i want to just start with the theme and the topic of this talk which is the myth of climate change apathy and really what we're looking at here right now is a moment in time it's an incredible moment actually if you think about it what's happening right now with regards to our confrontation and our ability to really apprehend what it means to  to be looking at engaging with these issues i see this as an incredible opportunity right now so what we're seeing is an incredible level of innovation people are seeming to be waking up more we're seeing signals that people are kind of starting to get it a bit more there's a lot of innovation there's a lot of technological advancements happening that are very exciting and at the same time i think one can see that there's also equally so an incredible sense of inertia and slowness and recalcitrance and what might seem to be retrograde and i really see these things as happening concurrently so one of the main things some of the main questions that get out gets asked every time i speak is you know it's about people want to know what is the trajectory is there hope there's a lot of you know conversation right now about this topic of hope and despair how do we keep going how do we stay engaged and what i'm seeing right now is is really profound confluence where we are seeing sort of the both and we're really seeing unprecedented level of engagement and we're also seeing an incredible sense of resistance and what i'd like to do is to help as best i can offer some ideas to shed some light on what might be going on and one of the things that's going on right now is a lot of people are thinking about what the psychology is of climate change so this is really exciting for me and my field because it's been about twenty five years that i've been looking at this intersection of what isn't is there a psychology of environmental issues and climate change now we're seeing an incredible kind of abundance of research and books coming out whether it's george newest book there's new reports coming out the a p a now has a task force on climate change there's a lot going on and what i'd like us to do tonight is to begin to perhaps get a bit of clarity around what is going on to make sense of this landscape because in fact not all psychology is equal and not all psychology is the same and so really my intention of this evening in this talk is to is to really sort of bring some clarity so that you all and we all can begin to engage with this material from a place of more insight and understanding and skill so the first thing that i'm going to look at are some of the myths that are circulating right now and i would call them this  and you can see if any of these resonate with you so the first is how do we get people to care more how many of you have had this thought at some point in your work or in your personal life how do we get people to care more ok what will it take to motivate people to act so i spent quite a bit of time working with organizations it does not matter whether it's governmental private public educational really the question on everyone's mind is how do we motivate people to act so this whole way of thinking about motivation is really central right now climate change is too abstract difficult for people to get their heads around if you've heard this before you know quite a bit of research looking at how we process information and that in fact is just too damn hard for people to really get their minds around and that we are designed and we're wired to respond to crisis and the short term and the immediate and the tangible and our brains are just not wired to cope so there's quite a lot going on right now around you know it's just too much there's something of the expression called time space to stand she ation the anthony giddens came up with a sociologist which means that with climate you know we don't see the effect for very long and it's time space distance and so it's very hard for our human minds to come to terms with and i actually invite us to really reframe these questions because in fact these questions and these assertions are based on a lot of assumptions that we often don't take the time to really think about and we don't think about them because frankly we're under a lot of pressure to act and to to mobilize and to respond there's an incredible sense of urgency right now and we don't really take the time to think about how our understanding from the some sions of human nature and what it means to be human being our informing our assumptions about you know why and how we're responding to these issues and so what i'm interested in doing is actually reframing these questions how can we awaken our innate capacities for deep care and limited creativity now some of you might be thinking yeah right you know you're not really quite there with me and you might be feeling like well wait a minute people really don't care and we actually really do need to motivate people and what i want to invite us to think about is what kinds of assumptions that is based on is a promise that if people if what we care about is you know there then we will necessarily act and that is actually kind of an interesting assumption because how often is it that we actually don't act on what we care about do you see that i'm saying that that in fact human beings are quite irrational and contradictory and we have a lot of conflicts and  tensions that we're negotiating all the time so this is sumption that what we care about will necessarily translate magically into our actions is in fact a bit of a fantasy now i'm not saying that we don't care you know we don't it's not cut and dry of course what we act on tends to reflect some investments that we have and attachments that we have and values that we have but what i'm wanting us to do is to really shake up this notion that we act on our values and what we care about in some sort of kind of unified simplistic way you with me so the idea here is that in fact within any given person we can have multiple cares we can have multiple