Weekly Reflection #016
The Weather We Bring, the Climates We Sustain, and the People We Become
By Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah | 11 October 2026
Have you ever found yourself preparing psychologically before encountering someone?
Perhaps it is a colleague, a manager, a family member, a teacher or someone whose reactions you have learned to anticipate. You may find yourself rehearsing what you want to say, deciding which questions to avoid, or preparing for a particular response. Perhaps you become quieter, more guarded or unusually careful about how you express yourself.
Nothing has necessarily happened yet. The person may not even have entered the room.
But you are already preparing for the conditions you expect to encounter.
In a sense, you are checking the weather forecast.
We routinely prepare for physical weather. We check whether rain is expected, whether temperatures will fall, whether strong winds are approaching, or whether the conditions will be favourable for the day ahead. We might carry an umbrella, put on a warmer coat, or change our plans altogether.
We understand that environmental conditions can influence how we feel, what we do and the choices available to us.
But what about the human weather we encounter? The emotional, psychological and relational conditions created through our interactions with other people?
And perhaps more importantly, how often do we consider the conditions we ourselves create for others?
We spend considerable time examining how environments shape us. We recognise the influence of our families, schools, communities, workplaces, institutions and societies. We understand that these environments can support our development or constrain it, expand our possibilities or quietly teach us to become smaller, less visible and more cautious.
Yet there is another dimension to this relationship that deserves attention.
We are not simply inhabitants of environments. We are also creators of them.
Every interaction carries conditions. Our words, expressions, silences, assumptions, expectations and reactions contribute to the psychological environments that other people experience.
Some people bring warmth, curiosity, reassurance and room to breathe. Others may bring tension, unpredictability, scrutiny, defensiveness or emotional coldness. Sometimes the same person brings very different conditions depending on the circumstances, the relationship and the psychological state they are occupying.
And sometimes, without realising it, we become the conditions that other people must learn to navigate.
Human Environments: The Weather We Bring and the Climates We Create
This has led me to consider an important distinction:
Weather is what I bring today.
Climate is what people have come to expect from me over time.
A difficult day may affect how we respond to someone. We may be tired, anxious, overwhelmed or preoccupied. Our patience may be reduced, our expressions less welcoming or our capacity to listen temporarily diminished.
This is our weather.
It may change tomorrow, later in the afternoon or even within the next few minutes.
But what happens when particular conditions become repeated experiences? When others begin anticipating our reactions before we have spoken? When they learn that certain questions are unwelcome, particular emotions are better concealed, or disagreement is likely to produce hostility?
Our weather may have become part of their climate.
There is an important difference between encountering an occasional storm and living in conditions where storms are consistently expected.
Think of the manager whose team members carefully monitor their mood before raising concerns. The parent whose children know when it is safer to remain silent. The colleague whose presence causes others to rehearse their contributions before speaking. The teacher whose pupils have learned that asking for help may lead to embarrassment.
Now consider the opposite.
A colleague whose presence makes it easier to admit uncertainty. A parent who allows children to express difficult feelings without humiliation. A teacher who encourages questions and treats mistakes as opportunities for learning. A leader who remains open to challenge without becoming defensive.
These are human climates too.
And the difference is not necessarily found in dramatic incidents. It may be found in the repetition of ordinary interactions.
Over time, people learn what is possible in our presence.
They learn whether they can ask for help, express uncertainty, challenge assumptions, make mistakes, disagree, reveal vulnerability or simply be themselves.
They also learn when doing these things carries emotional or social risks.
This connects directly with my previous SSF reflection, What State Are You Occupying?, in which I explored the relationship between psychological states, stages, emotions and the environments we inhabit.
The distinction between weather and climate offers another way of thinking about these processes, although it is not identical to the distinction between SSF states and stages.
A temporary emotional response does not necessarily define someone’s broader orientation or enduring patterns of behaviour. Yet repeated responses can influence how others experience and anticipate their presence.
Someone may be generally reflective but respond defensively when a deeply held belief is challenged. Another person may be warm and supportive in one relationship while being dismissive or hostile in another.
This leads to an uncomfortable but necessary question.
What is it like to encounter me?
Not what do I intend other people to experience, or what kind of person do I believe myself to be?
But what conditions do people actually experience when they encounter me?
And are those conditions the same for everyone?
