Instagram story viewer> @softsystems.world> Posts

Nico Daboul

@softsystems.world

2.8K

followers

3674

following

How do we cultivate human capacity?
helping humans stay human in complex times
mindfulness • attention • embodiment • coaching
1-1 spaces open ↓

POSTS STORIES REELS TAGGED

Download All

People often ask me what it’s like to work with me.

The most honest answer I have: you discover a way of seeing yourself that you may not have had language for yet.

My books are open for 1:1 Human Capacity Coaching. Link in bio. by @softsystems.world

16

2

14 days ago

Soft Systems Inquiry No. 1: On Attention

I think we’ve misunderstood attention. Or at least flattened it.

We often think of it as observation — as something we direct OUT toward the world.

But what if attention is actually relational? What if paying attention isn’t simply noticing what’s there? What if it’s one of the ways we enter into relationship with the living world.

With a flower. With another person. With beauty. With grief. With a city. With ourselves.

Mindfulness isn’t about breathing. Photography isn’t about cameras. Poetry isn’t about words. Meditation isn’t about emptying your mind. Good design isn’t about pixels. They are all teaching the same thing: how to notice.

Simone Weil called attention “the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

I’d add: attention is the beginning of love, wisdom, creativity, intimacy, and presence.

Change what you pay attention to, and you change the world you inhabit.

Maybe attention isn’t just how we see the world. Maybe it’s how we remember that we’re already part of it. taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

20

2

2 months ago

For a long time i’ve felt like flowering was just my special interest. Too niche, too whimsical, too silly to share. Then my friends started sending me pictures of flowers, from all over the world, with messages like: you’re reminding me to pay attention again. For thousands of years, this is how we found our way back. The flower has always been the doorway. The more-than-human world is always alive, always pulsing, always giving. It’s our capacity to receive it that needs tending. Flowering is a practice of attention. A pathway for reorienting to the simplest beauty 🌸 what’s the closest flower to you right now? taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

100

5

2 months ago

It’s a grassroots hex on your 💩 movement! Join me #beirut taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

32

11

4 days ago

For me the practice was less about getting rid of doubt but to simply recognize it when it arrives, feel it, tell the truth about it, and stop fighting with it.

How much of who you think you are is who you’ve learned to be? And how much energy goes into maintaining that version of yourself?

Often doubt doesn’t sound like doubt. It sounds reasonable. Maybe not yet. Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you’re reading too much into it. Which is partly what makes it so good at keeping us small.

Sometimes what we call honesty is actually the truth, carefully managed. Enough to feel real but not enough to be meaningful, not enough to change anything.

You don’t resolve doubt by waiting until you’re certain. You resolve it by catching it. Oh. There you are.

How prevalent is doubt in your life? Pay attention to the polite and tiny, intelligent, reasonable kind of doubt that tells you to wait, soften, reconsider, or maybe not quite trust what you already know.

I didn’t. And then I found out and immediately thought: of course it is. Sometimes something has to turn itself inside out before you can see what it really is.

There are things we inherit that aren’t really stories. A smell, a fruit, a tree, a way someone used to sit. Sometimes something ordinary carries more of us than we realise.

I used to think authenticity meant saying the uncomfortable thing. I’m starting to think there’s another layer: noticing all the ways we soften and edit the truth so we can still feel safe.

There is the truth we can say, and then there is the truth underneath it. I’m interested in the distance between those two things. The full essay is live on Substack. Link in bio.

Almost two years of writing on substack and I’ve finally turned on paid subscriptions. It only took me approximately forever. If the writing has given you something to think about, feel, notice or question, you can now support the work.

This is why I write / because sometimes another way of seeing can loosen something that has felt very fixed. taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

38

8

15 days ago

I don’t do that well on Instagram, probably because I’m no good at presenting a perfectly curated version of my life or pretending I have everything figured out. The work I do in the world is rooted in coherence, self-trust, and helping people come back into relationship with themselves, but that doesn’t mean we start with perfection. I’m 47, and I left my life in New York to live with my 🐶 and my dad in a “do not travel” country, so.