values and they are often in conflict with one another so this idea of how do we awaken our innate capacities for deep karen and limited creativity comes out of many many decades of research in psycho dynamic psychoanalytic attachment theory trauma studies that really understands that in fact our brains are wired for compassion and we do have an innate need to feel you know creative and to have the care but what happens with the climate threat is that it tends to short circuit our capacity to access these these experiences and these feelings and that's what i want to look at a bit more in depth with you so what we're talking about here is the art and science of awakening reparation and i use the term reparation deliberately reparation is a term that comes primarily out of psychoanalytic psychology and there's a whole science and study of what it means for humans to want to make repair and that's really kind of the moment we're in right now isn't it that we need to be activating and  desire and capacity to make repair when you see damage that's been done and how we respond to that with a instinct and an impulse to repair to fix to heal to restore to create and my guess is that a lot of people in this room are perhaps quite in touch with that capacity and are wondering why more people are not in touch with that capacity you know how can people see and be aware of what's happening and not just automatically want to become activated so that's really the puzzle that's the challenge that we're in right now that we're looking at is really the refrain from that there's a lack of care there's a lack of concern there's a lack of motivation and in fact that we have incredible capacities for all of these things now i pleaded the slide  with some ambivalence on my part but it's it's important to acknowledge that for whatever we might think about you know freud and freudian psychology and psychoanalysis it's actually come a long way since freud was generating his ideas but so much remains true in the same in active in the practice of psychology and so i want to kind of you know recognize and pay  insights that we have available to us through psychoanalytic psychology and and so you know one of the primary insights that i have found to be so powerful from  psychology is precisely an understanding of and conscious proces that we are not always driven by our rational selves that we have unconscious and of dimensions going on and  see mechanisms that kick in to help us manage those anxieties now psychoanalytic psychology is really good at understanding that i mean really good so you know when i first started reading for psychoanalytic work about twenty or twenty five years ago it was honestly hard for me to pick up any of those texts and not immediately relate it to what's going on in our environment in our environmental movement our relating with the environment which seems really perhaps kind of out there but it's kind of amazing because what's being described with quite a nuance and insight really describes what we're seeing happening out there in terms of you know what we're looking at that manifest as apathy that manifests as a denial that manifests this polarization all of these things that we talk about and we describe are actually phenomenon that are quite well understood in the psychodynamic and psychoanalytic world and so i'm really interested in looking at at how we can begin to take some of this and figure out how to apply it as best we can in these very different contexts so you know what we're looking at here insights from psychoanalytic psychology but also incredible insight that have been generated through neuro science and attachment theory and trauma studies and you know really we're again we're at this moment right now where our level of insight into the human mind and what it means to be a human being is really exploding it's exploding right now i mean there's a there's a conference taking place online starting tomorrow on friday called psychotherapy two point zero it's through sounds true and it's basically looking at all the innovation that's happening the psychological world is going through an explosion right now it really is people are having to rethink and reframe our assumptions about what it means to be human insight with attachment theory and neuroscience and we have that for those of us working in the climate movements in communications and messaging and engagement we have access to that if we want to be having access to that in other words it's a resource that we can begin to be looking at so i want to just do sort of a level set right now so we've been talking about you know there's all this insight going on and it's really sort of an explosion in the field of the psychology of climate change and the psychology of environmental issues and for a project that i was working on for school  threats fund i i was producing a report that was intended to be sort of a landscape report of what does the social science say right now that you know about the psychology of climate change and as i started to get into this project i realize that there were these sort of distinct ways that we have of looking at these issues so i want to run through these briefly with you because i have a feeling that some of them might be already familiar and might be areas that you feel drawn to and are attracted to just level set so we see kind of the landscape we're in ok so the first of the behavior change part of the so the behavior changes really asking this question how do we get people to do we want them to do and this is really really exemplified by books like nudge and shift and you know basically when you see words like push and pull and switch and drive and levers and motivators and so forth that were in the still mane of the behavioral economics and that behavioral economics has its own history its own legacy ok and so for some people this is the psychology of climate and environmental issues is to look at behavior change this resonate with some of you are you you know familiar with this kind of