The Lifelong Activist
How to Change the World Without Losing Your Way
Hillary Rettig
Lantern Books - A Division of BookLight Inc.
2006
Lantern Books
One Union Square West, Suite 201
New York, NY 10003
Copyright Hillary Rettig, 2006
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of Lantern Books.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Rettig, Hillary.
The lifelong activist : how to change the world without losing your way / Hillary Rettig.
p. cm.
ISBN 1-59056-090-6 (alk. paper)
1. Social reformers—Life skills guides. 2. Political activists—Life skills guides. 3. Social action. I. Title.
HN18.3.R47 2006
303.48’4023—dc22
2006009735
Dedicated with love to my parents, Gloria and Julius Rettig
Ebook ISBN: 9781590562468
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Table of Contents
PART IV: Managing Your Relationship with Self
PART V: Managing Your Relationship with Others
Acknowledgments
I wish to thank George Lewis for more than twenty-five years of love and friendship, as well as for his comments on the manuscript. Also, our Sudanese sons Daniel Mamour Agok, Phillipps Lual Baguoot, Aleer Galuak Deng and Dau Nun Deng, and our nephew, Angok Adier Angok, for sharing their lives with us. Meth e ran pioc path ben tene warkendit. And also Orbit, Comet, Elvis, Hawkeye and Neutrino, for more unconditional love than any mere human could ever provide.
I also wish to acknowledge the love and support of my sisters, Diana Presser and Lisa Rettig-Falcone, as well as of Larry Presser and John Falcone. And I am truly privileged to be the aunt of three very special individuals: Paul Busch, John Falcone III and Julia Falcone.
I am grateful to Melanie Joy, John Thompson, Patrick Tyrrell and Adam Weissman for their detailed critiques of the ideas in this book, which is much improved by their input.
I also wish to thank my friends and mentors Lois Arthur, Lisa-Claudia Brown, Brent Hymer, David Karp, Bill Merklein, Lisa Norling, Lydia Ross, Michael Stiefel, Vincent Suppa, Joe Valof and Bill Wollheim for their wisdom and generosity of spirit.
Also, Aryenish Birdie, Hilary Friedman, Ché Green, Stephanie Mittak and Nicholas Read for their close readings of, and detailed comments on, parts of the manuscript.
Finally, I wish to thank my editor, Martin Rowe, who supported this project from the beginning.
In dreams begin responsibilities.—William Butler Yeats (famously quoted by Delmore Schwartz)
Be regular and orderly in your life like a bourgeois, so that you may be violent and original in your work.—Gustave Flaubert
Introduction
I wrote this book because I believe that progressive activists are the world’s most precious resource. We tackle the most difficult and important problems—including hunger, war, disease, poverty, violence, cruelty and exploitation—and work to further humanity’s evolution in the direction of compassion and kindness. Conservatives may create more wealth, but we create more of the values, including justice, equality and freedom, that make life worth living. As history has repeatedly shown us, and as we are unfortunately witnessing in the United States today, wealth without the tempering of progressive values and mores leads inevitably to corruption and despair.
Imagine how different the world would be if there were twice—or ten times!—as many progressive activists as there are now, and if those activists were happy and effective and enjoying long full-time or part-time careers1. Entire societies and cultures, and quite possibly every society and culture, would be transformed.
That’s why I wrote The Lifelong Activist, a guide to building a sustainable activist career. It is aimed at you, the activist, volunteer or other politically active person who is considering your long-term career and life options. My goal is to empower you to live a happy life that includes an effective and sustainable activist career, and in particular to help you avoid the burnout that afflicts so many activists.
This is not a typical book on activism, perhaps because my background is different from that of many activists. Although I’ve long been involved in progressive causes, including labor, feminism, and, most recently, animal rights and vegetarianism, I have chosen to earn my living as an entrepreneur, business journalist and business coach. Prior to writing The Lifelong Activist, I spent three years working as lead business coach at a Boston nonprofit, where my team and I helped more than 1,000 economically disadvantaged people of diverse backgrounds start or grow businesses, professional art careers and nonprofit organizations. In that position, I was able to witness firsthand what causes intelligent and dedicated people to succeed and what causes them to fail. That is the knowledge I bring to this book.
That knowledge is, in a nutshell, that the secret to success as an activist, as well as in life itself, is to live a life that is as much as possible an expression of your core values. The Lifelong Activist is a guidebook for doing so, and it is based on the premise that you succeed by making conscious choices about your life, specifically in the crucial areas of your mission, time, fears and relationships. Self-actualization—a term coined by the late psychologist Abraham Maslow that refers to the cultivation of your unique strengths, talents and character—should be your primary goal, since the more self-actualized you are, the more creativity, energy, focus and other positive attributes you will be able to bring to your activism and other endeavors. Self-actualization is also, as I discuss in Part IV, entirely congruent with your progressive ethic and mission.
Self-actualization begins with breaking free of other people’s inappropriate influence and control over your life. Some of these people might mean well, while others might mean ill; still others might not care about you at all but are simply pursuing their own agenda. Some might even be other activists trying to bully you into working on their cause or meeting their standard of ideological purity. You need to break free of all of these inappropriate influences so that you can start to build a life in keeping with your values.
Perhaps because of my background, aspects of this book may challenge, and even anger or upset, some activists:
•My business background, naturally, influences my perceptions and advice, and so you may see more approving references to money, materialism, hierarchies and competition than you are used to seeing, or like to see, in a book aimed at progressives.
