16. Identity in rubble | Rewrite your self-concept note 1/5
The Rewired for Good podcast | Episode 16 | 04 March 2025
Notes
In times of crisis, when everything crumbles, what keeps us standing tall ? In this episode, we explore the role that your identity plays in your capacity to be strong, decisive and move forward.
Join me on a five-part journey to rethink and redefine your self-concept, starting with this episode which explores the power of identity clarity.
Transcript
Hello, my darling aid worker friend. How is it going? I know, I know, deep breaths, everyone. Today, I want to start with a photograph in my memory that I hope will inspire you. A year ago, exactly today, I entered Gaza, and obviously, there's no preparing for what I found there. No amount of training, no knowledge, coaching, self-coaching that can prepare you for what looks like the end of times.
I drove in through the Rafah crossing. At the time, it was open. We drove for a while along the southernmost corridor of the Strip. The journey had started at 4 a.m. in Cairo, and it was ending with this magnificent sunset in Gaza. It was honestly the most spectacular kind of sunset. Those of you who are familiar with them know what I'm talking about. Golden rich colors, reflections on the Mediterranean, the whole shebang. It's really something to be reckoned with.
I drove by a sea of tents, of course. A year later, it probably looks very different. There were kids playing with kites that they had made out of food packaging. After the sea of tents came the sea of rubble. Again, for those of you who know the geography of Gaza, our housing was in Khan Younis, which is a little bit above Rafah. That's where most of the fighting was concentrated at the time. The entire city of Khan Younis was being flattened one bomb at a time.
You have drones above your head buzzing non-stop. You have the bombings two or three kilometers away. That's about a mile and a half away. Then you have the sunset, the miraculous sunset to the left. I remember it like it was yesterday.
I turned my head to the right, and I saw this little kid. He must have been four, like the age of my oldest. He was standing strong, chin up, arms raised on this massive hill of rubble with tons of little metal rods sticking out. He's barefoot, but he's being a superhero. Picture Superman or Spiderman observing the big city at his feet from his skyscraper, but his skyscraper is a pile of rubble. He's laughing with all his being. He's shouting things and playing with other kids. I really want you to picture it. He's standing on this pile of destruction, but the expression on his face makes it seem like he's standing on top of the world.
To be honest, over the months that followed in Gaza, every single Palestinian that I spoke to and that I got to know was a version of that kid in her or his own way, with all the evidence, all the rubble stacked against them.
There was Fayza, the single mom whose husband had been killed and who had spent $10,000 she didn't have to send her kids to Egypt so they wouldn't face the war. And there she was, working as a humanitarian.
There was Mustafa, a guy whose newborn baby was crushed in the bombing of his building, but there he was showing up every day for work.
And I can also tell you about this teenager, Sara, who was learning to be herself but without legs because, well, they had been taken by rubble.
And, you know, without wanting to make tasteless comparisons because what the Palestinian people are going through today is unfathomable. Even if you've seen it firsthand, you can't really, you know, understand it. And it's obviously something we'll have to reckon with and answer for as a species for generations and generations. But I do want to tell you this out of that experience.
What my conversations with the women, the kids, and the men trapped in this barbaric war have shown me is that the main reason they're able to stand strong amid complete and absolute destruction, the destruction of everything that they once had, the destruction of everything they could imagine to become, in a context in which so many of us would be unable to get out of bed or would run away if given the chance or would commit suicide even, what kept them standing strong is a very, very solid sense of identity, something that I have honestly never encountered in any other emergency that I've worked in.
I would ask them "what helps you keep going?" And they'd say, "I'm Palestinian. I'm a father. We keep going. That's what we do."
I'd say, "if you could leave, would you?" And they'd be like, "No, I'm Palestinian. This is my home. If they destroy it, I rebuild it. And if I have to die here, I die here." Very matter of fact, like, what the hell are you talking about?
I'd say, "where do you find the energy? Where do you find the strength?" And they'd be like, "I'm a Muslim. God is great."
So it became very clear to me, for every hardship they faced, for every difficult question you could ask them, the answer would be found in that very strong clarity of who they are. And who they are determines how they show up for facing life or death every single day.
I feel personally incredibly inspired by this. Usually, I will use aid worker examples to inspire you because that's who I coach. But the truth is, most of our inspiration can and maybe should come from the millions of crisis survivors we work for.
So this is what the next four episodes of this podcast are about. I want to help you find clarity on who you are. So that even when you feel like there's nothing but rubble left to stand on, you don't let your identity become rubble too. It's a bit of a journey that I want to invite you on. It's going to be five episodes. Basically, this episode is just a little introduction in which I make the case for the importance of that strong self-concept. The next episode, we're going to map out your current self-concept, your current way of seeing yourself. And then, in the following episodes, I'll offer you some paradigm shifts, some things to consider so that you can rethink and redefine your self-concept in the most deliberate way. We'll rewrite your entire self-concept note. And then in the fifth and final episode, we'll look at other people's opinions and what to do with them. Because I know that a lot of us struggle with those on a regular basis.
So are you coming?
I'm observing through conversations and coaching sessions, and I am feeling it myself that these days, we have this collective sense that the humanitarian world as a whole and us in it is under attack, right? No matter what end you choose to examine it from, really, we are in many ways under siege, right? There's the choking on the funding front. The principals are being treated like toilet paper. The legal instruments, it's as if they didn't exist at all. We, the aid workers, are being threatened either literally with guns or with the loss of our jobs. Our projects and our intentions are being accused of the worst things. And last but not least, there's 300 million crisis survivors that we are supposed to assist. And they are the main casualties of these political moves. But they're almost completely left out of the conversation.