obsession with behavior change and there's a tool there so it's kind of like a the mentality is how do we kind of get people on math to do what we need to do quickly as expediently as possible the next kind of area that we're seeing emerging as an interest in framing and messaging and for some of you i'm guessing this is really a really key issue how do we frame in message and this relates to research like george marshall's recent  book that really focuses on messaging and framing lake off you know the idea of using metaphors values based work katharine hayhoe who comes from an evangelical background we need to message and in light of our faith in our values it's really primarily interested in how do we again how do we shift how do we mobilize using the power of framing third is really the kind of social innovation how do we design a better world ok so this is really kind of really demonstrated by the concept of social innovation the challenge to the the resilience challenge and the idea of having challenges to accelerate innovation really is is in this kind of technological system so that really this is what's needed this is what's go save us is to have this kind of focus on the technological infrastructural innovation and then there's the emotional experience whole domain and there's a rising number of people myself included who are really interested in women and you know these issues are really scary and they're bringing up a lot of the stress for people and what does it really mean to have to come to terms with these issues what does it mean for us in our lives in our communities as members of a particular nation as a state what does this mean how is this process at the experience whole and the emotional level and this orientation tends to really kind of have an interesting conversation so you know of some of you might have been hearing more about this concept of like climate conversations climate cafes carbon conversation so the idea is that amazing things happen when people are able to talk with one another that it's kind of like magic really it's the most simple kind of behavioral change tool we may have is simply when we create contacts for people to talk with one another and you know one of the inspirations in this area really for me comes from rosemary randall's work she's a british  psychotherapist who founded an organization in the u k called cambridge carbon footprint which then gave rise to a project called carbon conversations and it's now being rolled out across the u k and it's now there's folks in north america it's really simple people get in small groups and talk about how do we reduce our carbon footprint and so the idea here is that really it's about having people create these these these contacts to support one another so the area that i'm most interested in highlighting here for us is of course the emotional in the experience will and i i really want to impress upon you that i believe that this is critical for our efficacy and our abilities to be successful in the work that we're doing and it can be whether you're working in an organization or your time you're working on these issues in your own personal life and you're trying to understand how to better communicate with people and coworkers or families and friends but really it's understanding how humans manage distressing information how we manage things that make us anxious is our gold it is our goal and the more that we skip over this and we try to sort of sidestep it the harder our efforts are are going to be that we're going to continue to meet with what's called resistance you know if there's any psychotherapists in this room you know what i'm talking about when i say resistance because it's one of those terms that psychotherapists use a lot because we as humans have resistance to so people come in and of course we're not talking about a therapeutic set situation people pay to come in and work with someone and and have a lot of resistance to looking at what's actually going on and that's the work of the  psychotherapeutic interaction is working with resistance so we think about our work in this area is is is really involving human resistance this is intended to be empowering for us ok so it's not about feeling overwhelmed that i have to suddenly become a psycho therapeutically attuned person it's actually not about that but it is about framing our work  bringing into the center of our work and climate in the environment that these are distressing and really profound issues that we're dealing with that everyone is going to be dealing with them in their own particular ways  and that it really behooves us to become as skilled as possible now what happens is that we tend to have this pattern of sort of ricocheting and i say we those who are working in areas of messaging and engagement and trying to work with people around this that we feel like we either have to become sheer leaders to avoid bringing up distress and to say actually look how exciting this is you know how amazing seattle can be seattle can be a week of hope yet you know this is all really good for us this is good you should be behind this this is this is really juicy in this is really sexy stuff and we're going to give you some incentives and we're going to make it fun and we're going to create a game and we're going to you know game a fiat you don't have to really think a whole lot about it and isn't this exciting people want positivity and they want good stories and they want success positive messing up and we are very bad humans are so bad look at what we've done we've completely made of incredible mess of everything and if you're not doing something about this right now you either you know are greedy selfish stoopid short sighted all of those and so we do this kind of ricocheting it's a little bit manic or it's a little bit sort of splitting in that we tend to kind of feel like we have to be either rah rah or we have to really hit people over the head and in fact what if there's a way to integrate these so that it's not one or the other and that