•I believe that activists need to place a high priority on money—or, more specifically, on creating a sustainable income for themselves. I understand that this can be difficult in a society whose values are opposed to your own. But our society’s capitalist structure isn’t changing any time soon and you still need to earn a living. The good news is that you probably have more choices than you realize: Chapters 12 through 15 in Part I will help you sort through them, and through your feelings and thoughts regarding money.
•I also believe that an activist should live the lifestyle he or she wants to live even if that lifestyle seems “unacceptably” bourgeois or materialistic. We are not machines and can’t program our likes and dislikes. Moreover, a life built on self-denial is bound to be an unhappy one, and an unhappy life, besides being tragic in its own right, is likely to lead not to lifelong activism but to burnout.
So, go ahead: buy the car, the clothes, the electronics, the gym membership or the vacation. Or buy all of them, if that’s what it takes to makes you happy. This may require that you get a non-activist job and do only part-time activism, but that’s fine: I’d rather see you be a happy part-time activist than a miserable, deprived full-time one. Chances are, you’ll get more done as a happy part-timer, anyway—and you may even get to do some “bonus” activism at your day job. Enjoy your life fully, and without guilt, shame or other negative emotions.
I want to be very clear, however, that I am not advocating a bourgeois or materialistic lifestyle. I am not advocating any lifestyle in particular. I advocate, rather, that you build a happy, sustainable lifestyle for yourself based on your values and no one else’s. It’s usually better, for a host of personal and societal reasons, to live as simply as possible, putting the bulk of your time and energies into your inner development and vocation(s), instead of into buying and maintaining a lot of stuff. But do what you need to do to be happy.
To those readers who are offended by these or other points I make in The Lifelong Activist, I urge you to stay with the book and glean whatever useful information you can from it. My goal is to help and empower as many activists as possible, and that obligates me to tell what I perceive to be the truth even if some readers find it to be controversial or even painful.
Your task, therefore, is this: to work to visualize and create a more liberated self at the same time you work to visualize and create a more liberated society. Picture yourself as someone who does activism as part of a happy, healthy and well-balanced life, and then work, using this book as a guide, to make that vision happen. Get past the stereotype, if it afflicts you, that activists are supposed to be ultra-serious and humorless. Get past the stereotype that they are supposed to suffer for their cause. Get past the stereotype that they are supposed to be poor. Envision a new mode of activism for yourself that is built on joyous involvement with the world. As Julia Butterfly Hill says, “Activism is so much more than just a response to something that is wrong. Activism is a celebration of life itself. It is a manifestation of the miracle of being alive. And isn’t that something to celebrate!”
I hope you find The Lifelong Activist helpful as you build your activist career, and I invite you to contact me and let me know your thoughts on the book or any aspect of your life or activism.
Peace and Freedom for All,
Hillary Rettig
lifelongactivist@riseup.net
PART 1: MANAGING YOUR MISSION
3. Tips for Completing the Activist Project Histories
4. How to Tell the (Absolute) Truth
6. Three More Facts About Burnout
7. How to Handle Uncomfortable Truths
8. The Importance of Focus/Creating Your Activism Goals List
9. How Much Activism Do You Really Want to Do?
14. The Worst Choice: Not Having a Well-Paid Career
17. Your Personal Mission Statement
Chapter 1: Who Are You?
That question should be at the heart of your quest to build a sustainable activist career—actually, it should be at the heart of your quest to build a happy and productive life. It is a question that every human being should give deep thought to throughout her or his life.
Socrates famously said, “An unexamined life is not worth living.” (Actually, it was Plato, quoting his teacher, Socrates.) Gloria Steinem, in Revolution From Within (see Bibliography), talks about a long period in her life during which she consciously resisted such self-examination:
I continued in this way for decades while pressures grew. . . I organized and traveled and lectured; I campaigned and raised contributions and solicited ads to keep [Ms. magazine] going; I turned my apartment into a closet where I changed clothes and dumped papers into cardboard boxes; and I only once in twenty years spent an entire week without getting on a plane. But at home or away, I often awoke with sweaty palms and a pounding heart, worried that I was going to mess up some public event, fail to find enough money to pay the printer and meet the payroll, or otherwise let down this movement. . . .
She further recalls, “When my friends asked about my state of mind or emotions, I made them laugh—and despair—by turning Plato on his head. ‘The examined life,’ I explained, ‘is not worth living.’” Despite her jokes, however, she reports having felt “burnt out many times” during this long period, and “like a soldier who is wounded but won’t lie down for fear of dying.”
I’m of two minds about Steinem’s story. On the one hand, there’s no question that she paid a terrible personal price for her activism: decades of anxiety and self-denial. On the other hand, there’s also no question that she was spectacularly effective. Along with her feminist colleagues, she transformed our culture and politics in ways that have improved life for hundreds of millions of women and men in North America and around the world. It’s sometimes hard to remember how difficult things were for women before the second wave of feminism ushered in by Steinem and her colleagues, but here’s a sampling: employers routinely discriminated against women both in hiring and in pay; women were often fired from jobs simply for marrying or becoming pregnant; many schools provided little or nothing in the way of athletics programs for girls; many banks wouldn’t lend money to unmarried women or to married women without their husband’s approval; and behavior that we now consider sexual harassment or even rape was considered socially acceptable.
Steinem and her colleagues were largely responsible for changing all of that, but many of them, including Steinem herself, paid a heavy personal price for devoting their lives to activism. Was it worth it? Steinem doesn’t address this question directly in her book, but I suspect her answer would be “Yes.” (And as a direct beneficiary of this liberation, I can only say “thank you.”)