The Cold Classroom: When a Child Feels the Weather Before They Can Name the Climate
Consider the young boy depicted in my new Six Stages Framework visual formulation, Human Environments: The Climates We Create.
He is standing in a classroom, yet the conditions surrounding him are cold, wet and icy. Rain falls upon him while his teacher sits at her desk, seemingly unaffected by the conditions he is experiencing.
The rain is metaphorical, but the psychological experience it represents may be very real.
Imagine that this child has repeatedly asked for help without receiving acknowledgement. Perhaps his questions are met with impatience, his uncertainty interpreted as lack of effort, or his attempts to seek reassurance overlooked.
He may initially go home feeling unhappy without being able to explain why.
His mother asks how his day was.
“Not very good.”
“What happened?”
“I don’t know.”
Perhaps he cannot identify a particular incident. Nothing dramatic occurred. Nobody shouted at him. He was not explicitly told that he was unwelcome.
But something about the conditions he encountered left him feeling uncomfortable, unseen or excluded.
Over time, however, he begins to notice patterns.
He feels increasingly reluctant to ask questions. He becomes anxious when he knows he will have lessons with that teacher. He experiences relief when she is absent.
He may also begin noticing how differently she responds to other children.
Perhaps she smiles when they approach her, patiently explains their work or offers reassurance when they make mistakes.
He recognises that the warmth available to others does not seem to be available to him.
What initially existed as an uncomfortable feeling begins to acquire meaning.
He may start thinking, “She doesn’t like me,” or “There is no point asking for help.”
Eventually, he may stop raising his hand altogether.
An adult observing his behaviour might describe him as withdrawn, lacking confidence, disengaged or insufficiently motivated.
But what if his behaviour is an understandable adaptation to the human environment he has come to expect?
This is where psychological formulation becomes essential.
Rather than asking only, “What is wrong with this child?” we need to ask, “What conditions is this child experiencing, how might those conditions be influencing his behaviour, and what needs to change?”
Importantly, we would not automatically conclude that the teacher was deliberately rejecting the child or that discrimination had occurred.
We would explore the child’s experience alongside classroom observations, patterns of interaction, previous experiences, learning needs, the teacher’s perspective and the wider school environment.
Research provides reasons to examine these interactions carefully. A 2022 observational study of teacher classroom interactions identified differences in non-verbal behaviour, academic interactions and responses to pupils under comparable conditions. Such findings remind us that differential treatment can be communicated through everyday interactions, not only through explicit statements.
Perhaps the teacher herself is struggling. She may be overwhelmed, inadequately supported, or working in an institutional climate in which her own requests for help have repeatedly been ignored.
The conditions experienced by adults may influence the conditions they create for children.
Understanding those circumstances does not remove responsibility for what the child is experiencing. It allows us to examine how the situation developed and where opportunities for change might exist.
Human environments are rarely created by one person acting in isolation. They emerge within relationships, histories, expectations and systems.
But there is another important question.
Why might the child recognise his discomfort long before he can explain it?
And does something similar happen when adults encounter prejudice, racism or discrimination?
When We Feel the Weather Before We Can Name the Climate
I have been reflecting on the experiences of Black people and others from marginalised groups who describe encounters that leave them feeling uncomfortable, diminished or excluded, even when they cannot immediately identify precisely what occurred.
Perhaps someone attends a meeting where nothing explicitly racist is said.
There is no racial slur, no overt hostility and no obviously discriminatory decision.
Yet they leave feeling unsettled.
Perhaps they felt overlooked, questioned more closely, treated with less warmth or somehow positioned differently from those around them.
They may begin questioning themselves.
Am I imagining this? Am I being overly sensitive? Did that person mean something by their comment? Why did I feel so uncomfortable?
Sometimes the significance of an interaction only becomes clearer after repeated encounters.
Perhaps the person notices that their contributions are routinely questioned while similar suggestions from colleagues are welcomed. Their competence is repeatedly scrutinised. They are interrupted more frequently, given less benefit of the doubt or afforded fewer opportunities to contribute.
What initially felt uncomfortable begins to form a recognisable pattern.
Sometimes marginalised people experience the emotional weather long before they can identify the human climate contributing to it.
Psychological research has examined the difficulties people face when trying to interpret ambiguous experiences of discrimination. A 2024 study on attributional ambiguity explored the uncertainty of not knowing whether an encounter was discriminatory and found associations between that uncertainty and poorer mental health outcomes.