is exactly what i'm interested in and what i want to talk about because i know it's possible i know it's possible so i came up with something called the three a's and some of you've heard me talk about this quite a bit so when i say it again so i i transitioned from being a full time academic to being mostly a practitioner about  four years ago and i was going on talking to people about all the cycling olympics and talking about you know denial and disavow and it was like not working was not working and so i ended up you know sort of being forced to come up with a tool or a way to really kind of encapsulate what it is we're looking at here and i came up with the three a's and i'm very proud of having three a's so the first but there's going to be some elements of anxiety ok there's ambivalence and ambivalence is actually one of the most important concepts that we can use in this work invisible and means clear it's a clinical term it doesn't mean i don't care embezzlement means you are literally pulled in different directions you're literally have co existing desires so i do not want to be contributing to environmental degradation and i did fly here i did participate in a practice that i know is contributing to the problem that's ambivalen that we want different things and ambivalence is incredibly important in relation to climate change because we're being asked to call into question a lot of practices that we as humans have designed and developed to be human what makes us who we are what our identities are invested in so that could be for you going on a certain kind of trip or traveling or you know eating certain things or participating in certain activities that you're now being told are part of destroying the planet that's really heavy it's really heavy and so when we're talking to people about climate we're basically saying sometimes i have a cartoon of the gary larson where the guy's talking to the dog and all the dog hears is blah blah blah and the name ginger blah and i feel like with climate a lot of the time all people are hearing when we talk about it is  are and how we are to live and then we wonder why people learning gaging more and in figuring out a solution so ambivalence is really important and third is aspiration and we need to stay connected with this to be going back to the earlier slide around our innate capacity so this comes from for me it's inspired by the work of winnicott a psycho analyst who made incredible breakthroughs on understanding children  play when it ha studied for many years people and young people and really recognize that we as humans do have a need to be creative we do have a need to contribute we have a need to be part of something we have a need to be to belong to be part of a group right and so this is the aspirational piece and a lot of times it goes back to the cheerleading where we feel like we have to sort of only go there but the point that i want to make here is that when we leave out one of these a we are not speaking to the whole picture this is making sense so we have to be able to acknowledge and integrate all three ok so what does this look like what does this look like in practice now to be honest i feel like what it looks like in practice is all of our work ok so it's all of us to innovate and design what it looks like in practice i can't tell you here's the formula what it looks like but in fact it's actually i don't think that complicated you know i think it can be very simple so for example it's about listening ok so listening to people and understanding where the you know exactly is might be where the ambivalence might be now there's a lot to be said about this and i'm happy to talk with any of you later you can get in touch with me later but this is a big part of what i do as a researcher because it's about listening and it's not just about talking with people it's how we talk to people and how we listen so it's really paying attention to what is your experience what is coming up for you right now what are you concerned about what would support you and it's less about would you support this carbon tax how do you feel about you know this particular issue because when we ask direct questions we tend to get that the sense of kind of reflex right but it's about finding our way in through the side and really listening which means we have to be curious which is a whole other story because some of us may not feel very curious we might be too upset to be curious and that's ok it's ok to be too upset to be curious just to be aware that that's what's happening there's the acknowledgement so  ambivalence in my aspiration so if we're looking at how to apply this imagine imagine a messaging campaign that spoke to these three aides you know what that might look like so perhaps a campaign that basically comes out and says isn't the scary business overwhelming if you're like me you don't want to have to think about climate change it's  flippin drag you know and you probably want to be contributing and doing the right thing and you probably still want to buy the things you love the buying go on the trip you love and you know that makes total sense that makes little sense and we're actually organizing the campaign this project and be awesome if you were part of it so you know i'm just kind of making this up off the top of my head but it's basically touching on these three now why are we touching on these three because what we're doing is we're looking at how we navigate defenses and defense mechanisms right so we tend to go into you know in voluntarily we protect ourselves so we want to deny we want to avoid we want to numb out we want to distance what we're looking at here what we're doing our strategy for disarming for disarming our defenses so you know again psychotherapist sort of this is what they do they do this because they're trying to support behavior change in people and i don't see any reason why we can't be doing the same thing in our climate work and the third is about engagement and this is really quite a big topic in this work