About
Over the last decade, I’ve expanded my work which featured mainly research on, and learning from, change processes, in places like Indonesia, Nepal and Kenya, to include supporting organisations and teams to bring about change from within. At the heart of the latter is cultivating a holding environment - a space (relational, emotional, and sometimes physical) where people feel safe enough to reflect, take risks, face uncertainty and grow.
The idea comes from psychoanalysis, where it describes the way a parent or caregiver supports a child through distress and helps them make sense of their world. In organisations, holding environments help people stay with difficult emotions, work through complexity, and find a way forward, rather than retreat into blame, avoidance or burnout.
I haven’t learnt about holding environments merely through books and courses. It’s been personal. When my parents migrated from India they had very little in the way of a holding environment. Their hopes of a better life were disrupted. They lost the social and economic status they once had, were isolated, discriminated against and struggled to find their confidence.
Because of that, they weren’t able to offer me the kind of holding environment a child needs. I became the good child, compliant, quiet and well-behaved. I also found it difficult to tolerate the pain and frustration we often feel as human beings.
Raised in an Indian household but navigating a British world outside, I developed the capacity to hold paradox. Growing up in the margins (as an only child from an ethnic minority), I also became adept at observing others but also connecting with people from different walks of life, often bridging groups that wouldn’t normally mix.
Later, in professional life, I found myself in organisations that also lacked holding environments, places where raising concerns often led to being marginalised.
Over time, through lived experience, therapy, relationships, professional work and study (at places like the Tavistock Centre, the Institute of Group Analysis and the University of Hertfordshire), I’ve come to see just how vital holding environments are, both on a personal and organisational basis.
And it’s through that journey and all the learning it’s brought, that I’ve cultivated the skills and qualities to support leaders, teams and organisations create holding environments of their own: spaces where people can speak honestly, think together, consider difference and contradictions and make sense of what’s going on beneath the surface - spaces where we might begin to hear the music behind the words.
