What We Can Learn From Mandela's Strategy

Why our internal composure is the ultimate defence against authoritarianism

You can never have an impact on society if you have not changed yourself.

Nelson Mandela

Dear friends

Authoritarianism advances by attempting to colonise our thoughts and emotions, working to create a constant sense of unsteadiness within us. It thrives when we are reactive, when our nerves are frayed, and when our first instinct is one of self-protection or aggression. It makes us look for strong leaders or simple answers.

Martin Luther King and Nelson Mandela knew this intimately — they lived under systems that were designed to break their composure every single day. For them, the decision to govern their thoughts and emotions was a way of reclaiming their agency. And they understood that if they met the harshness of their world with an equal internal harshness, the “solution” would merely be a mirror image of the system it opposed.

In our lives today, we can see this same dynamic playing out. We are often surrounded by voices that want to pull us into a state of constant, low-level agitation. This creates an environment that makes it very difficult for us to think for ourselves or to act with genuine compassion. When we follow the example of these leaders, we are choosing to build a foundation of inner quiet that the chaos outside cannot easily reach. This isn’t about being passive or ignoring what is happening — it is about ensuring that when we do speak or act, it comes from a place of strength rather than a place of panic.

There is a real, tangible weight to this kind of self-governance; it requires that we look at our anger and our fear with honesty. Instead of letting those feelings drive our actions without thought, we must learn to hold them and ask what they are trying to tell us. Madiba spent 27 years in a prison cell doing exactly this. He looked at his own resentment and realised that it was a weight he simply could not afford to carry if he wanted to be free. He chose to cultivate a different kind of internal atmosphere, one where he remained the master of his own reactions. This allowed him to walk out of prison and speak to his captors with a dignity that they could not possibly match.

We find our own version of this when we choose to step back from the frantic pace of the world and reconnect with what we know to be true. When we are grounded in our own values and our own sense of peace, the tactics of authoritarianism — the divisiveness, the fear-mongering, and the demands for total loyalty — lose their grip on us. We become much harder to manipulate when we are no longer looking for someone else to tell us how to feel or who to fear. We act instead from a sense of internal wholeness that is inherently resistant to being controlled by outside forces.

This is a shared effort, too. When we show up for one another with this kind of emotional steadiness, we can create a community that feels safe and solid. We can provide a space where others can also catch their breath and find their footing. This is how the “beloved community” that King spoke about starts to take shape. It begins in the quiet, disciplined choices we make about how we handle our own spirits, and it grows into a collective resilience that can stand up to even the most daunting pressures. When we learn to regulate our thoughts and emotions, we are essentially saying that we refuse to let the world turn us into people we don’t want to be.

I first learned how difficult — yet how necessary — this work is while living in Zimbabwe under Mugabe’s regime. That was my proving ground. In an environment specifically designed to keep us off-balance, reactive, and afraid, I realised that maintaining my composure wasn’t just about my personal well-being; it was the only way to retain my agency. It was there, amidst the constant pressure to succumb to either despair or rage, that I began to learn the specific tools required to stay steady.

These are not abstract theories to me. They are the practical survival strategies that kept my spirit intact when the world around me felt like it was fracturing.

On Tuesday, I will start sharing these tools with you. We will begin with the invisible filters that colour our reality, and how we can use these to stop our environment from dictating our emotions.

I hope you’ll join me as we move from understanding the importance of this inner quiet to the actual practice of building it.

In solidarity, as ever

— Lori

© Lori Corbet Mann, 2026

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Hi, I’m Lori, the writer behind Your Time Starts Now.

Eleven years in Zimbabwe under the Mugabe regime taught me that our most vital infrastructure isn’t the power grid or the economy — it is the human nervous system. When the world becomes volatile, our biology is the first thing to be weaponised. If we cannot regulate our anxiety, fear, and moral outrage, we lose our ability to think, discern, and act with integrity.

I’ve spent twenty-five years at the intersection of neuropsychology and spiritual practice, learning how to stay functional and “spirit-led” when external safety disappears. I write for those who see the same patterns emerging in the West and want a strategy for resilience that goes deeper than “just breathe”. I offer a map for staying grounded, capable, and ethically clear-headed in a time of accelerating pressure. If this sounds like something you’d benefit from, I warmly invite you to subscribe.

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