The ambiguity can itself become a psychological burden.
But I want to be careful here.
An uncomfortable feeling is not, in itself, proof that someone has behaved in a discriminatory way. Emotions provide important information about our experience, but they do not always establish the intentions or causes behind another person’s behaviour.
Equally, the absence of an immediate explanation does not mean that discrimination has not occurred.
We must distinguish between validating someone’s experience and establishing the cause of that experience.
These are different tasks, and they need not be in conflict.
When someone describes feeling discriminated against, our response should not immediately become a demand for definitive proof before their concerns are considered worthy of attention.
Instead, we might begin with curiosity.
What happened? What did you notice? What felt different? Have you experienced something similar before? What patterns are emerging? What other explanations might be relevant?
This creates space for psychological understanding without assuming that the person’s initial interpretation must be either entirely accurate or entirely mistaken.
And it brings us to another dimension of Human Climate Intelligence: the ability to recognise relational contrasts.
Recognising the Climate Through the Treatment of Others
Sometimes it is not simply how someone treats us that alerts us to possible discrimination.
It is what we observe them doing differently with someone else.
We may witness warmth, familiarity, patience, encouragement or understanding being extended to others in ways we have not experienced ourselves.
The contrast can make visible something we had previously only felt.
Imagine a professional who has experienced consistently distant or dismissive responses from someone in authority.
Then they observe that same person responding to another individual with laughter, warmth and familiarity.
The difference may carry considerable psychological meaning.
It does not automatically establish that the difference is discriminatory. People occupy different roles and relationships, and relevant circumstances may differ.
Nevertheless, the contrast may reveal something worth investigating.
I find it interesting that comparisons are also central to the legal examination of some discrimination claims. Under the UK’s Equality Act 2010, assessing direct discrimination can involve considering whether someone was treated less favourably than another person in materially comparable circumstances. The legal requirements are more specific than an informal comparison, but the underlying attention to differential treatment is relevant to our discussion.
Psychologically, we may notice differences before we fully understand their significance.
A child may recognise that a teacher responds more warmly to others. An employee may notice that colleagues receive encouragement that is not extended to them. A patient may observe differences in how concerns are acknowledged or explained.
These experiences can contribute to the development of expectations about belonging, credibility, status and worth.
And this leads to an important question for organisations.
Are we all experiencing the same human climate, or are some people encountering conditions that others never have to navigate?
An organisation may genuinely be experienced as welcoming by some people while others experience it as excluding, intimidating or dismissive.
Both groups may be describing their lived experiences accurately.
The challenge is to understand why those experiences differ.
This is one reason I continue to develop and apply the Six Stages Framework and the Prejudice/Racism Spectrum.
These tools can help structure reflection on behaviours, biases, assumptions, patterns and the ways racism may manifest through individual interactions and institutional arrangements.
They can provide language for examining what may otherwise remain difficult to articulate.
They do not remove the need for evidence, careful interpretation or consideration of alternative explanations. Nor should they be used to infer someone’s motives from a single ambiguous encounter.
But they can help us examine the gap between declared intentions and the conditions others actually experience.
The Human Climates We Carry: When the Feeling Remains
Until recently, I had been thinking primarily about the environments we encounter and those we create for others.
Then something happened that made me consider another dimension.
I woke one morning feeling unusually good.
I felt warm, nurtured and cared for.
I knew that I had been dreaming, and I also knew that the dream was connected to this lovely feeling. But I could not remember what the dream had been about.
I deliberately remained still, trying to reconnect with the dream through the feeling it had left behind.
Eventually, the memory returned.
I had dreamed about my dear friend Giovanna, who now lives in Australia.
Giovanna has always been someone who has been there for me. Our friendship has been a source of warmth, care and support.
And what struck me was the sequence of my experience.
I remembered the feeling before I remembered the dream.
Then, when the memory of Giovanna returned, I experienced almost a sudden whoosh of warmth, as though the memory and the associated feelings had returned together.
The feeling became even stronger.
And I carried that warmth throughout the day.
This made me think about the human climates we create for one another.
Giovanna was thousands of miles away. I had not physically spent time with her. Yet the emotional significance of our relationship remained psychologically meaningful.
