Al Jeffery On How Meaningful Relationships Define The Wellbeing Of Changemakers
As a psychotherapist, regenerative leadership trainer and community-builder, Al has supported thousands of people around the world in restoring connection in their lives, leadership and communities.
He is a renowned facilitator, writer, speaker and co-founder of Turning Ground; a place and community of practice supporting Melbourne's transition to a regenerative culture.
Al was listed in the Top 30 Entrepreneurs Under 30 in Australia twice in a row and has since become a trusted guide to a number of for-purpose teams and leaders. As a queer man, haiku poet, leadership virtuoso and martial artist, Al’s love for integrating the diverse and transgressive is alive in all he touches.
Al discusses the importance of patience and expressing vulnerability in developing meaningful relationships, and why joining supportive communities is crucial for changemakers to avoid burning from their careers.
Highlights from the interview (listen to the podcast for full details)
[Indio Myles] - To start off, can you please share a bit about your background and what led you to working in the spaces of psychotherapy, wellbeing, and social enterprise?
[Al Jeffery] - It feels important to share that my cultural heritage is half Indian. My mum is from India, and my father is Australian with a Scottish and Irish heritage.
I often reflect on how from as early as I can remember I've had an interest in both Eastern and Western viewpoints and practices. These have always been a throughline throughout my journey, whether in business, life, leadership, or love.
Professionally, my journey or career began in some ways when I was 12. There was quite a defining moment where I was sitting on my couch with my brother watching Jumanji. A World Vision advertisement came on the TV, and from that point on, I was not at all engaged in the movie Jumanji (but I did have to go back and watch it because I love that movie)!
I was just sitting there on the couch, eating Twisties with my brother under a secure roof in our lovely home, and for the first time I was coming to terms with the fact there was so much poverty in the world. So much that there was a need for organisations like World Vision to start raising funds to support the livelihoods of people.
Whilst I was sitting watching a movie with my brother was the first moment I'd quite consciously reflected on this fact. This spurred me into an interest in social entrepreneurship, but it wasn’t termed as that at that point. I was interested in people like Richard Branson, people who were creating impact and influencing change by using business as a force for good.
This interest led me to start several small for impact projects during my teenage years, and then when I was 19, I was chosen to be part of a start-up accelerator in Colorado in the United States. That accelerator was in some ways a spiritual development accelerator program for young social entrepreneurs.
There were lots of activities where we were sitting in circles reflecting on our journey’s, refining our purpose, and developing our capacity for leadership. It helped me start to understand first what pulled me into social entrepreneurship at such a young age, but also the power of community, because during my teenage years I was very isolated, building projects during lunchtime at school, not at all hanging out with mates.
In my own experience, I thought there were just more important things to do. Yet it led to my calendar being incredibly full, but my heart and life feeling very empty. That accelerator program was a key moment for me, a pivotal experience where I reflected upon sustainable ways, I could enact upon being an entrepreneur and changemaker.
Since then, a lot of my work has been focused on the intersection between social innovation, changemaking, community building, well-being, and the therapeutic arts. This seems to be my sweet spot between what I enjoy doing the most and what people seem to be attracted to me for.
As the co-founder and director of Turning Ground, can you share more about your work and how you are helping changemaker wellbeing?
I've always dreamed about supporting the development of culture and people through a place-based solution. Turning Ground is focused on Naarm (Melbourne), and its changemaker community and broader cultural landscape.
We believe developing community and responding to the specific needs of a place is important in this time. Most of us are psychotherapists, but we also wear other hats whether it's in learning design, Social Theory, or leadership development.
Our pedagogy is that through creating curated and deliberately developmental learning experiences for changemakers and leaders, not only are we creating capacity within those leaders to lead change more effectively and sustainably, but we're also recreating culture.
In Social Learning theory, every single interaction either reinforces existing cultural norms or slightly/drastically repatterns and reframes them. Through the way we design our capacity building programs, we can develop a culture incredibly preventative of systemic issues. It also provides familiarity and safety, meaning people have deeper levels of implicit trust in our programs, which increases their efficacy.
