Have you noticed a shift in your disposition, vitality, or perspective?
5. Finally, think about how your glimpses have strengthened your hope and resilience. How did actively seeking out and enjoying these joyful times aid you in weathering times of difficulty or stress? What did you learn about your emotional needs and how to meet them?
Remember, the goal of exploring Glimmers is to cultivate a habit of seeking out and appreciating the small moments of joy and connection in your daily life. By intentionally cultivating positive experiences and emotions, you can build emotional resilience and promote well-being even in the face of stress and adversity. It’s time to Get Your Glimmer On!
A Speech of Hope
This is the transcript of the graduating address I gave on Friday 13th to the students of the Creative Academy. I hope that in some small way it gives hope especially to the many artists, small business owners and freelancers I know and so admire, during this tough time of Corona and immense commercial instability.
Graduating students, and esteemed guests, I am honoured to be representing the Creative Academy today. It is a school I have deep admiration for. Their reputation is growing internationally and locally as a place for rigour, fresh thinking and relevance. It takes guts, courage and bravery to envisage a school like this; one at the tip of a continent in a world that is often concerned more with “matters of great consequence” as the Little Prince called them, than the truly transformative power of creativity and connection.
It is these matters of great consequence that often unwittingly force us into over-seriousness, that create disconnection and alienation from others, this attempt to control and demand certainty in a world which operates with inherent volatility, paradox and complexity. The power of creativity is that it allows us to be comfortable with uncertainty, with mystery. It helps us build the curiosity that in fact increases our commercial acumen in a manner which is joyous and meaningful. Creativity is not frivolous. It drives the solutions for the changes we all so desperately need in a world which is struggling to manage its resources, its populations and in many cases its othering and prejudice.
I do not expect the insights I share with you today to make you rich. I am hoping that they provide comfort and a warm blanket for the road ahead which at times might appear impossibly treacherous and cold. They are thoughts that have helped me to collaborate and create across many disciplines in the world and given me much joy along the way; more so than I imagined I could have.
I have been thinking a lot about the power of ideas lately. As more and more objects that we purchase became intangible - the skin for a game, the music and films that we stream, the apps that we download to make sense of and manage our lives - the more it becomes evident to me how intrinsically necessary imagination is becoming in the economies of work.
The challenge is that to create demands energy; but so does the uncertainty and pressure of the world you are entering. Sooner or later, if you are not vigilant, burnout and cynicism become the realities. Here flow is impossible and creativity dries up. Here compassion, empathy, and real connection with others disappears. You enter the arena of Overseriousness.
So Nurture yourself. Eat well emotionally, socially, creatively, physically, spiritually. Remember that as long as you have breath, you can anchor yourself in the safety of the present. One of the things that has helped me when I am tired or nearing burnout is to look for all the anomalies around me - to become fascinated by my own ignorance, to be surprised by things that show up differently to how I imagine them to be. To be eternally curious at the extraordinary ways in which the world is unfolding for me and others around me. It is a great hack to help you refuel and see differently.
We are so often taught that it is the big idea that will provide the opportunity, that it is the good idea that will carry you far. The big idea is often the large rock in the rucksack of those following the path of “great and serious consequence”. In my experience it is the small idea which is the lightest to carry - the idea that starts off without a mantle of uniqueness - just an idea - or as William Kentridge would call it - “a good idea or a bad idea”. His point is that the richness of an idea comes from what you do with it - that the power of ideas lies in their making - it is then that they transform into the things that inspire us - it is what they suggest that then becomes birthed into the great idea. We so often don’t birth things in the world because we are crippled by the belief that what we are working with isn’t good enough, that it’s not unique, that it might even be a bad idea. We replace creativity with fear because we are worried about what others may think and in this way make our worlds barren and the road ahead solitary, dusty and long.
My wish for you as you enter the world of work is to follow the idea that sparks for you, that makes you feel alive. No idea will survive its first contact with an audience, so it doesn’t matter what it looks like at its inception. Don’t waste time there. Celebrate the less good idea and follow it to its transformation. Tie the addendum to that of "Better done than perfect” and you will save yourself much anxiety and many sleepless nights. This is advice which if I had been given in my early 20s would have made the process of Making much easier.
I would like to pay homage today to the salon for small ideas. It is the dwelling place of people like Jiro, the protagonist in the unforgettable documentary Jiro Dreams of Sushi - the story of a sushi maker who has become internationally lauded for the quality of sushi he makes from a small room in an underground tube station in Tokyo, Japan. He has decided to focus on greatness rather than growth.
Small ideas aren’t replicable or scaleable, they can’t be easily and effortlessly transposed to other places in the world. But they provide incredible energy and inspiration to us because they help us believe that there can be another way of being successful. They are also deeply aligned with a growing global philosophy which says that growth is not the only way to succeed in a market. That in fact unchecked growth destroys resources, values and connection with others. Small Giants is worth a read here. One of my heroes, the 83 year old founder of the sportswear brand Patagonia, Yvon Chouinard, is another small giant, to coin the phrase. His goal has never been to make money but instead to provide apparel for what he calls the silent sports - surfing, sking, hiking. Patagonia makes clothes that are expensive but will last a life’s time. Ironically, this sentiment has resulted in Patagonia becoming a deeply respected and admired billion dollar business which has grown despite itself. Patagonia’s tagline is “We’re in business to save our home planet”. This has struck a chord with so many of their customers and given them something to connect them. It has connected a purpose “their WHY” to a WHO, a global community who feels the same way.
Understanding WHY you are doing something isn’t enough. Why you do something matters, but who you are connecting to with your WHY matters more.