The dream appeared to reconnect me with something associated with her presence: warmth, care, reassurance and the experience of being supported.
The dream had ended, but the feeling remained.
I found myself thinking:
You may not remember your dream, but you can remember the after-effects of that dream.
And perhaps something similar is true of the human environments we encounter.
We may not remember every word someone said, every interaction we shared or every moment of kindness we experienced.
But we may remember how we felt in their presence.
This is why so many people can recall a favourite teacher decades after leaving school.
They may not remember the precise lesson or the words of encouragement. But they remember feeling noticed, capable, valued or safe enough to try.
Perhaps what we remember most enduringly about some people is not simply what they did, but the version of ourselves that became possible in their presence.
There is psychological research relevant to this experience.
A study published in Affective Science examined relationships between dream emotions and mood after waking. The researchers found associations between the emotional qualities of dreams and subsequent morning mood, including positive emotions.
This does not establish that dreams independently determine how our day will unfold. Nevertheless, it suggests that emotional experiences during sleep may contribute to how we feel upon waking.
Research on emotion and autobiographical memory also describes reciprocal relationships between remembering and feeling. Emotions can influence what we remember, while memories themselves can influence our emotional state.
My experience with Giovanna cannot tell us precisely what psychological mechanisms were operating. But it illustrates something I find deeply interesting.
The emotional significance of a relationship may continue to influence us even when the other person is absent.
And what applies to nourishing relationships may also have a more difficult counterpart.
A person who experienced abuse from a parent or partner may continue to carry emotional responses associated with that relationship long after the person is no longer present.
A particular tone of voice, expression, silence or situation may evoke fear, vigilance or distress because it resembles an earlier experience.
Not everyone who has experienced adversity responds in the same way, and these reactions are not inevitable. But previous experiences can influence the conditions we anticipate and the ways we respond to new encounters.
This is another reason I think our human climate metaphor needs to extend beyond the environment immediately surrounding us.
Human climates do not necessarily disappear when we leave them. Their effects may become part of the emotional expectations we carry into the world.
I have also been reflecting on the writings of Neville Goddard and his emphasis on consciously occupying particular states.
There is an interesting contrast between deliberately attempting to enter an emotional state and waking to discover that we are already experiencing one.
I had not consciously chosen to feel nurtured that morning.
I woke up carrying that feeling.
Perhaps this offers another useful thought:
The weather we wake up carrying may not be the weather we consciously chose.
Our dreams, emotional memories, relationships, concerns, previous experiences and current circumstances may all contribute to our emotional state.
Sometimes we may be able to influence what happens next. Sometimes we need support, reflection, reassurance or changes in our circumstances.
And sometimes the conditions we carry cannot simply be altered through positive thinking or deliberate emotional regulation.
That is particularly important when considering trauma, discrimination and sustained exposure to psychologically harmful environments.
We should not turn the language of emotional states into another way of blaming people for the consequences of what they have experienced.
Are We Responding to Today’s Weather or Yesterday’s Climate?
This raises a difficult psychological question.
If we carry the climates of our past into present relationships, how do we recognise when we are responding to the weather in front of us and when we are responding to a climate we learned to expect somewhere else?
I do not think the answer is always straightforward.
Sometimes something about a present encounter may remind us of previous harm.
Perhaps a particular expression, tone of voice, pattern of questioning or behaviour feels familiar.
We may become uncomfortable or defensive before consciously identifying why.
Our previous experiences may have helped us become sensitive to particular relational cues.
That sensitivity is not necessarily inaccurate. Someone who has repeatedly experienced discrimination may have learned to recognise subtle signs that others do not notice.
But familiarity does not guarantee that the present situation has the same meaning as the past.
Here is where I think we need to resist another false choice.
A person may be responding to a climate they learned to expect elsewhere while simultaneously recognising something significant about the weather in front of them.
Both processes may be occurring.
An earlier experience might heighten sensitivity to a particular behaviour, while something in the present encounter genuinely warrants attention.
Equally, an encounter may evoke a powerful emotional response because it resembles something harmful from the past, even when the current circumstances are different.
The task is not to dismiss the emotion or automatically accept every interpretation that accompanies it.
It is to become curious about the relationship between present experience, emotional memory and anticipation.
What am I noticing? What am I feeling? What does this remind me of? What is happening now? What evidence might help me understand the situation? Am I noticing a recurring pattern, or responding to a single ambiguous moment?
