This is How It all Began
My commitment to addressing poverty started 20 years ago. I was on vacation during 10th grade in high school and visiting my best friend’s home country of Indonesia. We were on our way to lunch and our driver stopped at a traffic light in the capital city, Jakarta. I looked out the window—I still remember it was monsoon season and the sky was dark, as if it was about to rain. I saw a boy my age, in torn clothes with no shoes on, approaching our car. He wanted to wash our car in return for money and the driver chased him away.
This interaction shocked me deeply—that someone my age had to live like that. I grew up in a small German town of 15,000 inhabitants in the countryside. Until that time, I had never seen poverty. In my world, everyone had at least an apartment, education for sure, as well as parents who had a decent income. I did not know what it meant not to have clean clothes or not know where your next meal would come from.
Because of this encounter with a 16-year-old boy at a traffic light in Jakarta, my future life path was decided. I volunteered in Bangkok and Guatemala during my summer holidays in high school and college, and in 2010, I joined the humanitarian sector, going on to work in Jordan, Palestine, South Sudan, Senegal, Nigeria and Zimbabwe with various organizations, and gaining different skills. In the autumn of 2017, I was given a unique opportunity to join our executive office in Rome to work for the Chief of Staff of the World Food Programme, the largest humanitarian organization in the world.
I packed my two bags and moved from Senegal in West Africa to our Italian headquarters. It was a great position, one that allowed me to see how my organization functioned as a whole and how all the pieces fit together. At the peak of my career however, I found myself increasingly frustrated. My job in previous years was focused on integrating systems that would create more accountability and consideration for the people we were serving, but in Rome, it felt like we were getting stuck in politics, in processes, systems and meetings. Nothing in those conversations was linked back to our purpose: to serve the world’s most vulnerable populations. At that time, we were also working on integrating “people centric approaches” but I asked myself, why is that? Why does the humanitarian sector, whose sole purpose is to help people, require a policy to focus on the people it sets out to serve? Whose fault was it and where did we make a wrong turn?
I realized that I was in the midst of a professional and personal crisis. We are made to believe our entire lives since childhood is a preparation and we are on probation. From school, when we are evaluated against grades, to potentially college and then our jobs. Our parents and teachers teach us to learn how to play pay the rules that everyone else sets for us because we are not full human beings yet. I worked, and tried to achieve success only to realize how little it meant. Some of us are still in the hamster wheel going after yet another title, promotion or bigger house. We work for a pay to then spend it and do what we really love during our free time until retirement.
At the peak of my career, I continued to feel that inner void. I realized that despite me wanting to do good in the world, I was driven by a sense of feeling loved and rewarded when someone needed me. But through meditation, self-development and personal growth, I not only re-gained my sense of passion to serve the most vulnerable, I found a new sense of being. I was more confident, less stress-out, more focused and interacted on a whole new level with the people around me.
In Buddhism they say, if someone goes on a spiritual journey, you should share the lessons you learned. Burn-out is a big topic in the humanitarian sector or any sector that focuses on helping others. Staff-turn over has become a major challenge for organisations. Recent research has also shown that only compassion driven actions lead to real help. But there is much more to that. Our rules for happiness and success are wrong as they keep us in an endless cycle of wanting more, only to satisfy our inner pain and void. What is inside out of us gets reflected in how we show up in the world with our partner, friends and at work. When we don’t have a piece of mind and therefore do not act out of compassion, we do not help others. This is fundamental to anyone whose job is to help others.
I made a commitment to myself during the outbreak of the pandemic in 2020, when my own organisation won the Nobel Price in Peace for its amazing work in the field, that I wanted to share what I had learned from my mentors, coaches online, countless CEOs, super successful executives, athletes and supported by some of the most unbelievable research and scientific evidence, and lessons from my own journey through my online platform. I am sharing with you free videos and articles about the different ways we can create a life, that is more fulfilling, balanced and joyful. Only when we begin look inward, and address our pain and void, can we look outward and step into a place of leadership to truly make an impact in this world and help others.
Are you still stressed out, not achieving your goals despite all the hard work and efforts, then sign up for my mailing list to start changing your life today.
A Global Community of Conscious Humanitarians
With your help, we can build a global community of conscious humanitarians. This helps all of us to go through this journey together and learn from each other. We have all been there, where things didn’t work so well. But when we become part of a global family, I believe we are stronger.
Whether you joined this community a few months ago, or an hour ago, I just wanted to say thank you. In this world, we can create a community across boundaries among people who share a common vision and goal. Humanitarians are a global family and with our experiences that we can share, that are common to all of us, it will help us together become an even better version of ourselves.
Why meditation and poverty go together
Humanitarians can have stressful lives. I worked for weeks on end in tents on the frontlines of a war in South Sudan. I had a stray bullet that went through my bathroom door.