Growing down makes you vigilant about your environment, it creates locality and it also builds the potential for Scenius above Genius - the idea that says that the lone genius is a tired construct, broke and hungry (literally) and that the scene within which you are in, the Scenius, if picked well, will provide the context for exceptional inspiration and phenomenal work. The “scene” builds the extraordinary not the lone genius. But be mindful and discerning of who you allow into your world. Your mental health, your belief system, your habits, your very creativity will be impacted not only by your friends but also their friends and their friends friends as Professor of Social and Natural Science at Yale and a researcher on how social influence works, Dr. Nicolas Christakis, discovered. Three degrees of separation will perfect you or poison you. The best way to engage this is to operate in fields and scenes filled with integrity, curiosity, and people that inspire you and bring out your best. As the poet David Whyte says, “Anyone or anything that does not make you come alive is too small for you”.
But the world isn’t a neat chess board. Paradoxically, I started my work in the world in three maximum security prisons in Jhb working with long-term and ex-deathrow prisoners. Not quite the scenes I am urging you to find. Ostensibly the brief was to help them create poetry for an upcoming edgy arts festival but after the process I continued for three years, to run workshops every Wed at Jhb Maximum security prison and Diepkloof women’s prison. Using art, writing, dance and theatre we used creativity to help them reframe their thinking and reimagine themselves. So it is possible to draw extraordinary lessons from places that don’t feel welcoming, that are full of danger and malevolence and to transform them into places for change and renewal.
It is my hope that as you graduate you continue to remember the incredible power you hold, that you understand deeply that your creativity is a tool for transformation, connection and hope. Stay close to it, listen to it always, let it be your voice in times of misfortune and despair. Be brave. Be Gentle. Be Humble. Be fascinated by your own ignorance. Laugh a lot. Remember the Scenius, the small idea, grow down, grow deep, grow joyously. Remember the WHO not just the WHY.
I will end as I started with The Little Prince. The Fox cautions the little Prince that you become forever responsible for what you tame. You cannot tame Creativity, but you can be tamed by her and be in service to her. Use your power well. Be responsible with what you create in the world and always remember that what you do shapes who you are becoming. After all is said, the bravest truly are the tenderest.
In closing I would like to read you a poem that I wrote entitled There are always ways back.
There are always ways back
There are always ways back
in -
opportunities for pause and presence
through breath
through wonder
even through the coveting of objects far flung and impossible
Always ways
to slow down
the crippling speed
of absent doing
to find a way back
to the circle of
spiraling quiet,
that neither beckons
nor denies
but merely holds
itself and us
in the possibilities
of acceptance and the journey home.
~Written by Elaine Rumboll
Thank you. And a heart congratulations to all those graduating today.
The Epidemic of Overseriousness in South Africa
Play as an antidote to Overseriousness
This is a 5 minute talk I gave on 16th July 2015 at the Future by Design event held at the University of Cape Town Graduate School of Business in Cape Town.
I have no experience or expertise of the future but what I do have is Foresight. To quote Bobby Godsell, “ We cannot predict the future but we can hear its footsteps approaching.” And to my mind, the footsteps approaching are in big, ugly, black boots. We are experiencing a crisis of Leadership in South Africa. In a study quoted at the Business of Design in May, for a research project undertaken in sub saharan Africa, 57% of employees are not engaged and 33% are actively disengaged. That means that we have only an engagement rate of 10% of employees at work.
According to an article in the Mail & Guardian this month, "South Africa is stressed out and suicidal". We have 21 South Africans committing suicide every day with 20x more South Africans attempting but failing to take their lives. We have the 7th highest rate of suicide in the world and in a recent study conducted by Bloomberg we are the second most stressed-out nation in the world, following Nigeria.
This clearly shows an epidemic of Overseriousness. The symptoms of Overseriousness are disengagement, cynicism, fear of failure, lowered quality of output (mediocre work) and an increased focus on overbureaucratisation, more building of systems and processes to attempt to control the environment.
We live in a world where Volatility is no longer symptomatic, but systemic. With markets growing and changing exponentially and levels of complexity rising, the environments we operate in are now inherently environments of uncertainty; part of what is now our new DNA. And for that we need new systems of being and leading. The beauty of design thinking is that it is a response to a world of uncertainty. It encourages us to experiment and play, to iterate and prototype not to over-invest in one solution.
Design’s wingman is Play.
Play gets us out of Overseriouness immediately. Imagine doing a 2 min exercise like the one we just played that immediately increases your confidence, your creativity, your sense of mastery and purpose, your attention and your levels of engagement. This is what Play does. It is an urgent and necessary requirement to build into our new ways of leading today if we want to break our current crisis in leadership and our immanent epidemic of Overseriousness.
The Power of Play - Joyous Surprise at the end of a Keynote Address
I gave a keynote on the Power of Play at CounterPlay15 in Denmark a few days ago. At the end of the talk, I asked the 250 participants whether they would prefer to have a Q&A or a game instead. The unanimous agreement was, "A game."
This was the result....a tangible enactment of the Power of Play to connect and energise, and a reminder that it is in Play that we develop incredible insight and agility.
BUILDING A GLOBAL MANIFESTO THROUGH LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY® – A CASE STUDY
I had the honour of working with Deutsche Welle Akademie at the end of last year on what for me was an interesting and important challenge:
How do you create a global manifesto on information sharing and freedom of expression with participants from 14 different countries, when each has with their own culturally valid and particular way of doing things and seeing things?
Here is a link to the article I wrote around designing the process and the results which followed.