These are questions that may help us move towards greater understanding.
They also apply to the people whose behaviour we are examining.
Someone who repeatedly responds defensively to criticism may be drawing upon earlier experiences in which criticism was accompanied by humiliation or rejection.
Another person may interpret difference as threatening because of narratives repeatedly reinforced within their social or cultural environment.
Understanding these processes does not mean excusing harmful behaviour.
It means recognising that human interactions are shaped by histories that may not be immediately visible.
And this takes me back to another longstanding strand of my work through the SSF.
The Caves We Inhabit and the Weather We Bring
In my Coming Out of Caves work, I have explored how individuals and groups develop ways of understanding themselves, other people and the wider world.
Our caves may contain familiar beliefs, assumptions, values, narratives and expectations. They may be reinforced by our families, communities, professional groups, institutions, friendships and the information environments we inhabit.
Some caves provide protection, connection, wisdom and opportunities for growth.
Others may reinforce fear, rigid certainty, prejudice, hostility or distorted understandings of those perceived as different.
But what happens when we emerge from our caves and interact with other people?
We do not necessarily leave their contents behind.
The assumptions we have absorbed, the behaviours we have witnessed, the emotional expectations we have developed and the attitudes we have learned to tolerate may accompany us into our relationships.
The cave I inhabit can influence the weather I bring into the lives of others.
If my cave repeatedly reinforces the belief that certain people are less capable, less trustworthy or less deserving of compassion, how might those assumptions affect my interactions with them?
Might I become less patient, more suspicious or less willing to listen? Might I interpret their behaviour more negatively, offer fewer opportunities or dismiss experiences that challenge my understanding?
Conversely, if my cave reinforces curiosity, humility, reflection, empathy and an openness to difference, what conditions might others encounter in my presence?
This also connects with the digital environments I explored in Algorithmic Acceleration: Who Is Setting the Speed of Your Thinking?.
Repeated exposure to particular narratives can shape what becomes familiar, credible or threatening. The information we consume may influence the states we occupy and the assumptions we bring into face-to-face encounters.
The weather we bring into a room may therefore have been influenced by environments we inhabited long before entering it.
This makes the relationship between caves and human climates particularly important.
Our caves may help shape the conditions we create for others. Those conditions may then influence their emotional responses, beliefs and expectations. They may carry those experiences into other relationships and environments.
The process can reinforce existing patterns.
But it can also be interrupted.
A new relationship, a different perspective, a challenging conversation or an experience of genuine acceptance may create opportunities to reconsider assumptions that once seemed certain.
We are not condemned to reproduce the conditions of the caves we have inhabited.
We can reflect upon them, question them and change our direction of travel.
Institutional Climates: When the Weather Is Not the Same for Everyone
The relationship between individual and systemic environments becomes especially important when we consider organisations.
We may recognise the climate of an organisation before we fully understand its structures, policies or history.
Who acknowledges us when we enter? Who makes eye contact? Who is invited to speak? Whose concerns receive attention? Who is believed? Who is questioned? Who receives support when struggling, and who is expected to manage alone?
Some organisations feel warm, welcoming and psychologically safe.
Others may feel cold, intimidating, unpredictable or indifferent.
And sometimes there are pockets of warmth within a wider institutional climate that remains difficult or exclusionary.
A supportive colleague may create a small climate of psychological safety within an otherwise unsupportive organisation.
A teacher may provide reassurance and belonging within a school where wider practices leave some children feeling marginalised.
But individual acts of kindness, although important, do not automatically transform institutional systems.
This becomes particularly significant when we consider how organisations are experienced by different groups.
People may approach the police, immigration enforcement agencies, healthcare systems, schools or local authorities with very different expectations.
Those expectations may be shaped by direct experiences, family histories, documented practices, community knowledge, public narratives and wider institutional histories.
One person may anticipate reassurance and protection.
Another may anticipate scrutiny, dismissal, exclusion or the need for self-protection.
The fact that a particular institution feels safe to one person does not establish that it feels safe to everyone.
Nor does one individual’s negative experience establish that every person within the institution behaves identically.
The important task is to examine patterns, differences in treatment, institutional practices and the conditions experienced by those with less power.
