profile

ANZPOP

Thought-provoking ideas, and transformative tools and training for working with individuals, groups, organisations, and communities.

Featured Post

The Poet's task

Dear Reader, This month’s newsletter is inspired by poetry. The poet’stask is simple. He looks for quiet,and speaks to whathe finds there.David Whyte, Excerpt from The Poet So we invite you to become a poet for a moment.What do you hear in the quiet? In your body? In the world? In your relationships? In your dreams? What do you find there? Make a few notes. We begin by slowing down, seeking quiet so we can hear more clearly. We can consider other types of listening too – listening to tiny...

Dear Reader, There is so much noise everywhere it’s easy to become overwhelmed. Bam. Bam. Bam. Our bodies feel the pressure and pull of competing agendas and meanwhile our time can easily be usurped by devices designed to keep us there. Never before have we had so much access to what’s going on in other places, knowledge and answers, and also so much fluff! In this cacophony, some of us want to curl up under a doona and find quiet, some want to rage against injustice, some want to understand...

Dear Reader, A few honest questions today. Are you on the edge of signing up for something that could change your practice and your life? Are you a lifelong learner who wants to go deep, not just wide? Do you hold a professional qualification and want to supercharge it, with tools and self-knowledge that most training doesn't offer? Are you ready to make a significant shift in how you understand yourself and the people you work with? If any of those landed, the Two-Year Process Work Study...

Dear Reader, This week, Australia pauses to mark Reconciliation Week - bookended by two landmark moments: the 1967 Referendum, which recognised Indigenous Australians as citizens deserving the right to vote, and the 1992 Mabo decision, which overturned the fiction of terra nullius and acknowledged Indigenous land rights. Both were won not in a single dramatic moment, but through decades of tireless advocacy by Indigenous leaders, and crucially, through partnerships with unlikely allies who...

Dear Reader, Sometimes we deny ourselves transformation. It’s such a big, loaded word, it can be easy to think that it is simply beyond us or our groups – somehow only reserved for others, or that it requires a huge investment of time, money or resources that we simply don’t have. Because of the enormity of the impact of transformation, we think that the input looks the same. And sure, like anything, sometimes that can be true. But usually it’s not. Process work teaches that transformation...

Dear Reader, History is full of stories of people who 'saw it coming' when others didn't. Ignaz Semmelweis in the 1840s knew that doctors washing their hands before delivering babies would dramatically reduce maternal deaths, and was ridiculed by the medical establishment for saying so. Marine scientist Ove Hoegh-Guldberg spent the late 1990s warning that rising ocean temperatures would cause mass coral bleaching on the Great Barrier Reef, and got enormous pushback that her findings would...

Dear Reader, Did you know Carl Jung didn't like groups? Apparently, he found them a bit dangerous. “Every mass organization is a latent danger just as much as a heap of dynamite is.” Eeek. He was really feeling it. It makes sense that we fear groups. There's so much that could spin out of control, so much that could go wrong. And so, many of us respond by trying to control them to alleviate that fear. We want to feel grounded and to help those in the group feel safe. In some ways, it works....

Dear Reader, A you a fan of tension? Weird question, but regardless of whether you enjoy it or not, let's just say it happens. You might be facilitating a group, holding a meeting, working with a client, or even sitting at a dinner table, and here it is. Perhaps it’s a particularly difficult group dynamic. A relationship that keeps circling the same issue. Or an inner reaction that surprises you with its intensity. The funny thing is, often we treat or think about these things as separate...

Dear Reader, As the year begins, we think about kicking off into action. New calendars, new intentions, new momentum. The urge to move, decide, change something. Action is a powerful force.And yet action without direction, focus, or educated discernment can drain us. At best, it wastes time and energy. At worst, it can be harmful - to ourselves, to others, and to the systems we are part of. So as the year opens, we invite you to slow the impulse just enough to ask a deeper question: what kind...

Dear Reader, Sometimes, it’s hard to write. Sometimes it’s hard to write because we are trying to write something that is going against our experience. We had intended to write this newsletter about Christmas elves and beavering away to produce our 2026 program. We were going to tell you about our recent strategy retreat and our continuing commitment to our guiding principle: Teaching and learning Process Work in a diverse community. We were going to pose the question: How would it be if all...