🌍The transformative power of challenges 😅
Plus hot cross bun butter boards, a Balearic spring break playlist and the prettiest power banks we’ve ever seen
Exciting times friends, as this is our last newsletter before we open up our waiting list for limited founder memberships. Standby! Next week we will tell you all about it: it’s been cooking a while and we’re proud of it. Until then, we’re bringing you our regular mix of links we love + musings on a low-impact life.
This week’s theme is… The transformative power of challenges 😅
It’s hard to miss, but the world is challenged at the moment. You don’t need us to dig into the polycrises, but perhaps together we can help each other survive them. And maybe even thrive through them. A BRiMM martial arts expert suggests adopting dodge and weave tactics. “If you stand there and let them hit you in the face you’re going to get hurt,” he says. “But if you dodge the incoming strikes and let them move past you, focussing on where you are in the space, you’ll survive.” And as all martial arts enthusiasts know, using the power of force against you to respond, makes you even stronger.
The Japanese have this down: their word for "crisis" is made up of the characters "danger" and "opportunity". So here’s a cheery fact: half of all the Fortune 500 companies were created during either recession or an economic crisis. Walt Disney had only 11 months of operation until the market crash of 1929, (and couldn’t we do with Mickey sorcering some brooms into his apprentice now). Revlon was born in the Great Depression, because everyone needs a lipstick in a crisis, while Linked In capitalised on the post dot com bubble of 2002. Rebecca Solnit wrote the book on it, A Paradise Built in Hell. Her premise is that crisis forces people to see the world in a different way, because it ruptures the assumptions of everyday life, creating a doorway into a different kind of world. A world where people can improvise solutions inspired by generosity and empathy, goodwill and common endeavour, acquiring the resilience and resourcefulness lacking in normal times.
So take heart friends, and have courage. We just need to be in the flow, dodging and weaving. Psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s seminal work 'Flow' shows how we can be five times more productive when we have the right conditions and mindset, (there’s a fab synopsis here). Concentrating on what we have, as opposed to what we don’t have, with an abundance mindset and working to our optimum, we can achieve a great deal. Which is exactly where BRiMM comes in, (next week, friends, next week…).
Creating good outcomes from bad experiences is also the heart of modern psychology. The physician Gabor Maté’s work, The Myth of Normal, dissects how trauma shapes our lives, and offers a transformation path. Here is a breakdown of his thesis and the six questions Maté suggests we ask ourselves to dig out of a personal crisis. Or tune into We Can Do Hard Things, the podcast by the American Glennon Doyle, whose premise is the braver we are, the luckier we get. “We are all doing hard things every single day – things like loving and losing; caring for children and parents; battling illness and loneliness; struggling in our jobs, our marriages, our divorces; fighting for equality, purpose, freedom, joy, and peace,” says Glennon. Talking openly about them with guests ranging from Michelle Obama to Melissa McCarthy has made her show a global hit. Inner resilience will help all of us achieve our low impact goals: know thyself, as those clever Greeks advised.
Turning crisis into triumph has been the preserve of adventurers from Ernest Shackleton (Endurance) to Jo Simpson (Touching the Void). Rather than feel overwhelmed by the climate crisis, BRiMM has been born from our desire to do something. To learn a new way of living that has us moving in the flow, using the power against us for us, and, yes, finding a low impact lipstick for those days when you need one. (Boys - you should try it sometime).
So let’s team up, tune in and turn the tide,
Team BRiMM
p.s. Name a book that has inspired you to make a change – give it some love by sharing them. Read The Mushroom at the End of the World? The perfect accompaniment to Season 2 of The Last of Us.
p.p.s. do you like this email? Why not forward it to a friend?
The BRiMM life questionnaire
Danielle, founder of My Skin Feels, the planet-positive skincare line, shares her low-impact living reccos
Your all-time top second-hand find
“A Fendi Baguette bag from a secondhand shop when I camped across the USA – still the best find ever.”