An organisation may publish commitments to inclusion while particular groups continue to experience reduced opportunities, unequal scrutiny or limited psychological safety.
This is why we cannot assess organisational climates solely by asking those in positions of authority whether they believe their organisation is welcoming.
We must also listen to those who have had to learn how to navigate it.
A human climate is not necessarily the same climate for everyone who inhabits it.
This also raises questions about accountability.
When someone reports experiencing racism or discrimination, does the organisation respond with curiosity and a willingness to investigate? Or does its first response involve protecting its reputation, defending intentions or questioning the credibility of the person raising the concern?
The response to a concern may itself become another human environment that the person must navigate.
An individual who initially experienced exclusion may subsequently experience further dismissal when attempting to explain what happened.
The process of seeking understanding can therefore reinforce the very conditions that gave rise to the concern.
In my previous reflection, Building Inclusive Futures: What Are We Becoming Accustomed to Hearing?, I explored how repeated exposure to particular language, attitudes and behaviours may influence what becomes normalised.
The same principle applies to human climates.
What happens when hostility becomes routine? When dismissive responses become accepted? When people learn that expressing concern carries consequences? When exclusion becomes so familiar that it is no longer recognised as something requiring attention?
This is where the analogy of climate change becomes particularly thought-provoking.
What Happens When Human Climates Deteriorate?
We understand that physical environments can be affected by cumulative processes. Harmful conditions may develop gradually, with warning signs ignored until the consequences become increasingly difficult to overlook.
Could something similar happen within our human environments?
What happens when we repeatedly neglect empathy, normalise exclusion, dismiss people’s experiences or allow dehumanising language to become part of everyday interactions?
What happens when hostility is excused as humour, discrimination minimised as misunderstanding, or those who challenge unfairness are portrayed as the problem?
Over time, the conditions people are expected to tolerate may change.
What once provoked concern may become familiar. What was previously challenged may become accepted.
And climates that were already difficult for some people may become increasingly hostile.
These conditions may influence how people respond to one another. Some may withdraw, become more guarded or protect themselves through emotional distance. Others may become increasingly defensive, resentful or hostile.
But these outcomes are not inevitable.
Experiencing a harmful environment does not mean someone is destined to recreate those conditions for others.
Some people respond to adversity by becoming more compassionate, more reflective and more determined to challenge the conditions they experienced.
And this gives us an important counterpoint.
If human climates can deteriorate through repeated patterns of neglect and exclusion, they may also improve through repeated patterns of care, accountability, fairness, courage and repair.
A single act of kindness may matter enormously, but sustained change requires more than occasional moments of warmth.
It requires attention to the conditions we repeatedly create, the systems that reinforce them and the behaviour we are prepared to challenge.
This is where the SSF’s emphasis on movement, reflection and transformational action becomes particularly relevant.
Human Climate Intelligence: Recognising, Understanding and Transforming Human Environments
My longstanding interest in Emotional Intelligence has led me to think about how people recognise and manage emotions, understand relationships and respond to others.
But as I have reflected on human environments, I have begun to wonder whether we need to extend the questions we ask.
It is one thing to recognise that I am feeling frustrated.
It is another to recognise how my frustration may be shaping the psychological conditions experienced by someone with less power than I have.
It is one thing to recognise that another person is anxious.
It is another to ask whether the environment I am helping to create may be contributing to that anxiety.
It is one thing to develop the skills to navigate an intimidating workplace.
It is another to examine why that workplace is intimidating and who has responsibility for changing it.
This has led me to begin exploring what I am provisionally calling Human Climate Intelligence.
I am using this term to describe an emerging area of reflection within the Six Stages Framework: our capacity to recognise, understand, navigate and take responsibility for the human environments we create, experience, anticipate and carry.
It includes awareness of our emotional responses and the patterns of behaviour we bring into relationships.
It involves recognising how previous experiences may influence what we remember, expect or fear.
It asks us to notice relational contrasts and examine why different people may experience very different conditions within the same environment.
It requires us to consider the influence of power, identity, organisational systems and wider social histories.
And importantly, it involves the capacity to act upon what we learn.
This is not yet a separately established or validated psychological construct. It is a developing conceptual proposal that would require further definition, critical examination and research.
But I think the questions it raises are worth exploring.
Can I recognise the weather I bring into a room?
Can I understand the climate others have come to expect from me?
