Shannon Galpin Wants You To Take Action

A decade fighting for women’s rights in Afghanistan has taught Shannon how to achieve her goals agains all expectations. Here’s how to get it done in any situation.

by jayme moyePublished: Dec 6, 2016

Shannon Galpin

Shannon Galpin is no stranger to tough causes. As the founder of Mountain2Mountain , a non-profit dedicated to improving the lives of women in conflict zones, she’s spent the last decade traveling back and forth to Afghanistan—one of the most challenging places in the world to be a woman.

As an activist, she’s endured countless trauma abroad, including Taliban raids, earthquakes, and most recently, having to smuggle herself and two colleagues through a Taliban checkpoint after rebels shut down air travel from the Bamiyan province.

Yet Galpin pushed on to support the grassroots Afghan National Cycling Federation, Afghanistan’s first women’s cycling team, which earned a Nobel Peace Prize nomination in 2016. Tribe, her latest project launching in 2017, aims to connect young women, both within their communities and cross-culturally, to find solutions to social justice issues.

Here, Shannon reveals her best tips, learned during years of defying expectations in Afghanistan, that you can use to meet any goal.

On Championing A Cause

Shannon Galpin

Take action: It’s easy to just get pulled into whatever cause is trendy. And certainly with social media that’s gotten easier… we feel that if we share or like something, we’re actually doing something, but in reality, we’re not. The antidote is to look at what issue you are able to raise awareness around, through not only words, but also actions. Maybe that’s donating money and maybe it’s volunteering and maybe it’s creating programs—the key is that you’re doing something.

Draw on intrinsic motivation: If your motivation comes from external sources, from likes and kudos, you’re going to feel deflated pretty quickly. Social justice work is, 80 to 90 percent of the time, soul-crushing. But if your motivation comes from the inside, from a place of authenticity, for a cause that you believe in… you’ll keep at it.

On Dealing With Setbacks

Shannon Galpin

Dissect fear: It’s not that I don’t feel fear, or that my perception of fear is somehow different from other people; it’s that I don’t allow it to paralyze me. I do that by remembering to breathe, and by looking at fear analytically rather than emotionally: Okay what’s the situation… how can we move forward?

Screw worry: Somebody gave me this magnet, and it sums it up perfectly: “Worry is like a rocking chair, it will give you something to do, but it won’t get you anywhere.”

Keep going: The deck is stacked against social justice work. Understand that even a baby step forward is hard-fought. And even if it feels like one step forward and 20 steps back, you’re still making progress.

On Achieving Balance

Shannon Galpin

Sit still: Trail running and mountain biking have always been my go-to for releasing tension, sparking creativity, and solving problems. Then I got sidelined by a blood clot in my brain and realized that there’s also value in not being in a constant adrenalized state. I started meditating 10 minutes a day, using an app called Headspace, and found that the act of settling down has helped me put my work in perspective. Unless you’re the president of the U.S., pretty much nothing is imminent.

Tap into the collective: One individual can’t change the world. Instead, I look at it as putting your drop in the bucket. Everybody else who believes in the same values that you do is also putting their drop in the bucket. You may never know any of those people, but know that there are other people out there fighting the good fight beside you, and cumulatively, that has power.

Step back to step forward: When it starts to feel like I’m smashing a square peg into a round hole, I step back. Stepping back doesn’t mean you’re stepping away forever, it just means you’re giving something room to breathe. It can result in gaining a fresh perspective or making room for others to provide input. Sometimes I even find the solution, like I had tunnel vision and couldn’t see what was there all along, in the periphery.