What I am interested in is helping people thrive despite imperfect conditions. Lately I’ve been realizing that steadiness may have less to do with controlling our circumstances and more to do with no longer participating in our own self-abandonment.

Achieving inner coherence is just one of the ways we do that. by @softsystems.world

22

8

5 months ago

We talk about attention as though it is a personal virtue: something you either have or have somehow failed to cultivate. But attention has always been relational. It responds to what surrounds us.

Put a person in a room with a book, a quiet corner, and nothing demanding a response every few seconds, and you create very different conditions for attention than you do when the environment is continuously offering something new to notice.

That doesn’t mean we are helpless against our devices, or that technology has destroyed our ability to concentrate. It means we should be a little more curious about the conditions under which attention is being asked to operate.

And this is where I think the conversation gets interesting.
Because perhaps the question isn’t “How do I fix my attention span?” Maybe it’s: What kind of attention is my environment training me to have?
What are you surrounded by? What keeps interrupting you? What have you learned to expect? What does your attention now reach for automatically?

Attention is not just something happening inside your head.
It is shaped by the world you are moving through.

And if we want to change our capacity for attention, we might need to change some of the conditions around it; which is not about willpower, it’s intentional design.

xx Nico | Soft Systems World taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

21

4

2 months ago

Yesterday, during an enquiry session (part of my ongoing therapy training), the person I was working with described a blockage in her chest as:

*a tightly wound ball of twine.*

The image stayed with me.

Because what if our protective patterns are not evidence that we are broken, but evidence that the body learned how to survive?

This piece became a reflection on metaphor, nervous systems, adaptive intelligence, and the ways we slowly abandon ourselves to stay safe.

Perhaps healing is not the dramatic dismantling of these protections, but the patient unwinding of them.

Thread by tiny thread.

New on SoftSystems™ World Substack. by @softsystems.world

27

4

5 months ago

A little field note on self-override 🌸

How repeated acts of self-abandonment can slowly become a way of being in the world.

It’s about the slow, heartbreaking ways we learn to leave ourselves—and the possibility of noticing before we do. taken in Beirut, Lebanon by @softsystems.world

17

3

4 months ago

Because you’ve all been waiting for someone to read Euphoria through a Nico-specific lens... it’s finally here.

I’ve always been fascinated by works of art that become cultural weather systems. The kind of work people can’t simply consume; they have to have a relationship with it.

I don’t actually care that much about television. I care about what television reveals about us.

(Also, yes, I have thoughts about the Labyrinth soundtrack. No shade to Hans Zimmer.)

Essay is on Substack. Link 🔗 in bio. taken in Planet Earth by @softsystems.world

21

1

2 months ago

Conflict. Discomfort. Tenderness.
To be human is to want to run. To practice is to stay.
From an essay on how mindfulness builds our capacity to stay with what feels hard, without abandoning ourselves.
Full piece is linked in bio. by @softsystems.world

36

4

9 months ago

I didn’t set new intentions for 2026. Not because I’m checked out or avoiding direction, but because I don’t feel the need to force a reset. I already turned my life upside down. I’m still living inside that change, still orienting, still adjusting. Every day already feels like a beginning, so I didn’t need to declare one.

What I did notice was a quieter question coming up. Not “what’s next,” but “what do I need to let go of.” And when I stayed with that long enough, it became clearer: what do I need to forgive myself for.

I started to see how often self-blame hangs around under the guise of responsibility, like if I keep punishing myself I’ll somehow do better next time. But that kind of self-attack doesn’t actually create change. It just keeps me tight, guarded, and stuck in the past.

Forgiving myself, in this context, isn’t about excusing anything. It’s about changing the conditions so learning and repair are even possible. That’s what I’m working with right now. No big declarations. Just paying attention to where I can stop hurting myself and still stay accountable. For now, that feels like enough 💟 by @softsystems.world

32

1

8 months ago