What does it mean to nourish your relational tissue, especially at a time when you can be faithfully uncertain, stuck maybe, and want to notice and transform?
Places of stuckness take many flavours, shapes and responses.
There is a load, a drag, some stormy weather. These places are never really inert
They just try to bend and contort for air and insight.
Here’s what I do with a place of stuckness:
Am an optimistic and I also love to play with futures and imagination.
In turbulent times like ours, uncertainty never disappears; it’s become heavy.
Sometimes frustration sharpens my awareness, because it all makes sense on paper, but I feel so small and powerless in the face of the task to accomplish…
At the same time, hope and faith haven’t left me; they’ve gone underground.
They’re present but inaccessible for now in their previous form.
Today, for example, I feel faithfully uncertain…
So, when I have workshops about tending to conflict, before rushing to fix anything, we start by naming our states of friction (or conflict, or mild tension) with honesty and humility.
We name the states we’re in because they are never neat. But they’re pregnant with stories about us.
They’re adjacent. In the junction we’re in, our state holds frustration without ejecting dignity.
Do you recognise yourself in these adjacent states?
- Weary Steward (you are still – always? – tending, even when tired)
- Reluctant Navigator (you know the way exists, struggling to step)
- Held Practitioner (you might need holding as much as you offer it)
- Tethered Dreamer (hope is dangling somewhere, more like a theory in a drawer, not flowing)
- Paused Radical (your fire is banked, not extinguished)
- Sober Waiter (you’re not really passive, but you’re listening for timing)
- Irritated Carer (you care under strain, but you still care
- Grim Improviser (you make do without romance)
- Restless Holder (you’re unable to resolve, but unwilling to abandon)
Or maybe you have another adjacent way to be in that stuckness? What do you notice?
And how would you call it?
Hi, I’m Servane! 👋🏼
Drawing on 25 years in community building and systemic leadership, I love to explore how we can nurture more courageous, connected systems of change. A Thinking Partner and systemic team coach, I tend the spaces where conflict becomes curiosity, and futures-thinking turns into collective imagination. I guide boards and social innovators to rediscover the relational heartbeat of their work.
