Catalyzing a Movement for Global Harmony
Our call to action today is healing the conflict within ourselves, which is contributing to the conflicts outside of ourselves, and sharing tools for each of us to become active change makers for humanity.
We live in times of high levels of terror, aggression, stress, and trauma, and yet we have a remarkable ability to adapt and actively cope and persist resiliently in the face of high-stress states. We are all experiencing that this is extremely difficult in today’s global environment, as we are co-regulating with the trauma and stress of others. Leading fundamental shifts to address today’s most pressing global challenges and building resilient systems and societies is important if we are to reach critical mass for genuine systems change and transformative societal impact.
Evaluating Educational Efficacy: The Gap in Developmental Change
How do we stop working reactively and begin to work proactively? How do we create future resilient societies, an inoculation of sorts, where children do not pass on the biases and belief systems, generational wars, violence, or harm—both to themselves and others?
Why are current educational or early childhood programs not creating lasting developmental change? There is an abundance of child and youth educational programs and tools, peace education, global education, social-emotional learning, moral and ethical development, and the list goes on, but none of them have shown lasting results. In fact, research shows that children and youth may increase in social, emotional, and ethical reasoning in dilemma stories, classroom lessons, or aptitude tests, but it does not transfer—they do not apply it in real-life behavior and choices.
From a dynamic adaptive systems lens, we need to work with the critical nodes in a system, both adults and children. Children develop brain functioning by modeling and co-regulating with the adults in their environment. How do we help current adults begin to adapt, form new insights, and ‘rewire’ their brains? The term neuroplasticity, which we hear so often, is the understanding that as humans we can deliberately build our adaptive and socio-affective bits of intelligence.
Over the past five years, with UNICEF and the World Bank in the Western Balkans, we have been putting theory into practice, and practice into impact at scale. We have trained and supported long-term thousands of teachers and caregivers, child psychologists, and professors.
Overcoming Barriers: The Challenge of Cognitive Flexibility
As those on the frontlines will attest, change is difficult, and peace is remarkably complicated. The theory is easy, but the reality is that we may be asking people to sit across the table from someone who has killed their father or raped their mother, or who has the physical scars of violence on their bodies—and asking them to consider changing their perspective and behaviors for the sake of future generations. It’s not easy. How do we get adults, to find that one unlock, to create cognitive flexibility? Neurobiology explains that if we can find something that we share as a mutual core emotion and we can find a similarity as a human being, this allows trust, and then our brains can begin this wonderful dance of co-regulation.
The adage ‘knowledge is power’ comes to mind. What is the knowledge we need? We need to understand how our brains are able to be very cognitively flexible and adapt and gain new learnings and insights. To understand that when we are stuck in hyperconnectivity loops that prevent us from being able to see another’s perspective or prevent us from understanding with empathy or imagining a different future, the youth are forming their neural architecture mirroring the adults in their world, which perpetuates the cycle of hatred, inequality, violence, and ‘othering’. The unlock is that we can very quickly change that for ourselves—we can regulate our nervous system in order to regulate our neural systems.
Activating Change: The Role of Adult Education in Shaping the Future
If as adults, we empowered ourselves with the neurobiology tools to activate our empathy, perspective-taking, ethical reasoning, emotional regulation, and effective communication of these things, we could unleash massive transformation both for ourselves and our children, and also, our communities and the world.
If we understand more about our own neuroplasticity to continuously change our brain and our mind, and increase our adaptive intelligence, then we can create the critical breakthroughs and new insights we are seeking for genuine systems transformation. Not only does this transform our own lives, but once we master how to regulate ourselves, we can understand how to help other adults regulate and ‘rewire’, and develop new neural pathways, new mental models, and new ways of interacting with their world.