right now is a lot of talk about engagement what does it mean to engage  engagement often means for a lot of people getting people to do what we want them to do but we are smart we can sense when we're being manipulated we can sense when we're being sort of spoken to in a way where we don't have a lot of agency and a lot of creativity and a lot of power to make sense oh so i'm really interested in is create is engagement that's genuinely engaging what do you think you what are your ideas what would make sense for you right to creating contexts for people to exercise more of their own sense of creative engagement because believe me people want to be asked and we're often not asked you know in our workplaces and schools and you know we're not asked so again this is an opportunity for us to tap into some energy that's there to be leveraged right so again going back to this idea of reframing from feeling like we have to get and push and pull people to how do we work with people who might appear to be completely disengaged what does it look like if we work with people in a way that actually might create some opening some invitation now the phrase here guys me don't write me comes out of motivational interviewing and for some of you might be familiar with motivational interviewing but it's a it's a strategy and a whole field that's developed out of public health that is actually very powerful and the idea of guide me don't write me is a term terminology that's referred to our tendency to want to write people so for example you know for talking to someone about smoking or you know sugar consumption this is where how motivational interviewing came out of you know we have a ten you say well you should want to do this is the right thing here's all the reasons why the guy eating is a way to bring people out so that people can actually own their own process ok so it's really about listening it's about asking questions and you know it's like well would you consider this or have you thought about that and you know it's kind of taking that more empathy compassion listening let approach so engagement is really about recognizing my needs to exercise my creativity impact in efficacy and the peace around not patronize ing feeling like we have to sort of dumb down and i feel quite strongly about because i think that in our urgency to want to mobilize and incite action we inadvertently have a tendency to communicate with people in a way that is potentially patronize ing and so what i'm interested in is you know what does our work look like if we if we actually you know take some of this on board and are cognizant of the fact that most people are actually really scared and feeling really overwhelmed about what's going on and when those few years are not acknowledged we tend to sort of fill in the gaps with our own worst fantasies and so you know really what we're talking about is a compassion led approach that's one way i think about this work to sort of the irony of speaking on the same night is bring a brown you know because i really feel like we're not talking about separate things here but the context might be a bit different and what we're looking at which is how to channel the swerd in our understandings of compassion and what i really love about this quote of the dalai lama is that it reflects my feeling that i wanted to convey which is that i don't feel that this is a luxury i feel that in fact our abilities to be effective in creating the kinds of changes that we need to see happening at the scale we need to see happening does require compassion it were choir's our billet ease to feel with not only others but with ourselves and to really recognize that you know this is a really this is a messy situation and we didn't intend this to happen we didn't intend no one set out to create the level of damage and destruction that we're seeing happening right and that's to me the poignancy that's what's truly heartbreaking to me about the situation is that we thought we were doing what was right and what was good in  so well known composer here in seattle christophe and he's he's going to be showing this performance at the impact on the thirtieth and i strongly encourage everyone to go so he was presenting a performance of imagery he was commissioned to create a composition about climate change and so he designed this composition and he brought in well i'm going to include some imagery here to help us kind of engage with this piece of music and then he brought in spoken word and had a young woman write a poem an amazing poem to go with the words and the sound and the images and what was really compelling and so moving about the excerpts you shared is man like we're really passed up but we didn't mean to and that for me what was so heartbreaking is that you know industrial achievements are were considered still our achievements  but we've really obviously gone astray and that you know as far as what you know underlies that level of disconnect that's enabled us to do what we do we've been doing is i think invites our compassion i really do so i included this is the first time i've done this but i included quine yan and the goddess of the buddhist goddess of compassion because i that this can be really helpful for us to think about how this can inform and influence our work but what i want to also say is that this is this is  the which is a another day to be representing compassion that fears its fears and so what i want to leave us with is the sense that being compassionate understanding the warrior that we need to be channeling in fact we can be compassionate warriors and we need to be compassionate lawyers because what are warriors without compassion i mean where where are we in what are we doing when we're engaging in that and so i want to encourage us to think about as we develop our capacities to navigate these human dimensions to think about it as you were so words you know dan siegel the need to be making in our lives and so that's really where i'm out with this and why i'm here speaking and why i'm why