What if, however, Steinem had achieved less than she had? What if, like most activists, she had achieved much less? Because, let’s face it: Steinem was a superstar. Through some combination of talent and luck, she was able to achieve vastly more than most activists, even activists who make a comparable or greater personal sacrifice. Most activists have to content themselves with creating a relatively small amount of social change, although those changes add up, of course, and also provide the context in which the occasional big change can happen. And some so-called “small changes” can make a huge difference in the life of an afflicted or oppressed individual and, hence, are not really small at all.
It’s not just true for activism, it’s also true for sports, business, art and any other human endeavor: most people are not superstars, most change happens in small increments, and those increments are often achieved only after substantial personal sacrifice.
So, imagine that you are an “ordinary” activist. You’ve worked for years or decades on an important cause, enduring poverty, isolation, disapproval from family and community, and the depression and (sometimes) trauma that comes from being a constant witness to society’s evils. In other words, you’ve made the usual sacrifices that activists make and endured the usual things they endure. But you haven’t achieved a vast amount of liberation, or even a little liberation. Maybe you’ve just held the line against one small evil. Or maybe, despite your best efforts, the line moved backwards.
Were your years or decades of sacrifice worth it?
Objectively, it is clear from history that even small changes are meaningful. In Bury the Chains: Prophets and Rebels in the Fight to Free an Empire’s Slaves (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005), Adam Hochschild describes how a tiny group of “superstar” abolitionists, including Granville Sharp, Thomas Clarkson, John Newton and former slave Olaudah Equiano, was responsible for the historic evil of slavery being banned not just in England but indirectly around the world, and in little more than a hundred years. But that group, he repeatedly emphasizes, was supported by the work of thousands of other activists who were doing pretty much what activists continue to do to this day: holding demonstrations, giving speeches, writing letters, doing legislative work, speaking through the press, providing financial support, selling socially-conscious products (for instance, the famed “Am I not a man and a brother?”–inscribed Wedgewood medallion), and risking life and liberty taking direct action to help individual slaves. The vast majority of these activists are unknown to history, and yet, working alongside the superstars, they halted one of history’s most monumental evils.
On a non-objective, more personal level, the answer to the question of whether your sacrifice was worth it depends on the answer to this one: Who are you?
This section of The Lifelong Activist is devoted to helping you answer that question.
Chapter 2: More Questions . . .
The tough question asked in the last chapter was:
Imagine you are an activist who has sacrificed years or decades for a cause, and has achieved a non-spectacular result. Was your sacrifice worth it?
As discussed, the answer lies in the answer to this more fundamental question: Who are you?
Ask a group of activists whether a decades-long sacrifice for non-spectacular results was worth it, and you will get a spectrum of answers. Some will emphatically say, “Yes, it was.” Others will just as emphatically say, “No, it wasn’t.” And many others will answer somewhere in the middle.
Moreover, everyone will have a different reason for her or his answer. Some will say “Yes” because they see activism as an inherently difficult challenge in which you shouldn’t expect to achieve a dramatic result—although it’s nice when it happens. Others will say “Yes” because they see the activist life as its own reward. And still others will say yes for some other reason entirely.
The people who answer “No” will offer similarly diverse reasons.
Actually, the question “Was it worth it?”, lacking nuance and specificity, isn’t very useful. Here are some more useful ones:
•What specifically was the nature of your sacrifice?
•What specifically was the nature of your achievement?
•Could you have somehow reduced the level of sacrifice without compromising your achievement?
•Could you have somehow increased the amount you achieved without increasing your level of sacrifice beyond what you were willing to accept?
You won’t be able to answer these questions for some hypothetical example, or for someone else’s career (like Steinem’s). But you can look back on your own activist career and answer them—and doing so is the very first step to Managing Your Mission.
So, set aside some time, find yourself a quiet place to think and write, and do the following Activist Project Histories exercise.
Exercise
Activist Project Histories
Choose two or three of the most important activist projects you’ve worked on over the past few years, and, for each, answer the questions below in as much detail as possible. It’s a good idea to select not just projects you consider “successes,” but at least one you consider a “failure,” as we often learn more from our so-called “failures” than our “successes.” (The words “success” and “failure”, and their derivatives, are in quotes throughout The Lifelong Activist for reasons that will become clear in Part III.)
•What was the project’s goal?
•What was your role in the project?
•How did you get involved in the project?
•What did you like about the project?
•What did you dislike about the project?
•Was the project successful?
•What result was achieved?
•How could that result have been improved?
•Could the result have been achieved more easily? (Or more quickly and/or cheaply?) If so, how?
•What talents or skills of yours were used in this project? How were they used?
•What talents and skills of yours were not used? Why not?
•What personal result (i.e., experience, information, contacts, career advancement) did you get from the project?
•How could that personal result have been improved?
•How could your own work on the project have been improved?
•Which parts of the project did you most enjoy working on? Why?
•Which parts did you least enjoy working on, or not enjoy at all? Why?
•What sacrifices did you make in other areas of your life to do this project?
•How did you feel about those sacrifices at the time?
•How do you feel about them now? Looking back, were they worth it? Should you have sacrificed less or more than you did?
•Did participating in the project harm you in any way? If so, how?
•Would you do a project like this one again? Why or why not?
•If so, what changes would you make, either in the project itself, or in your life outside the project?
Some tips for completing the Activist Project Histories are provided in the next chapter.
Chapter 3: Tips for Completing the Activist Project Histories
1. Answer Each Question as Thoroughly as Possible
It’s important to answer each question as thoroughly as possible because your answers will serve as the raw material for your Personal Mission Statement (see Chapter 17), a statement of values and purpose that you can use to plan and organize your life, and the more you write, the more you will have to work with. (If you don’t like to write, the next tip may help you get over that hurdle.)
