In this blog SMK’s new interim CEO, Katie Roberts talks about the quieter, but no less challenging approach to social change that starts with each one of us.
For the love of…
As I enter my second month as interim CEO at SMK I’m loving the challenge and inspiration that comes with working in such an ambitious and purpose driven organisation. And, I’m becoming increasingly aware of the mental battle to pace myself and attend to my own well-being in the excitement of possibilities of what I could get done!
Issues of wellbeing and workload are nothing new within the charity sector. The combination of a sense of vocation and/or strong personal commitment to the mission of the organisation, combined with an unending stream of complex and potentially overwhelming issues to be addressed, creates a potent mix of willingness to do all we can. Inevitably, what we can offer is never quite enough.
The myth of completion
As a coach and leadership development practitioner I often work alongside exceptional people who are hanging on for that moment of organisational stability that is just around the next corner. Driving themselves and their teams forward to the point where ‘we can take a break’. This can be incredibly motivational and keep us producing good work longer than we thought, but the problem with such havens is that, at best we don’t know exactly how to reach them and at worst they might not exist. Navigating such waters often also assumes that we can control the external ‘weather’ on route, despite our repeating experience telling us otherwise.
In his book Four Thousand Weeks: Time Management for Mortals, Oliver Burkeman confronts us with a harsh truth “the day will never arrive when you finally have everything under control—when the flood of emails has been contained; when your to-do lists have stopped getting longer; when you’re meeting all your obligations at work and in your home life; and when the fully optimized person you’ve become can turn, at long last, to the things life is really supposed to be about”. We must learn to rest where we are.
The art of resistance
This month I have had the privilege of short-listing a wide range of nominations for our SMK National Campaigner Awards 2025 and we can’t wait to share the finalists with you in May. In the huge variety of campaigning techniques and approaches, only one campaign mentioned resistance as a method for social change. Yet resistance has a deep and transformative history in social change movements across the globe. From the Montgomery Bus Boycott to the School Strikes for Climate, actively choosing to step out of systems that lead to the oppression of others has and does led to powerful lasting change.
The burden of rest
Well-being has never been higher on the agenda yet scratch the surface and many interventions are still rooted in increasing productivity or simply add to the list of things that you ‘should’ be doing. Many of us are still anxious and exhausted.
There are many reasons why we don’t rest, many of them with apparently good rationales and some not so good. Health professionals are increasingly emphasizing the immediate and longer-term cost of a global rest-deficit.
Systemic Change
Author Tricia Hersey, in her book Rest Is Resistance, firmly sets the endless drive for productivity at the expense of rest and ultimately human flourishing, in the oppressive systems of capitalism and white supremacy. She writes, “The time is up for any shallow wellness work that doesn’t speak about dismantling the systems that are making us unwell”
Social change happens in hundreds of different ways. I don’t want to be just another unit of productivity, and I don’t want to model that for my team or my children. Could I do more and work harder? Probably yes. But at what cost.
It’s physically hard for me to press pause and take a break from the work I love and take pride in, but framed as a small quiet act of resistance, I can get on board. And then, when I explore the richness of improved relationships, more space for creative imagination, meaningful collaboration and better health, that lunch break looks less like a luxury and more like a strategy to strengthen my purpose and take more joy in seeking to deliver it.