Do you feel like the hero in the journey of your life? It sounds like a lofty question, but life is a lofty enterprise, and many may feel like a supporting character or even an extra in their own lives.
Mazin Jamal is a San Francisco-based coach and consultant who supports social impact leaders and organizations. He does so through his nonprofit Holistic Underground, where he and a team work around the themes of empowerment, resilience, mindfulness, wellness, enrollment, agility, allies, equity, leadership, etc.
It may sound aspirational and progressive, but the mission comes forged from tough events in Jamal’s life. When he was 16, his mother died.
“That crisis that happened to me shifted into an opportunity to transform, to become who I was really meant to be in this world,” Jamal says.
One of things he became was an activist, and he grew into leadership roles, but he found that it could be disempowering and exhausting.
“You get frustrated when the world, as Buckminster Fuller said, doesn’t dedicate itself to making you happy,” he says.
He looked to role models for lessons, including Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Maya Angelou and Joseph Campbell. He noticed how each of them insisted on being the authors of their own stories, so Jamal sought out training as a coach at the Academy for Coaching Excellence to learn “tangible, practical tools” to overcome trials and break out of the mundane.
He’s using Joseph Campbell’s Hero’s Journey model in an interactive workshop of music, stories and conversation, along with co-presenter Jo “Seoulstice” Jordan. The aim: how can we view our lives as a story in which we are the hero?
It’s a dynamic that we know well from stories both old (Hiawatha, Sir Lancelot, Odysseus) and new (Luke Skywalker, Moana, Harry Potter).
“We see these stories,” Jamal says, “and deep down in our hearts we feel called to do the same – rise up.”
But instead of battling Voldemort or the Trojans or Anglo-European settlers, workshop participants might be dealing with overbearing spouses or cruel bosses or past traumas that hold them back. Same difference. Adversity is adversity and heroism is heroism, and Jamal and Jordan believe they can help people to shift perspective to see their lives in these terms. But will the protagonist take that first step?