And several people have told me that this ongoing earthquake -- by the way, I know I used to call it turbulence before, but I think the recent developments call for an upgrade in the language, I hope you don't mind -- when there's this rug being pulled from under you, when you feel besieged from all angles, when you have no firm ground to stand on, it makes it kind of hard to have a clear vision of who you are and how to move forward in the present, let alone project into the future.
And so more and more of us are operating on fear, especially maybe the leadership of humanitarian organizations, because they're stuck with very, very difficult decisions. There's a lot of pressure. So there's a lot of like, "tighten the belt, don't use that word in the statement, it might piss them off. Let's keep a low profile. Let's not do that. Let's not try this. Let's just play it safe."
And we have this escape room feeling, trying to find our way out of this tricky situation, in a very reactive way. That's the position we feel we've been put in. And of course, there's very little room to feel in control when you're in that position. You're going to feel like a leaf or that plastic bag in the movie American Beauty that lets the wind decide what your direction, what your actions, or what your decisions should be on your behalf.
And I started offering pro bono coaching to the humanitarians who are struggling through this. And a lot of them come to me and tell me, "I don't know who I am anymore. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I don't know what I'm supposed to be."
I'm realizing that a lot of us see the world as events that happen outside of us and that we need to find our positioning and our reaction as those events unfold. And to some degree, of course, I understand where that way of seeing things is coming from: I'd be lying if I didn't admit that I'm going through a lot of existential questions myself, believe you me, I pulled out the biographies of Che Guevara and Malcolm X out of my bookshelf and put them on my nightstand just in case I need some creative resistance inspiration.
But then I keep thinking of that little Gaza four-year-old superhero on top of his rubble. And I think of Fayza and Mustafa and Sara. They're not letting their circumstances tell them who they are. They are telling the circumstances who they are. Their ground can shake. The sky can fall on their heads. They have a hundred percent clarity on how they need to act based on their identity.
And whatever you may be facing, this doesn't just apply to the current reality of the humanitarian ecosystem, this applies to everything, who are you really?
Are you a victim or are you a survivor?
Are you a problem finder or a problem solver?
Are you the one who walks away because it's too hard, or are you the one who stays and fights for it?
re you the woman who speaks up when another woman is belittled, or are you the one who stays quiet, climbs the ladder, and then makes sure she hires all the women she can hire?
Are you the guy who breaks people's hearts or the guy who mends them?
In the office drama, are you the one who prioritizes harmony or are you the one who prioritizes shit getting done?
Are you the critic or are you the artist?
When you enter any space, are you there to harvest or are you there to plant?
And listen, of course, there's no wrong answers here, right? We need all of it to make our world. If we were all the same, things wouldn't work well. We tend to forget that. We tend to think that there's a good way or a bad way to do things. But thank goodness we're all different.
But whichever kind of different you choose to be, make sure that you are clear on it and deliberate about it. Because when you know who you are, what's acceptable and not acceptable becomes so much clearer. What to do and not do becomes much less negotiable and debatable.
Every single strong move I've made in my life was because I had gained a crystal-clear notion of who I was or who I wasn't, and I've never looked back.
And it's the same for the aid workers that I coach.
When my coachee decided to pause his humanitarian career to be with his aging mother, it was because that's the kind of son he is.
When my best friend, one of the most kick-ass, badass aid workers you'll come across, resigned from her overpaid HQ job and took smaller, more precarious contracts, it was because to her it was clear she's a frontline humanitarian, not an office one.
When I left my two kids to deploy to Gaza last year amid an insane amount of judgment, "You're a mother, how can you do that?" By the way, have you ever heard that being said to a dad? I deployed because it didn't matter how difficult and heart-wrenching it was for me to leave my kids to go to that particular war zone which is responsible for two thirds of all aid workers killed in the past year and a half. I cried so much when I said goodbye on the side of the road. But my identity both as a humanitarian and as a mom told me there was nowhere else I could accept to be. It wasn't negotiable. So I cried, you know, but I felt very, very strong in my decision.
Feeling strong when everything is falling apart in this one life you have is about identity. It's not about the circumstances around you. Ask the Palestinians.
My friend, that's what I wanted to share with you today. Some motivation to go on this self-concept clarity quest.
The next four episodes are going to be that little journey I told you about, and I cannot wait for you to join me so that when everything gets wobbly, job loss, breakup, flooding in your home, your boss's shitty feedback, your parents' criticism, any circumstance that happens against your will, when everything crumbles, you don't break. And you can stand strong in that rubble and show the world the strength of your values, the strength of your belief systems, the strength of you.
With silence or with words.
Fighting or withdrawing.
Participating or passing your turn.
It doesn't matter: however you show up, let it be anchored in a very strong and deliberate definition of who you are.
I want to finish by saying that I know that a lot of you these days are struggling, and my heart is with you. If you have a hard time getting out of bed and facing reality and facing people, it's perfectly normal. But please reach out if you need help. Lots of therapists and coaches are offering pro bono support. I am one of them. Lists are circulating on LinkedIn and Facebook groups. Don't go through this alone.
Take care of yourself, and if you find the energy, keep being the light when everything else is dark.
I'll talk to you soon.
Bye.