I quickly realised that I have been a co-pilot to my own discrimination and this revelation is quite shocking and actually quite sad.
Some two hours after completing Sync and saying our collective ‘goodbyes – but not forgotten,’ a lingering thought prevails. Leadership comes from a place of loving oneself deeply and inviting others in to participate… is what I wasn’t expecting.
Sync led us through various tasks including leadership styles, approaches, and traits, but for me loving myself in this context makes me feel like I’m stripped bare. It’s raw – and this course makes you sit with these feelings, whether reflections and ponderings, or just the naked truth behind your motivations. You are worth more than you allow yourself to be.
Sync is about unlocking one’s own process and potential and defining one’s practice, culminating in a personal metaphor symbolising values and process. The program helps participants to identify and sharpen one’s tools, to disrupt and break down internalised ableism and to birth a leadership outcome.
In terms of uncovering our shadows or limitations, I discovered that I often publicly state I am a person with disability, but I don’t preach it and I certainly have not challenged the status quo enough around me to provide my access needs on my terms. I quickly realised that I have been a co-pilot to my own discrimination and this revelation is quite shocking and actually quite sad. I have denied others to accept me because I haven’t authentically owned my own needs and advocated for them. Wow, just wow. How did I not see the full extent of this until now?
I believe the answer lies in social conditioning and as people with disabilities, we are experts in our own military style self-defence systems, complete with childhood as our training ground. If one hasn’t at least installed a verbal cannon by the onset of school, you could expect the snipers to check in for the stock standard name calling. And if that’s still getting through the force field, then it’s the specialty tools like shock tactics, camouflage and shape shifting just for special effect. The more these tools are used, the more one is forced to blend in through subterfuge because over time, the constant battle of having to fight for one’s own dignity over many years is wearing. However, with more advocates going public about being disabled, the constant exhaustion of emotional labour given freely from many fierce advocates has enabled pockets of light to break through and push for systems of change now that these critical conversations are in the public domain.
Sync Australia is a vehicle for starting these dialogues one person at a time. It’s transformative and it plants the seeds to encourage all of us to openly question each other on what is happening now and what could lie ahead with aspiration and curiosity, the panacea and the zeitgeist.
These conversations happen in a virtual room and participants dial in from different time zones across the world. Each session is designed to gently dismantle these defence systems and invite you to be your authentic self, to unshackle oneself from the usual normative behaviours, reveal our cultural wounds and share learnings, wins and successes. Small acts of revolution are discovered in moments of kindness. Sync is safe, nourishing and familiar. It beckons you to relax, deeply breathe in and exhale out the stigma and self-deception.
…as people with disabilities, we are experts in our own military style self-defence systems, complete with childhood as our training ground.
Sync is the perfect program for mid-career creatives to aim and ascend to leadership positions in Australia. There is a distinct lack of disabled representation in public positions and at the helm of arts organisations due to limited or zero opportunities for succession planning and career progression. It’s possibly the product of a background of competition, exclusivity and a long history of disconnection between many of the arts organisations. This is a result of an over stretched arts eco-system being expected to deliver big on small amounts of funding. It’s got to change; the community and disabled arts culture utilises the power of the arts to save lives – why isn’t there more investment for this? My Sync goal is slowly birthing – my vision of wanting to develop my own non-profit was re-ignited again – another surprise.
The door is now open, but where will it lead? We leave the group with the last provocation of “What’s next?” Small gods exist in undiscovered places when we commit to loving ourselves. This affords us the opportunity to develop our skills and tools, to challenge and improve ourselves but to break through our individual constructs and dismantle those of our peers. We then are ready to take a leap of faith and be the change we want to be for ourselves and in the context of a broader, complex cultural landscape.
You can connect with Harmonie Downes via LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/harmonie-downes/
Ice metaphor information:
Why I chose “ice” as a metaphor in the symbol of an iceberg: It is so embedded in our language in terms of what we can see and what we can’t see. The iceberg represents what’s above and what’s below. It is about what, when, why and how we show ourselves. The 20 percent of what’s above, is in the public-facing aspect when delivering an event, performance or creative outcome. Below is the 80 percent that includes all of the tumultuous churning, the thought process, the unseen. Everything that no‑one knows what you have gone through to deliver – it can be resource intensive. What we do ‘back of house’ depends on how we shape our projects. It’s driven by the environment. Can it form; will it disperse? How will we manage to skate on thin ice when things are shifting and shaping? Will the project collapse or will it be delivered? It is a mix of these ingredients to support the sustainability of your work to take form which takes time, careful consideration and problem-solving skills. It can be an incredibly beautiful experience, but painful just as an ice burn can be. It can be refreshing or isolating, but absolutely transformative when it all comes together. Process is key to everything.