2. Format Doesn’t Matter
It doesn’t matter if your answers are in paragraph, list, narrative or some other format. Just get the information down as easily as possible. And don’t worry about grammar or spelling; you’re not showing your Activist Project Histories to anyone. (See #6, below.)
3. Don’t Rush It
Take as much time as you need to complete your Activist Project Histories. At the same time, don’t obsess over details or aim for perfection. As you will learn in Part III, perfectionism is always the enemy, so just write as much as you can easily in answer to each question before moving on to the next.
It’s a good idea, after you’ve finished writing, to set aside your Activist Project Histories for a week or two. Then return to them and look at them with fresh eyes. See if you can add to, or clarify, what you have written.
4. Get Specific
Don’t just say a project was successful or unsuccessful: write down why, and what exactly was and was not accomplished. If you can quantify any “successes” or “failures,” so much the better.
Don’t just say a project used a certain skill of yours: give an example of how the skill was used. And don’t just say you screwed something up: write down how. Whenever possible, your points should be substantiated with a specific example.
5. Ask Others for Their Input—But Only After You’ve Finished Writing
It’s great to get input from mentors, colleagues, family and friends; and what they say may pleasantly surprise you, since others often rate our achievements higher than we ourselves do. But only approach them after you’ve finished getting your own thoughts down on paper. You don’t want their thoughts to prematurely influence your own.
6. Don’t Show Your Activist Project Histories to Anyone Else
It’s hard to be completely honest if there’s even the slightest chance someone else will see your Activist Project Histories, so make a pledge to yourself that you won’t show them to anyone.
And, finally, the most important instruction of all:
7. Be Honest and Objective
Honesty and objectivity are key, because only honesty will lead you to a valid Personal Mission Statement. Being honest is also harder to do than it sounds, since most of us have trouble being objective about our own life story and the situations we find ourselves in.
Chapters 4, 5 and 6 will tell you how to do it.
Chapter 4: How to Tell the (Absolute) Truth
To create really useful Activist Project Histories, you have to tell as close to the absolute, objective, unvarnished, “microscopic” truth as possible.
This is harder to do than it sounds.
All kinds of things stand in the way of our telling the truth, including: strong negative or positive emotions surrounding a situation; a tendency to overemphasize a situation’s good or bad aspects; myths, clichés and stereotypes surrounding our work; and a tendency toward generalization and oversimplification.
Here are some tips for getting past these and other barriers:
Learn Not to Self-Censor
We often self-censor when we believe our thoughts or feelings are somehow unacceptable. What I have seen from working with my students is that most people self-censor a lot, in big and little ways.
You may, for instance, start to write that you hated having to call up strangers for a get-out-the-vote project. That feeling strikes you as unworthy of a “true” activist, however, so you mentally correct (i.e., self-censor) it by thinking, “Wait a minute! If I’m really an activist, I shouldn’t mind making a few calls.”
Just write, “I hated calling strangers.”
Or, you may start to write that you hated working with a certain person. That feeling strikes you as unacceptable, however, so you mentally correct (i.e., self-censor) it by thinking, “How could I hate that person? She’s a famous, brilliant, important activist, and I learned so much from working with her. So what if she has a temper?”
Just write, “I hated working with her and her obnoxious temper.”
Don’t censor your positive feelings, either. If you start to write, “I loved having the summer off. It was great taking a break from activism,” but then start to self-censor it by thinking, “I should be committed enough to my cause to never want any time off,” just write, “I loved taking a break.”
Or, if you start to write, “I loved creating the posters and other artwork for the event,” but then catch yourself starting to self-censor by thinking, “Aw, that was just stupid, silly stuff. Other parts of the project were much more important,” just write, “I loved creating the artwork.”
Always write the absolute truth in your Activist Project Histories, even if that truth makes you feel guilty, embarrassed or ashamed. Remember that your feelings are always valid, even if they don’t meet your own or someone else’s standard of seriousness, appropriateness or ideological purity.
Head vs. Heart? Heart Wins
If you study the previous examples, you will see that frequently a strong and honest feeling is obscured by an intellectualization or rationalization. So, “That other activist was obnoxious, and I hated working for her,” gets obscured by layers of rationalization about how brilliant and dedicated the activist was, and how much you learned from working with her.
We often try to intellectualize or rationalize away feelings or thoughts we feel are unacceptable or inappropriate. Try not to do this, as it is one of the most fundamental forms of self-denial. In other words, if there’s a conflict between what your heart (your feelings) and your head (your intellect) are telling you, go with your heart.
Your heart often speaks in a softer voice than your head, and you may need to slow down and stay quiet to hear it. Just concentrate on your feelings, including your physical feelings. If thinking about a certain situation makes you physically tense or even physically ill, that’s obviously a warning sign. Conversely, if thinking about a situation causes you to burst out into a big smile, that’s obviously a very positive sign. Your brain may leap in and try to cover up whatever it is you are feeling, but don’t let it.
Watch Out for “Shoulds” and “Shouldn’ts”
If you catch yourself thinking things like . . .
• “I should have done more work on that project.”
• “I should have given more money to that cause.”
• “I should have stood up for myself more when talking with that opponent.”
• “I shouldn’t have taken the night off to be with my friends.”
• “I shouldn’t have bought that new coat.”
. . . the very next thing you should do is ask yourself, “Why? Why should (or shouldn’t) I have . . .”. It may be that you’re right: you should or should not have done the act in question. But it is also very possible that what you did was quite okay, and this “should” and “shouldn’t” stuff is pure pointless self-criticism and Monday morning quarterbacking.
As you will learn in Part III, criticizing yourself because you didn’t act perfectly is a destructive habit.