Only when we find ways to remain centered and focused within ourselves, are we able to deal with the challenges in our lives. Meditation can help calm your “monkey mind” as it continues to wander and produces stressful thoughts. The latest scientific evidence suggests, that meditation creates alpha waves that are known to be calming and relaxing. Contrary to popular believes, when we focus inward, and become calmer, only then do we create space in our mind and the energy to be fully present with other people. This is even more relevant for those whose job it is to help others. We all know the feeling of being overwhelmed and stressed out. Are you able in those moments to truly see the other and help? No, we are not able to because our monkey mind distracts us.
Meditation and poverty is fundamentally connected. Meditation not only makes us more centered and focused, it brings out compassion for others, that is needed when truly wanting to create an impact. Only when we are able to leave our stress behind, no longer feel anxious and enter into our own power and leadership, can we create and make a difference in the lives of others.
Lesson 1 – Sit with your Emotions
There is a growing body of research that suggests that humanitarians living in conflict-affected areas are three times more likely than the general population to suffer from conditions such as depression, anxiety, and post-traumatic stress disorder. Doing this type of work comes with dangers but what is it that motivates people to join in the first place? Thomas Arcaro in his book Aid Worker Voices explains that most young people start out as idealists but continue their job despite frustration and disillusionment. The sector has acknowledged the mental health crisis and invested in mental well-being systems. But the culture of heroism — that you risk your life in one crisis more complex than the other to serve the world’s poor — does not allow for self-care.
We have learned to look away when we feel pain. But only when we learn to sit with our emotions, welcome them in and let them tell us the story that we do not want to hear, can they leave. To sit with your emotions is the most powerful liberating thing you can do. Pain wants to be heard. It will always come back in various forms in your entire life. Until you heal that pain, you will continue to see the world through your past pain.
Lesson 2 –Dismantle labels, categories and lenses
The way we understand the world is through a “regime of truth,” in the words of Michel Foucault— a famous French philosopher. The regime of truth is a body of discourse and knowledge in form of labels, categories, and language that serve to keep the status quo. By becoming aware of how these labels have shaped our own views and understanding of the world, we can dismantle them, as these regimes of truth are constantly in flux and are always being re-negotiated. This is relevant for our own lives but also when we deal with those we intend to help. What rules have you been taught about money, relationships and work? That money doesn’t come easy? That you must work hard? That relationships mean conflict? What do we think about those we help? That they need us? We have come to save them? That they are victims?
It takes an honest and critical look at our past and the rules we all grew up with since childhood. Parents and society teach us these rules because we need to learn them to make a living. But who are we really satisfying when we got married? When we got that promotion? How is your relationship defined when you enter into a conversation with someone who is a victim? He or she will be a victim.
Lesson 3 – Cultivate compassion
Compassion is often confused with empathy. Empathy, as defined by researchers, is the visceral or emotional experience of another person’s feelings—it is, in a sense, an automatic mirroring of another’s emotion, like tearing up at a friend’s sadness. Compassion can lead to an action that benefits someone else, without asking for anything in return. When we are compassionate, we do not look away as the suffering of the other person does not trigger negative emotions. Compassion defined as one’s emotional response when perceiving suffering involves an authentic desire to help. It activates a different part in our brain. With empathy, depending on how we as individuals react, we might feel inclined to look away when we see someone bagging because the emotion is too strong. In contrast, having compassion for someone might even mean not to help because the person can figure things out on his or her own. But its fundamental to the social glue of our societies, which is social collaboration.
Lesson 4 – Learn to Listen
Listening to the other is the most crucial part of our conversations, be they with our friends, family members or co-workers. In order to truly do this, though, we first must do our own inner work: it’s only when our minds are peaceful, and we have learned to listen to ourselves, that we develop the space to listen deeply and understand the situations of the people we’re talking to. This is what allows us to listen without prejudices or stereotypes.
The interrelationship between your state of mind and your ability to listen compassionately is fundamental to listening. The latest studies in neuroscience highlight how meditation can produce alpha waves that lead to deeper states of relaxation and stress reduction, which in turn reduces the “noise” in our heads. Instead of having thoughts swirling around in our mind when we talk to others, we make space to fully listen. We are now able to listen without our mind wandering off or already thinking about what we say next. We no longer see the other through our blurred vision.
Lesson 5 – Actions Flow from Conversations
When we become more compassionate, because we started to look inward at our own emotions and pain, our interactions, coming from a place of compassion, are different from those that are not. You will start seeing the impact you can make when you step into your place of power. Goleman and Davidson undertook research that proved, for people to take action to help others who suffer, compassion is required. They further establish that meditation focusing on compassion is vital in this process.
Lesson 6 – See the World Differently
This section brings all the different steps together. You are now able to connect the dots from your own personal transformation to an outward one, where you engage differently in the world through genuine conversations characterized by compassion—conversations that lead to small actions with lasting impacts. Wayne Dyer, the famous US psychologist said it best: “Change the way you look at things and the things you look at change.”
20 years of reflection and thought will go into this book that will be coming out in January 2022. But you can already benefit from the videos and blogs where I already share the content for free. If you have enjoyed and loved the videos, wait for the book as the next step, as it will give you a deep dive into these topics and conversations.