i'm committed to doing this work is because you know i'm really interested to see what this movement looks like what our work looks like if we really take this on board and i don't know exactly what it looks like but i think that we all can figure that out and a player own ingenuity and insight and creativity and passion and warrior and fierceness so i'm going to end on that note and open things up for discussion so thank you question about being an economist and sensors are good you know you're talking about don't incentivize me and i was thinking well to me that sounds like you're saying don't bribe me rather than you know as an economist you just kind of want to and send the five things you don't necessarily do automatically the private sector doesn't do well like take care of public health well right or in this case take care of the environment well right right so to respond to that point around incentives so incentives are really kind of have been quite big in the sustainability sector right and so the idea is that when we focus on incentives we're sending a message which is that this is an activity or practice that you wouldn't ordinarily want to be doing unless we sweetened it up for you and actually there's a book by dan pink's the move you may know called drives you may know dan pink's work where he talks about intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation there's a wonderful r s a animation that distills this beautifully where there's an abundance of research that shows an incentive after a certain point to not work they actually backfire they actually backfire because they're conveying that this is not something you would normally want to do and we have a radar for being bribed right and so the idea is that if we can tap into those intrinsic motivations which he identifies his purpose mastery and the tanami does very similar to what the psychoanalyst have been saying you know that we have these  to have purpose to experience mastery and to experience autonomy so that's where where i'm coming from with the incentive i think we all know some incentive can be valuable right you know you're retrofitting your house and you get a little bit of rebate on replacing something that's cool but it's being mindful of how much emphasis we place on the incentive and not looking to the incentive to do the heavy lifting for us i think that that's where the refra happen thanks so much for being here this is a fantastic talk and i would love to hear you talk a little more about apathy which was in the title of the lecture and that wasn't one of the three  and the reason why is because i see apathy as a sense mechanism and so what happens is that we tend to fixate on the apathy as if it is a kind of a thing like a phenomenon like oh you know the public is has up you know the public's apathetic and so forth and so in doing so we sort or reify it's like refining a symptom rather than looking at what's actually going on under the surface so apathy is a very well known defense the fence mechanism i didn't make that up it's been well documented as as one of the kind of main strategies that humans engage in to cope and the reason i think it's very important to pierce and shatter the because it blinds us to looking at what's actually going on which is i would say pain you know i think it's very painful to be out of alignment it's very painful to be problem solving beings which we are we're wired to solve problems we're being presented with a situation that appears to be potentially not solvable and so that's intolerable and so what do we do we we we withdraw we check out and so the research i did actually for my ph d was interviewing people in green bay wisconsin who appeared to be apathetic about what was going on in the environment that i used to survey and again you know there's a lot of issues with surveys but i was you know experimenting with how people show up in  survey and what happens when you actually sit and talk with them and what i found in these interviews these conversations is that they were anything but apathetic they were actually in a lot of pain but the situation was that they just there was a sort of resignation like oh well you know it's already the lakes the great lakes are already messed up and you know there was just like but not a conscious level and so the theory that i'm working with the m apathy and what the the book is about is that when people are experiencing that kind of pain and loss and it's not actually acknowledged it sort of goes into this like underground place and so all the efforts of all the environment's organizations say hey look what we're doing to protect and restore the great lakes and it just sort of doesn't it doesn't penetrate that make stuff so the three a's are what i recognize as being presidents in our day lemmas and confrontation with environmental issues so there's you know so i don't either apathy is a expression or symptom of what happens when there's such a cute inside me that comes up right so yeah i hope that helps i know for me personally sometimes i'm not i'm not dream i part for climate change so much as just trying to assuage my guilt about it it's an it's a negative aspect in that it's not an experience that i think is productive or constructive to evoke and to to base our actions on i think renee brown was in the room she would have a lot say about guilt i think that there's a difference between having a sense of a moral imperative and a moral conscience and that hang that happens when you know that you're doing something that's transgressive and guilt guilt is when it becomes you know internalized in a thirst a disk sort of take up a lot of energy and so i think the the best thing we could do would be to work on healing and assuaging guilt as best we can it's like i'm not saying let's all kind of get off the hook i really need to be clear about that but also to from my point of view guilt is not a helpful experience and motivator so  yad welcome other thoughts on the if we can so my question is about educating the younger