If you’re oppressed by a “should” or “shouldn’t” statement, try repeating it a few times in your mind. Whose voice do you hear saying it? Is it yours? Or is it your Mom’s or Dad’s? Your partner’s? Some other activist’s? Or someone else’s? Once you know who, specifically, is “scolding” you, you can often then figure out whether he or she is making a valid point or just trying to manipulate you into acting according to his or her agenda.
Embrace Complexity and Contradiction
Most of your projects will have both positive and negative aspects, and include elements of both success and failure. Try to capture all of these contradictory aspects and don’t worry about reconciling them or coming to some kind of artificial, oversimplified conclusion. So, instead of just writing, “I hated working for low pay,” write, “I loved doing activism full-time, I loved most of my colleagues, I thought my boss was OK—but I didn’t like working for low pay. Actually, I didn’t mind the low pay so much as not having health benefits. That really screwed me up when I got into that accident with my bike.”
Avoid Preconceptions, Clichés and Stereotypes
Many of us also have bought into the many clichés and stereotypes surrounding activism. You may believe, for instance, that . . .
• All activist work, no matter how difficult and unrewarding, and no matter how meager the result achieved, is inherently worthwhile.
• Activism is supposed to be difficult or unpleasant.
• Activists are supposed to be suffer.
• Someone who has suffered discrimination or oppression has an automatic pass to be obnoxious or hard to work with.
Try to get past preconceptions, clichés and stereotypes such as these, so that you can record your honest experiences and feelings about your work. One key here is to listen to your “heart” voice, as discussed above.
Chapter 5: Honesty vs. Burnout
Why is telling the truth so important? Because honesty is a preventative of, and antidote to, burnout. Here’s a definition of burnout:
Burnout is the act of involuntarily leaving activism, or reducing one’s level of activism.
Note the word “involuntarily.” Someone who makes a conscious decision to do less activism, either because her life priorities have changed or because she’s tired and needs to take a break, is not burning out: she is making a wise choice.
But, let’s face it: most people seem to leave activism involuntarily, and that’s a problem on many levels. When an activist burns out, she typically derails her career and damages her self-esteem and relationships. She also deprives her organization and movement of her valuable experience and wisdom. The worst problem, however, may be that when an activist burns out she deprives younger activists of a mentor, thus making them more likely to burn out. And so it’s a vicious circle, with burnout leading to more burnout.
No one knows exactly how many activists burn out each year but the number must be very high. (One indicator is the high employee and volunteer turnover rates in most activist organizations.) To picture how great a loss this represents, imagine how different, and how much better, the world would be if there were just twice as many activists out there as there are now. That’s twice as many campaigners for peace and justice, the environment, sustainable agriculture, labor, corporate accountability, gender equality, racial equality and other progressive movements. And then, imagine if all of those activists were happy and effective and enjoying long careers. It would make a huge difference.
Now, imagine if we were able to really lick this burnout thing and there were ten times as many happy, productive activists as there are now. That means, basically, that everyone who does activism in their teens and early twenties continues to do it, in some form, throughout their lives. (“Ten” is a guess, but a conservative one, I think. The ratio of younger to older activists could be up around twenty-to-one or thirty-to-one or even higher.)
Life would improve dramatically for perhaps every living thing on the planet.
That is why it is imperative that all activists work to self-actualize: so that we can prevent burnout in ourselves, and help prevent it in others.
As an activist, you probably see burnout all around you: activists leaving activist work, or staying in it but doing a crappy, half-hearted job. (I call the latter “passive burnout.”) Burnout is so common that it sometimes seems like an inevitable consequence of activist work. It isn’t, however: it is an entirely avoidable phenomenon. Burnout can have many causes, but perhaps the most common is this:
Burnout is caused by living a life in conflict with your values and needs.1
When I say “living a life in conflict with your values,” I am not accusing you of being a bad activist. For all I know, you’re a terrific activist, and whether you are or not, I know you’re doing your best, as are we all. What I’m talking about is a failure to create a life for yourself that reflects who you are as an activist and a complex, multidimensional human being. People make this mistake for all kinds of reasons, including:
• They don’t know they are supposed to consciously build a life around their values and needs.
• They do know, but don’t know how.
• They let others control their time and priorities.
• They have emotional or other barriers to success.
• They are overly focused on one area of their lives, such as activism or a relationship, to the exclusion of other important areas.
Some of these reasons may seem better, or nobler, than others. The problem, however, is that living a life in conflict with your values, and where your needs aren’t being met, no matter how noble your reason for doing so, is an energy-draining, soul-sucking experience that almost always leads to burnout.
The Cure for Burnout
The only cure for this kind of burnout is to be truthful about who you are, what your values are and what your needs are, and to start reorganizing your life around that truth. You may have a romantic fantasy of sacrificing your all to save the world the way Gloria Steinem did, but if you’re not the kind of person who can remain effective while enduring decades of deprivation—and few of us are—you’ll probably fail at that unrealistic goal and simply burn out.2
Once you come up with your Personal Mission Statement, your next step is to live that Statement, which brings us to another common cause of burnout:
Burnout can also be caused by the perception that you have been working too hard, or sacrificing too much, for too small a result.
The word “perception” is significant, as it is our perceptions, as much as or more than the actual facts, that often determine our level of satisfaction or dissatisfaction with a particular situation or outcome. Your Personal Mission Statement will help you identify what level of sacrifice you are prepared to make for your activist career, what level of success you hope to achieve, and whether those expectations are realistic.