Turning Ground fundamentally is a place, and within this place we have a psychotherapy clinic for individual and group work. We offer targeted support for leaders, changemakers, and general members of the public.
Our work includes targeted psychotherapeutic services and community events, which are learning experiences designed for the community.
What obstacles have you observed impacting people's ability to connect with a community, and why are these spaces crucial for encouraging wellbeing and positive health outcomes?
Answering personally, I've found having a community and community learning spaces to have been very transformative for me. I can call on lots of evidence within the psychotherapeutic and psychological community around the importance of relationships for psychological or emotional wellbeing.
A key ontology, belief or philosophy we hold is that everything is inherently relational. The negation of relationships and being disconnected from our feelings, community, place, ecology, the natural world, meaning, purpose, and direction, in some way contributes to the psychological, emotional, and social distress we are seeing.
It's often spoken about in the psychotherapeutic community that if the challenge is relational, then the solution and healing must also be relational. The solution must be planted back into relationships, and that was my experience in my teenage years.
I felt like I was this solo entrepreneur who was driven by purpose and urgency, but also at that stage in my life, I was driven by shame. There was an enormous sense of isolation and overwhelming circumstances I was facing, the perfect recipe for burnout.
My changemaking story can only go so far, it's quite a clear ceiling within those parameters. Sharing in community and feeling this sense of universality and that I was not alone in itself helped to validate my shame so that it could no longer act as a driver for my changemaking.
It also meant I could access greater resources for my own wellbeing and regulatory practices, so then my internal capacity to create outward change increased. There are many times I have personally experienced or witnessed a community bolstering its people for changemaking.
I also think about it in terms of cultural change, because a lot of our work is focused on creating integration through a systemic view on being a changemaker. If part of our challenge is also cultural, things like isolation and alienation, then a way to create an integrated change whether through systems innovation or more structurally is to approach the problems with a cultural lens. This includes speaking about issues using an intersectional approach.
In terms of barriers, two key things stand out for me. The first is there is a sense of urgency to solve problems. The real difficulty in slowing down enough to build a relationship and tend to community, which is to build a relationship over time with curiosity and listening.
Bayo Akomolafe, who is a beautiful African poet and mythologist, quite often says in these times of urgency we must slow down. That's the paradox of change we're seeking in this time, the sense of that we need to move fast, but the kind of change we need is slow because it's deeper structural and systemic change.
Change is not just creating new widgets or technologies; the ways we go about creating these solutions is important. This tension creates a lot of challenges for people in communities to access wellbeing practices, and then shame itself also makes it difficult.
I have experienced this in Australia, we seem to be a little bit further behind Europe or the U.S. In terms of mental health. We stigmatise being open about our own vulnerabilities, and that’s a real inherent tension I think we must acknowledge.
Slowly, and it is definitely happening, there is less and less stigma around being open about our feelings themselves
Why do social entrepreneurs commonly encounter burnout during their careers and how can they mitigate this from happening?
It's something I have experienced a couple of times. In my experience (and in witnessing and supporting others through this experience), the first big driver is this sense of urgency. Many of us in this space are motivated by our passion to do something to change the state of our world.
For many people this is a strong emotional driver, and other people might just panic. Many of us carry existential or ecological anxiety, whether we're aware of it or if it's playing out in our minds subtly. It's palpable, and we see the volatility, ambiguity, and chaos it creates at all levels and layers of society.
For those of us who are actively turning towards these challenges, we're in some way constantly processing information that produces a panic response in our nervous systems. There is something beneficial about this, because we're turning towards our problems and doing something about it.
It can be the opposite of something like trauma response, which is to be overwhelmed but not able to respond.
If we don't have the resources to process and regulate our nervous systems while we're building businesses or engaging in solving challenges, we're also then not processing the energy and information being received in our nervous system and bodies. That's what leads to burnout.
