For most of my career, I was taught that social change occurs from mobilization, collective action, and deep community engagement. The challenge with this view of change is that it doesn’t require reflection on one’s own individual trauma. So instead of taking time for ourselves when we’re exhausted, many of us hide our trauma, bury our exhaustion, and push our worries beneath a thin veneer of optimism. This leads to burnout and ineffective leadership.
No one told me that rest was revolutionary, that reflection was liberation, or that cultivating transformative relationships was the only way to true change. Over time, I’ve learned that the most important aspect of social change is healing—both on an individual and collective level. Somewhere along the way, we all have bought into myths about how to create social change. Below, I’ll share a few of those myths and the four pivots I’ve identified in my latest book, The Four Pivots: Reimagining Justice, Reimagining Ourselves, that move us toward more transformative change.
Myth No. 1: We can fight our way to justice. I was taught that social change required fighting for justice, resisting oppression, and confronting power. The problem with terms like fight, resist, struggle, confront, or defend is that we become satisfied with strategies that may address problems yet fail to create what we really want. We simply don’t believe we have the permission to dream, imagine, invent, visualize, and play as fundamental actions necessary to achieve social change.
Myth No. 2: The more power we have, the more change we can create. I’ve been taught to think about power as a collective action attained from withholding labor, boycotting, or raising awareness about an issue in order to force some desired change. But, as I point out in The Four Pivots, there’s one problem with this form of power-building folks often overlook: It rarely addresses our collective trauma or our individual healing. Power is also an “inside job,” or inner work that comes from our personal passions and our collective convictions that we discover when we imagine together and heal our own insecurities and fears.
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