Tribe-Making
How discouragement can strengthen your allies.
Tribe-making. It sounds ancient and intentional. But in my experience it begins much more humbly — with a moment of honest discouragement shared in the right company.
I know this because one of the most sustaining tribes of my life was born at a conference lunch. I was feeling daunted — genuinely daunted — by the complexity of the change work I was doing. I said so, a little nervously, to two colleagues across the table. And something loosened. They had their own versions of the same story. We were all OD specialists tangled in messy, multi-player change efforts, and suddenly we were trading hard-won lessons instead of polished ones.
Before the lunch ended I heard myself make a bold invitation: Let's take all the books we just bought and would never read, find a few days in the woods, and think through our gnarliest cases together.
So we did. We never opened the books. We opened something better — the accumulated wisdom of years of stumbles and breakthroughs. That gathering became the seed of the Ginger Group, a community of practice that held ten years of honest inquiry, daring, and mutual courage.
It began with discouragement. It grew through the risk of sharing it. And what grew was a place to reflect, experiment, and muster the nerve to act.
The Painting, Meeting
Meeting — this painting — holds something of that for me. Three presences finding each other in the murk. Something luminous emerging at the point of contact.
A Micro-Practice for Seeding Tribe
The next time you are feeling daunted or too alone, try these steps:
Reflect. First, reach out to yourself and see if you can name specifically what you are feeling daunted with. Reconnect with your "true affections" as Stanley Kunitz refers to, which is to say -- remember what most matters to you. Clarity with yourself will help you know what you want to say to another.
Find one person. Go through your contacts. Who feels right — not perfect, just right? Reach out. Tell them what you see in them that made you think of them. That part matters.
Share your unsureness. Not a polished version. The real one.
Dare a next step. If it feels alive, suggest something — another conversation, a shared project, something neither of you would do alone. Follow the aliveness.
Reflect Again. Whatever comes of it, give yourself credit for reaching toward one other person. That's how tribes begin. Not with vision. With a small, honest gesture toward someone who might understand.
Accelerating Hope beyond Hope
Stoke hope that recharges in uncertain times.
Contact Anne
anne@annewright.ca
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