Chapter 6: Three More Facts About Burnout
A large fraction of my activist and other students were experiencing burnout by the time they took my classes. From witnessing them, discussing their experiences with them, and from my own research, I have concluded these three things about burnout:
1. Burnout is a Process
It typically starts small and gets worse. Sometimes it happens quickly, and a person who was perfectly happy doing activism a month ago suddenly wakes up one morning and realizes he can no longer stand it. Usually, however, it happens slowly, over a period of years or decades.
2. Events Don’t Cause Burnout—It Always Comes from Within
Often there appears to be a precipitating event that leads to a case of burnout, such as a failed campaign or a fight with a colleague. Sometimes it’s a personal event such as an eviction notice or relationship break-up.
In cases such as these, it is tempting to come up with a simple cause-and-effect explanation for the burnout, but such an explanation is usually not accurate. Because burnout is a process, often what appears to be the precipitating event is really just the last straw: in other words, the person was mostly burned out before the event even happened and, being burned out, lacked the resiliency or will to cope with the crisis and carry on with his activism. Often, the event merely serves as a convenient excuse for doing what the activist has been wanting to do anyway.
For all the activists who burn out, however, there are others who keep on doing their activism despite having many other personal and professional commitments. And there are many activists, especially in the developing world, who keep on doing their activism even in the face of horrendous persecution and personal risk. When you ask these activists how they can keep on doing their activism, they often respond something like this: How could I stop? This is who I am. I wouldn’t feel right if I didn’t do it. In other words, their activist work doesn’t drain them; it sustains them.
For activism to be sustaining, it has to derive from your values and also occupy the right place in your life. If you are an activist who is feeling burned out, your challenge will be to figure out what type of activism is right for you, and where that activism fits in with your other priorities. Coming up with your Personal Mission Statement using the process described in this part of The Lifelong Activist will help.
3. Burnout Often Happens at a Subconscious or Semi-Conscious Level
Often, we’re not really aware that we’re burning out. We may not be aware that we’re in a bad mood a lot of the time, or that we’re not getting as much work done as we used to. Or we may be aware of these symptoms, but not recognize them as symptoms. Or we may recognize them as symptoms, but of the wrong problem.
That last one happens all the time and it’s a real pickle. Obviously, if you misdiagnose a problem, then you’re not going to be likely to solve it—and a misapplied “solution” can even make things worse. Many burned-out and burning-out activists, for example, misidentify their problem as laziness, lack of commitment or lack of discipline. Their solution—to try to work harder—often makes them feel even more burned-out than before.
The vast majority of burned-out activists are not lazy. They are not uncommitted. They are not undisciplined. They are, in contrast, some of the most energetic, committed and disciplined people around. They are, however, blocked from using their energy and talents in the service of their movement; and the block is invariably caused by trying to live a conflicted life where one’s actions do not derive from one’s values and needs.
The solution, once more, is honesty: about yourself, your situation and your needs. So, let’s return to your Activist Project Histories, and, in particular, to what may be your toughest honesty-related challenge: facing up to “bad news.”
Chapter 7: How to Handle Uncomfortable Truths
You are likely, in the process of doing your Activist Project Histories, to uncover lots of gratifying information about your talents, skills and accomplishments. Unfortunately, you are also likely to uncover some “uncomfortable truths.” You may discover, for example, that:
• You are not as committed to activism, or to your cause, as you thought. (Maybe you have other priorities right now. Or maybe you’re just exhausted.)
• Or, conversely, you are more committed to activism than you realized. (And, therefore, you should be doing even more of it than you are doing now. And how are you going to do that while continuing to earn a living and take care of your loved ones?)
• You have stronger materialistic cravings than you previously thought. (You really would like a nice car, new clothes or a bigger apartment. Or maybe you are just tired of living hand-to-mouth.)
• You would like to have more fun. (But how can you possibly take a night off, or a few nights off, when there are suffering people and/or animals out there who need you?)
• Your desire to do activism is partly rooted in your “selfish” personal needs or insecurities. (You want everyone to think you’re cool, or sensitive, or super-committed. Or, you like it when your activist ideals and lifestyle get under your parents’ skin.)
• You have questions about the validity of your cause. (You’re no longer sure whether it’s completely in the right.)
• You are no longer committed to the organization you are working for. (You don’t like the people or their approach.)
• You’re not as good an activist as you thought. (You’re not good at certain key skills, such as talking about your cause without annoying people. Or, you haven’t really accomplished that much relative to all the time and effort you’ve put in.)
• You haven’t really done as much activism as you thought. (So, what have you really been spending your time on, all these years?)
Confronting uncomfortable truths such as these can cause sadness, shame, guilt, regret and other negative emotions. It’s important, however, not to give in to these. The way to handle uncomfortable truths is as follows:
1. Don’t feel bad! Congratulate yourself, instead!
Confronting the truth about oneself is hard, gutsy work. Many people can’t do it, and many, perhaps most, don’t even try. So give yourself a lot of credit. Recognize that all of the so-called terrible things you are learning about yourself are not terrible at all (see Points 2 and 3), and that they don’t mean that you are a bad or uncommitted activist. Also remember that this process, painful as it may be, will ultimately lead to your becoming a better activist and a happier, more fulfilled person.
2. Don’t judge yourself harshly.
Many of us seem to believe that if we just criticize ourselves enough, we will be motivated to change our bad habits. The truth is, however, that self-criticism almost never works. In fact, as you will learn in Part III, it usually backfires. So, try not to indulge your habit of self-criticism, and instead seek to compassionately observe your failures and limitations without feeling bad about them.
