What we focus our attention on becomes our lived reality. Today’s toxic attention economy increasingly commodifies and monopolises how we make sense of the world, how we relate with each other, how we understand our own role on this planet. Industrialised identities, behavioural patterns, and dreams are sold on attention marketplaces dominated by big tech companies. We can buy solutions to problems others created for us. We can buy into manufactured realities that are disconnected to what is alive in us. How can we re-embrace communications as a force that helps us thrive?

"Regenerative communications can help us move beyond what seems impossible in today’s polluted, sterile, and heartless attention economy."

Communications today are characterized by increasing levels of polarization, fragmentation and atomization. Maybe as a natural response to the unprecedented destruction of natural and social ecosystems, our ways of communicating seem to be increasingly careless, aggressive and/or fearful. Qualities like deep listening, gratitude or imagination have become scarce. Perhaps unsurprisingly, we face a mental health and hopelessness pandemic.

This toxic soil of communications today is nourished by the traumas of the past. Most of today’s marketing, advertisement and PR industries are capitalizing on patterns of instant gratification, restlessness, addiction, fears, and a general sense of “not-enoughness” to make people do something they wouldn’t intuitively. At the same time, modern communication landscapes give little visibility to marginalized voices, ancient wisdoms, and pluralistic ways of looking at the world.

Against that background, how can communications help to channel attention towards regeneration where it is needed in our communication ecosystem? How can we learn to meaningfully talk about our role in issues such as climate change, planetary health or social reconciliation? Which communication posture is needed to stay grounded and thrive as part of the communities and places we inhibit?

Regenerative communications could be described as the conscious and creative, wild and wise, caring and courageous practice of listening to and expressing our greater, deeper and more diverse potential. By sensing  regenerative and degenerative patterns and dynamics in communications, regenerative communicators can identify intervention points to redirect communication flows towards truthfulness, integrity and love.

Back to essence

“We create ourselves by what we choose to notice. Once this work of self-authorship has begun, we inhabit the world we’ve created. We self-seal. We don’t notice anything except those things that confirm what we already think about who we already are.” Margeret Wheatley

If we agree that what we focus our attention on will grow, then we need to understand how we perceive reality. This is a deep introspective journey that explores our inner landscapes by “living the questions”. It is an invitation to dive into our unique essence and the diverse parts that compose it: our roots, our dream, our role, our vibe etc. This unique contribution to the world is what will shine in the outside world.

Back to belonging

“I long, as does every human being, to be at home wherever I find myself.”Maya AngelouWith the growth in loneliness, distrust and inequalities, there is an embodied longing of feeling part of something bigger: a community, a place, a higher call. Particularly people from marginalized perspectives have many insights on what it means to belong or not. Regenerative communications can help to meaningfully weave individual stories of essence into a larger picture by asking about the unique potentials of an organization or community as part of its ecosystems.

Back to beauty

“To see a world in a grain of sand and a heaven in a wildflower.”  William BlakeWhat if we could write a new story for humanity? What if every dream found a place in the imagined landscape of our future? What if we gave life to the fabric of the dream we are weaving together? Regenerative communications can help us move beyond narratives telling us a different reality is impossible within today’s polluted, sterile, and heartless attention economy.

It can be an invitation to re-imagine how beautiful it would be to live together in ways that promote our thrivability. Inspired by nature and diverse perspectives, we can learn to be designers of enlivened dreams. Communications can become a spark of hope, an inspiration, but also a force that channels attention towards learning to enliven the dreams of people and the more-than-human world.

Discover how Perspectivist can help you to dive into essence, root back in community and place, and weave for potential through regenerative communications!

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