We can still enact change, but if going to the community garden or meeting with friends isn't enough to regulate the energy in our nervous system, then we're left with this deficit we need to find new ways to manage. That energy in some ways is unfinished business and unprocessed stress.
It was useful for me to understand that just because the stressor isn't present anymore, it doesn't mean the stress is gone. The stress itself also needs to be somehow processed, so find ways to do that whether it's by going for a run, to the gym, for a surf, to talk with your mates or to do something creative.
As one of my teachers said, “whatever you do, have a life.” At the same time, be a changemaker, but first be a person. That always sticks in my mind as a humble reminder. Pleasure and joy are so important, and this is something we have often reflected upon at Turning Ground. People often enjoy having meetings because we try to bring play and joy into everything we do.
It's productive and supports innovation, new ideas and creativity, but it also regulates us socially, so it helps the changemaking process not feel so serious, arduous, cold and dry. It fills your cup a little bit, but there is sometimes this sense that being a changemaker means there’s no time for play or play is counterproductive.
There are many books on pleasure activism and the role of pleasure, play and creativity on social cohesion and wellbeing.
How have you seen the business for good movement evolve and what is required to help it gain more traction and grow to create more change?
I've felt and seen it become more holistic in the sense it includes these inner dimensions of change I'm interested in. The work happening in terms of emotional intelligence, feelings, community and culture building seems to be now supported in projects and the language they use.
There is a growing appreciation of the need for integrated systems of change. There is also recognition that we need to look at subtleties. The Iceberg Theory of Change shows us how we can connect events to patterns and mindsets. Attaching as many of those different layers of change as possible is one way I've seen the space evolve.
My sense of it way back when I was a teenager was that the social start-up space was just an echo of the start-up space itself. It felt quick moving (at least to my nervous system), extractive, and competitive at the same time. I've grown up and the space has grown up, but it feels more collaborative now.
It feels a lot more s relational, and while it is slow in some senses, we are still acknowledging that our economy needs to move. Things need to move to affect change, so we can't just sit around and navel gaze. I've felt that there has been this integration of these softer dimensions of change in the space.
What inspiring projects or initiatives have come across creating a positive social change?
One is the Inner Development Goals framework born in Europe. It's built to pair with the Sustainable Development Goals, but it’s focused on developing the inner capacities and competencies that will support us in creating the conditions for external and observable changemaking.
I find it useful in that it’s an actual framework growing its theoretical basis and community worldwide. It’s open source, so anyone can check out the framework. There are lots of free resources online for leadership teams and organisations to implement.
One initiative I find exciting is Regen Melbourne, which is a well-structured think and do tank in Melbourne. They are bringing together alliances and a strong collaborative network of partners to support projects regenerating Melbourne as a place and culture.
That’s one organisation I would recommend people checking out, and its spawned lots of other projects in rural Australia as well. There are also lots of open-source media outputs based on Kate Raworth’s Doughnut Economics model.
To finish off, what books or resources would you recommend to our audience?
On the topic of burnout, the book Burnout is by two sisters who are psychologists, Emily Nagoski. It's a great read that’s very accessible on the neurobiology of burnout, and it’s practical at the same time. It can help you understand what contributes to burnout, what's happening during a state of burnout, and what we can do about it.
For a more philosophical recommendation, one of my mentors, Parker Palmer, wrote a great book Let Your Life Speak. It’s a beautiful book for those of us who are in or who are trying to make a career in the space of social changemaking.
It looks at the difference between a career and vocation to uncover how we can get closer to discovering what our true work to do in this world is. This helps us align our career (something we spend a lot of our time doing) with our values, vision and what is most true for us.
Initiatives, Resources and people mentioned on the podcast
Recommended books
Burnout: The Secret to Unlocking the Stress Cycle by Emily Nagoski (PhD) & Amelia Nagoski (DMA)
Let Your Life Speak: Listening for the Voice of Vocation Parker Palmer