generations about might change and as you mentioned i think as adults we are so mired in this  ambivalence and trying to pull that apart and figure that out that maybe we don't have the proper resources to guide our model children how to deal with these  emotions and perhaps maybe they aren't even aware that they're feeling anxiety or ambivalence yet but i think they have been to their advantage more aspiration perhaps than we do as adults so how do you recommend or how do you personally overcome that and strive to teach children about climate change and move well i mean one project that i've been working working on recently is with high school students a lot's been really amazing so there's an organization called the alliance for climate education ace and ace those assemblies with high school students around the country and they're starting a new campaign that's called provisionally have the talk that they want to mobilize young people to have the talk with their parents about climate and yeah and their fantasy is that this is going to actually create a sea change and so they're designing this campaign it's actually happen going to happen and what i did is i designed what i called these learning labs for high school students around the country and they were sort of like a focus group but also a training in how to have conversation because i am really scared of the idea of young people having these conversations with their parents and then just being completely annihilated with their parents anxiety and vitriol and so i feel like we need to really prepare people how to have these conversations so what i experience is is you're right i mean there's a huge amount of there's there's a high level aspiration you know there's a lot of energy that's really aspirational really positive but i also experienced these young people read deeply appreciative of the opportunity to recognize that other people and themselves are also having these other kind of more difficult feelings and and they face felt that it was very empowering to comment from this kind of orientation because it took less pressure off them to feel like they had to go and persuade people that was one thing i could have had up here is like a line through the idea of we have to persuade i guess i'm not you know i mean that i feel  like i feel like the best thing that we could be doing right now is to be working with anyone who works with young people like teachers and educators and community leaders to what i would call break the mister and and you know allowing just that status for people but not that we have to stay there very long that's the thing is like we're so resilient as humans that all we need is the touch of the truth like yeah this is messed up and we can move on pretty quickly to the solutions but unless we have that kind of yeah this is messed up it's hard i feel with new we kind of you know so many have written eloquently about this like we need to feel like we're hurt our feelings are going to keep coming up until they're heard you know and anyway so i don't i don't have that totally response to your question i think it's really important that that we do model for young people how to relate with these issues i really appreciate that question too is a long term educator myself who is stepping out of the classroom because my passion and interest and sustainability and climate change education in these exact issues i'm noticing not only make it difficult for students to open and absorb the information being taught but the teachers willingness to teach it and so the exact same issues we've got with students are happening with teachers as well and partly here to learn how to work with that and i'll be there friday as well oh graber look forward to really excited about the ace program you're talking about or work with them  tickler in the contributions of developmental psychology and levels of consciousness and all and i want to know what you think about the promise of really taking those into consideration and working with messaging and educating theory to sustainability and so it's really powerful work and it just so happened that while i was pulling this this work together the report someone just kind of showed me the quadrant the interval and i was like wait a minute that's a on and so what i didn't probably emphasize enough in the quadrant is that they we need all of this quadrants so it's not just the emotional needs brienne chills like king in fact i went into the work thinking and feeling that it is because i can be kind of evangelical about that and i was like until you know it's really the psychosocial in that you know and i realized oh my god like we need them all and that any one of those without the others is partial and limited and kind of stunted and so that's the point that i really did want to meg but i think having at least a map can help as at least navigate so my fantasy is that if you read an article you see a paper you read a book and you're like oh yeah this is kind of coming from that more behavior change orientation and so as not to diss that it's just  we can kind of locate that and say oh well how my you know social marketing right which i just you know someone might have just done a training in or something right how does that relate to this work i'm reading about on social innovation so that's what i'm interested in seeing how we can bring these in new and different combinations depending on the context in the challenge that we're facing is sometimes it might require more of a nudging situation and sometimes that might require more of a let's have a conversation kind of cafe so but i but unless tuned into a knot is like grounded in those in those traditions that you mentioned those who may not be aware is a it's a body of work that was produced by ken wilber and it's a way of kind of mapping our the human consciousness then and so there's people that have gone out and been through applying its rules theory in lots of different ways and developing consultancies around that so just in context there