3. Remember to look at the big picture.
In Part III, I devote an entire chapter to negativity, a self-sabotaging habit that many people are prone to. Negativists, as I call them, tend to be unduly harsh on themselves for their perceived failures or shortcomings, and also to blow them way out of proportion. They also tend to minimize, or not even acknowledge, their achievements and strengths. Negativism will really undermine you, so avoid it, and strive to keep a balanced view of your successes and failures.
4.Talk to someone else.
Because many of us are negativists, it’s often helpful to get a second opinion from a supportive mentor, colleague or friend. Often that opinion will be more balanced than our own, and can help us keep our “failures” and limitations, as well as “successes” and strengths, in perspective.
And, finally:
5. Consult a professional.
If you are finding it really difficult to cope with your unpleasant truths, please consult a mentor, therapist, coach, spiritual counselor or other advisor.
The goal, as always, is honesty, or, to put it another way, objectivity. You want your Activist Project Histories to accurately reflect the entire spectrum of your achievements, “failures,” “successes,” strengths and weaknesses.
Exercise
Return to your Activist Project Histories and see if they are objective representations of your experiences and feelings. In particular:
•See if there are any achievements you’ve omitted or underemphasized.
•See if there are any uncomfortable truths you’ve omitted or under- or over-emphasized.
If so, rewrite the document so that your experiences and feelings are more accurately and objectively conveyed.
Chapter 8: The Importance of Focus/Creating Your Activism Goals List
Once you’ve completed your Activist Project Histories, you should set them aside for a while. Spend the next two or three weeks giving your brain a rest and allowing some of the insights you’ve gained to settle in. Treat yourself well, and if you’ve got the money for it, buy yourself a little present. Absolutely no guilt or remorse allowed after the purchase! This is a reward for a job well done.
After you’ve rested, return to your Activist Project Histories. Now, your goal will be to review what you have written with the aim of determining which activist movement and which type of activism you should be working on. That’s right: singular “movement” and singular “type of activism.” In general, you should focus most of your efforts on one activist movement and, within that movement, on one type of activist work, be it electioneering, legislation, community education, running a shelter or sanctuary, guerrilla art or theater, letter-writing or something else. That doesn’t mean that you should just be doing that one activity: it means you ought to be doing that activity and all the other activities needed to support it. If, for instance, you’re focusing on community education via tabling and demonstrations, you’re probably also going to need to: manage your volunteers, do publicity, create posters and other artwork, build coalitions with other groups, negotiate with the people you’re targeting (and maybe law enforcement), solicit funds and materials donations, follow up with those who sign up for more information, and many other tasks.
Focusing is crucial because it takes a huge amount of time and effort even to do one seemingly “simple” thing, like a demonstration, well and completely. Many activists are so busy bouncing from one movement to the next, or one type of activism to the next, that they don’t have the time or energy to do a great job at any of their activities. That’s a shame, because great activism is way more effective at creating social change than merely good activism.
Activist Henry Spira even came up with name for unproductive workaholic activist behavior, “hyperactivism,” which he defined in an article in Satya as “the phenomenon of doing without achieving.” He asks, speaking about the animal rights movement in particular, “How can so many activists with so many resources achieve so little?” He offers several answers, including that, “Campaigns . . . have evolved into mindless rituals without beginning or end.”
Don’t fall into the hyperactivist trap of thinking that if you’re not rushing around every minute of the day, you’re wasting time/uncommitted/lazy, etc. Quantity is not the sign of a good activist, quality is: quality of work, quality of professional and personal relationships, and quality of outcomes. And you don’t achieve a quality result by spreading yourself too thin.
More on workaholism in the next chapter.
Focus to Avoid Burnout
Here are other reasons why focusing is important:
1. Transitions are wasteful. Every time you switch between movements or types of projects, you lose time and energy.
2. Working in too many movements, or on too many types of projects, means that you will probably have to manage unwieldy amounts of information and people.
3. By focusing, you’ll gain deep expertise in whatever type of activism you are doing—expertise that will help make you an even more effective activist.
4. Because of your expertise, you’ll attract other experts. Therefore, you’ll probably make many more valuable contacts and connections as a specialist than as a generalist. And, finally,
5. Focusing will lower your stress level. This is particularly true if you’ve been rushing around trying to do too many things at once. After you focus, you’ll have less to do, so you’ll be able to take a breather when you need it.
Professionals in many fields, including medicine, law, science and technology, become specialists in order to have a successful career in which they can achieve a lot without becoming too stressed. You should be a specialist, too. Even though focusing on one movement and type of activism may initially seem constricting, it is actually very liberating. You’ll be able to do a great job, and see many positive results from your activism, while at the same time living a balanced life. And instead of being burned out, you’ll wake up each morning rested and recharged and rarin’ to go.
Budgeting Your Time
Above, I said that you should focus most of your efforts on one activist movement. So what does “most” mean? There are no hard and fast rules, but I’m going to suggest you spend 80 percent of the time you devote to activism working in your chosen movement, and the remaining 20 percent working in a different movement.
You always want to spend some time working in another movement because, by doing so, you’ll get to form the kinds of linkages and coalitions that are vital to effecting broad social change. Also, you’ll get to “cross-pollinate”—exchange useful and empowering ideas, information and insights with activists in the other movement.
Needless to say, all of your activist work should be done in the context of a larger strategy aimed at achieving a defined and important goal. That goal could be something like:
• I want to help get at least 20 percent more Democratic or Green candidates elected to state and local offices in my state over the next five years.
• I want to help at least three town governments in my state increase the amount of conservation and recycling they do, so that their energy use and solid waste production are cut in half over the next ten years.
• I want to get vegetarian options added to all elementary, middle and high school lunches in my state by the year 2012.