Can I notice when my current emotional response may be influenced by a previous experience?
Can I recognise differences between how I treat people, including differences that I may not consciously intend?
Can I listen when someone describes experiencing a climate that differs from my own?
And can I take responsibility for changing the conditions I help create?
The distinction between stages and states within the SSF is helpful here. Awareness does not guarantee behavioural change, and a person may demonstrate reflection in one context while remaining defensive or dismissive in another.
Human Climate Intelligence would therefore need to involve more than self-awareness or sensitivity to interpersonal conditions.
It would require us to examine the relationship between awareness, behaviour, impact, accountability and sustained change.
Crucially, it must not become another expectation placed upon those who already experience exclusion.
We should not continually ask people to become more emotionally intelligent, more resilient or more skilled at navigating hostile environments while allowing the people and systems generating those conditions to remain unchanged.
Sometimes the most important intervention is not helping someone carry a stronger umbrella.
It is changing the conditions that keep leaving them exposed to the rain.
Who Am I Becoming — and What Am I Creating for Others?
As I bring these ideas together, I find myself returning to questions that have become increasingly central to my work through the Six Stages Framework.
Who am I?
Who am I becoming?
What is the cave I inhabit reinforcing?
What assumptions, experiences and emotional expectations am I carrying into the world?
And perhaps now another question needs to sit alongside them.
What kind of human environment am I becoming for others?
The answer may not always be comfortable.
We may discover that someone experiences us differently from how we experience ourselves.
We may believe we are approachable, yet others have learned to avoid asking us for help.
We may consider ourselves fair, yet particular people experience greater scrutiny, less patience or fewer opportunities in our presence.
We may value inclusion, yet contribute to systems in which some people repeatedly feel invisible.
Recognising these possibilities requires curiosity, humility and a willingness to examine the gap between our intentions and our impact.
But I do not want this reflection to leave us thinking only about storms, icy conditions and hostile climates.
I want to return to the warmth I experienced after dreaming about Giovanna.
And I want us to think about the people whose presence has made difficult circumstances feel more bearable.
Perhaps it was a teacher who noticed you when others overlooked you. A colleague who created space for you to speak. A leader who listened without defensiveness. A parent who offered reassurance. A friend who made it possible for you to express uncertainty without fear of judgement.
You may not remember every word they said.
But you may remember how you felt in their presence, what you were able to attempt, or the possibilities that seemed to open up because of the conditions they helped create.
These are human environments too.
And their influence may continue long after the encounter has ended.
Some human climates leave us carrying warmth, confidence and a sense of belonging.
Others may leave us carrying discomfort, uncertainty, vigilance or fear that we struggle to explain.
Sometimes we feel the weather before we can name the climate.
Sometimes we recognise a climate because we have encountered similar weather before.
And sometimes the climate we carry influences how we experience the weather in front of us.
We do not always know precisely where our feelings originate, and we cannot control every condition another person experiences.
But we can remain curious about these processes.
We can listen more carefully, examine patterns, question assumptions and recognise the influence of relationships and systems.
We can also become more intentional about the conditions we create.
Perhaps the next time we enter a room, we might ask ourselves not only how we are feeling, what we need or what we hope to achieve, but something else.
What weather am I bringing into this space?
What climate have people learned to expect from me?
What am I carrying from environments I have previously inhabited?
And what might I need to change so that others do not have to keep preparing themselves for the conditions they encounter in my presence?
Because we are not simply shaped by the environments we inhabit.
We also participate in shaping the environments in which others must live, learn, work, relate and become.
And perhaps one of the most important measures of our humanity is not simply who we are becoming, but what becomes possible for others in our presence.
Dr Shungu Hilda M’gadzah
Chartered Educational Psychologist | Founder, Six Stages Framework
This reflection introduces Human Climate Intelligence as a developing concept within the Six Stages Framework, drawing upon psychological research, professional experience and reflective inquiry.
Further reading and research
For further exploration of the psychological ideas discussed here, see Mallett and colleagues’ research on dreams and morning mood, Faul, Ford and Kensinger’s review of emotion and autobiographical memory, Cuevas and colleagues’ research on attributional ambiguity, and research on teacher classroom interactions and possible bias.
Related SSF resources include Coming Out of Caves, What State Are You Occupying?, and the SSF Visual Psychological Formulations.