Most joyful weekend moment
“I haven’t had a weekend off in two years so I have forgotten what that looks like haha, but if I could choose a dream weekend activity it would be my local community gym class (all my pals go and it’s so much fun) followed by brunch, a car boot and then an evening at the sauna. We have an amazing one on the beach here in Brighton and it’s always my favourite place to be.”
Quote to live by
“‘If you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never been to bed with a mosquito.’ Anita Roddick.”
Watch out for the rest of Danielle’s answers on our site, launching soon
Fancy doing our BRiMM Life Questionnaire yourself? Get in touch
FROM THE COLLECTIVE
Sam spotted these new solar powered postboxes with parcel hatches (and one of the five in the UK is located right next to Becky’s parents’ house – small world)
Rebecca discovered these extremely goodlooking power banks made from reclaimed trash that are designed to be repaired
Tiff also recommends Rob Macfarlane's dreamy writing on landscape for spring feels
‘I think never before, outside of a wartime situation, have I seen such synergy and concordance coming together. This response has been quite unprecedented.’ So says Dr Sania Nishtar, the Prime Minister of Pakistan’s Special Assistant for Poverty Alleviation and Social Protection, on how in the space of a few weeks, the country flung together a social safety net for 12 million households whose cash incomes had dried up following the Covid lockdown. Referencing telemedicine in Indonesia and track and trace in Kerala, Nesta, the UK’s innovation agency for social good, pinpoints six factors that spark radical innovation in turbulent times. From ‘shared focus’ to ‘repurposing resources’, BRiMM HQ is taking notes.
If you fancy digging down into yourself Gabor Maté style, why not sign up to one of The School of Life’s 4 day retreats, designed to help you ‘learn, heal and grow’. Four days sounds to us like a very do-able amount of time to take out for some inner work, plus you can do it as a residential or, if you live in London, non residential. We’d trust those excellent people at The School of life with most things, and their promise of therapeutic groups, journaling, art therapy, music therapy, dance and movement therapy, writing therapy, and EMDR, (that’s something to do with your eyes), all “in the spirit of friendship, learning and curiosity” sounds like a glorious use of time. Crisis, what crisis?
Famously, It was Ella Mills’s own personal medical disaster that inspired her to launch Deliciously Ella, a plant based blog that has grown into a formidable food empire. At a recent lunch Ella shared that it’s frustrating she is still termed as a ‘blogger’ when she and her husband sold their company for undisclosed millions last year. But Ella is just getting started, having used the proceeds to acquire All Plants, which puts her in the interesting position of managing a start up and a scale up empire simultaneously. Take some tips from her and nutritionist Rhiannon Lambert on their new podcast The Wellness Scoop, a no nonsense approach to the wellness industry, "because we’ve got bigger problems than worrying about oat milk”.
Nothing better than the story of a successful career maven, and we love Millie Kendall’s. Currently CEO of the British Beauty Council, Kendall skipped sixth form to work as a shampoo girl on the salon floor. But, she discovered she wasn’t any good at cutting hair. With no education to fall back on, she fell to despair, until the Japanese make up guru Shu Uemura saw past her failings. “I had failed as a hairdresser and I wasn’t a good makeup artist but Shu saw I was really good at managing the store and making money for the company. I went to Japan when I was 21 and Shu opened up a lot of opportunities for me.” Kendall went on to found her own brand, Ruby + Millie, her own PR agency and then the British Beauty Council, an advocacy group that helps brands with inclusivity and sustainability. Now she campaigns for better education opportunities for those wanting to work in the industry. Here she describes how the BBC is building a better, more responsible industry.
We just spied this Able & Cole hot cross bun take on the butter-board trend from a while back– plus here’s a vegan version too, because it’s a long weekend and we’re feeling generous
MUSIC FOR BALEARIC SPRING BREAKS
With our longest playlist to date – 105 tracks! – these blissed-out sundowner sounds from Sam and Greg will keep you soulful right up until it’s really summer…