Note the highlighted words: “20 percent more,” “at least three,” “cut in half,” and “all.” Good goals, as you will learn in Chapter 18, are quantified. Also note, “five years,” “ten years,” and “2012.” Good goals are also deadlined.
Many activists make the mistake of working on activities that are not linked to a defined goal, with the sad result that, even if they do good work, their efforts don’t result in much social change. The way to avoid this painful mistake is to take strategy seriously and work with other activists who do the same. Books such as Randall Kehler, Andrea Ayvazian and Ben Senturia’s Thinking Strategically: a Primer on Long-Range Strategic Planning for Grassroots Peace and Justice Organizations (Amherst, MA: Peace Development Fund, n.d.) and Kim Bobo, Jackie Kendall and Steve Max’s Organize!—Organizing for Social Change: Midwest Academy Manual for Activists (Santa Ana, CA: Seven Locks Press, 2001) are good places to start.
When you choose a primary and secondary movement, and a specific type of activism, to focus on, that doesn’t mean you have to stay with those choices forever. Your interests may, and probably will, take you in a different direction later on. So don’t worry that by focusing you are making a life-defining choice. You are just making a choice that is going to make you much more effective in the short term.
Focus, by the way, happens on multiple levels. There’s the “macro” level of focusing mainly on one movement at a time. Then there’s the “micro” level of focusing mainly on one type of activism within that movement at a time. And finally, there’s the “nano” level of focusing on one task at a time. Here’s what the late Peter S. Drucker, the world’s most famous management guru, said about nano-focus in his classic book The Effective Executive (see Bibliography):
If there is any one “secret” of effectiveness, it is concentration. Effective executives do first things first and they do one thing at a time. . . . This is the “secret” of those people who “do so many things” and apparently so many difficult things. They do only one thing at a time. As a result, they need much less time in the end than the rest of us.
It’s just as true for activists as for businesspeople.
How to Choose
If you’re lucky, you’ll feel a strong emotional pull toward one particular movement and type of activism. If not—if you feel pulled in several directions at once—you have two valuable resources that will help you choose: your Activist Project Histories and your mentors.
So, go back and review your Activist Project Histories, asking yourself these questions:
• Which movement or cause did you most like working on? [Note: not necessarily the one you considered most important.] Was it gay rights, labor, environmentalism, antiglobalization, transparency in government, poverty reduction, fair housing, antiwar, animal rights/animal welfare or something else?
• What type of work did you most like doing? [Ditto.] Was it electioneering? Organizing and running demos? Legislative work? Building websites? Door-to-door canvassing? Guerrilla art and/or theater? Letter-writing? Something else?
• What type of organization did you most like being part of? [Ditto.] Big or small? National or grassroots? Hierarchical or flat? Majoritarian or consensus decision-making?
• Which role did you most like taking on? [Ditto.] Did you like working independently or as part of a team? How big a team? Did you like being a leader or coordinator, or did you prefer to let someone else handle that role?
Now go back beyond your Activist Project Histories, to your earliest activist experiences, the ones you landed in almost by accident back when you didn’t really know that what you were doing was called “activism.” And then look back even beyond that, to your childhood. Often in our early years we express our true passions, which we then tend to lose track of as we get older and busier. For example, as a child I was always deeply passionate about, and concerned for, the animals in my life and animals in general. As an adult, I did many other kinds of activism, but it wasn’t until I started doing animal activism that my activism truly began to feel like a comfortable “fit” and extension of my core values. Animal activism very quickly took me deeper into activism than any of my previous activist experiences, and I was more effective at it as well. I wish I had returned to this childhood passion earlier.
Next, talk to mentors. (More on how to find and work with mentors in Part III, Chapter 26.) This is actually a vital step to take at any pivotal stage of your career—or, more precisely, at every stage of your career. Review the conclusions you’ve drawn from your Activist Project Histories with them and see if they agree. In particular, ask them what talents, skills and resources they think you have that you might have missed; and also which skills they think you need to improve.
There’s one more important question you need to consider as you plan your activist career: how much activism do you really want to do? I discuss that one in the next chapter.
Exercise
Activism Goals List
After carefully reviewing your Activist Project Histories and talking with your mentors, write down the answers to these questions relative to the primary activist movement you wish to be working on:
•Which activist movement would you like to focus on?
•What type of activism would you like to focus on?
•What goal (quantified and deadlined) would you like to see result from your activism?
•What type of organization would you most like to be part of?
•What role would you most like to assume?
Please answer each question in as much detail as possible.
Then answer the same questions for your secondary (coalition-building) movement.
We’ll call this document your Activism Goals List.
Remember that your answers to this and the other Goals exercises in The Lifelong Activist are not meant to be set in stone. You’re simply taking your best guess as to what you want to be doing in the future, and you can always change your mind later. Planning should be a fun, low-stress activity, almost a game, so don’t get nervous over it.
Chapter 9: How Much Activism Do You Really Want to Do?
Many activists, and especially many young activists, see the enormous amount of injustice and suffering in the world and conclude that their only moral choice is to devote their lives 100 percent to activism. These activists tend to see all activities other than activism as a waste and a distraction. They also often scorn the easier types of activism, choosing instead to plunge themselves directly into the most difficult and dangerous aspects of the struggle.
There are several problems with this viewpoint, beginning with the fact that no one can devote 100 percent of their time to activism or any other activity. We are all human beings with a minimum set of human needs—to be fed, clothed, rested and sheltered—that consumes many hours a day. This may seem like a small point, but these tasks are essential and if you stint on them to devote more time to your activism, you probably won’t function well either as an activist or a human being. Eating junk food, going without sleep, skipping medical appointments and ignoring other personal needs are common ways activists stint on the essentials.