How to shift your mindset and choose your future

I never thought that I would
be giving my TED Talk somewhere like this,

but, like half of humanity,

I've spent the last
four weeks under lockdown

due to the global pandemic
created by COVID-19.

I am extremely fortunate
that during this time

I've been able to come here to these woods
near my home in southern England.

These woods have always inspired me,

and as humanity now tries to think

about how we can find the inspiration

to retake control of our actions

so that terrible things
don't come down the road

without us taking action to avert them,

I thought this is a good place
for us to talk.

And I'd like to begin
that story six years ago

when I had first joined the United Nations.

Now, I firmly believe that the UN

is of unparalleled importance
in the world right now

to promote collaboration and cooperation.

But what they don't tell you when you join

is that this essential work is delivered

mainly in the form
of extremely boring meetings,

extremely long, boring meetings.

Now, you may feel that you have attended
some long, boring meetings in your life,

and I'm sure you have,

but these UN meetings are next level,

and everyone who works there
approaches them with a level of calm

normally only achieved by Zen masters.

But myself, I wasn't ready for that.

I joined expecting drama
and tension and breakthrough.

What I wasn't ready for was a process
that seemed to move

at the speed of a glacier,

at the speed that a glacier
used to move at.

Now, in the middle
of one of these long meetings

I was handed a note,

and it was handed to me
by my friend and colleague and coauthor

Christiana Figueres.

Christiana was the Executive Secretary

of the UN Framework Convention
on Climate Change,

and as such had overall responsibility
for the UN reaching what would become

the Paris Agreement.

I was running political strategy for her.

So when she handed me this note,

I assumed that it would contain
detailed political instructions

about how we were going
to get out of this nightmare quagmire

that we seemed to be trapped in.

I took the note and looked at it.

It said, "Painful,
but let's approach with love!"

Now I love this note for lots of reasons.

I love the way the little tendrils
are coming out from the word "painful."

It was a really good visual depiction
of how I felt at that moment.

But I particularly love it
because as I looked at it

I realized that it was
a political instruction,

and that if we were going
to be successful,

this was how we were going to do it.

So let me explain that.

What I'd been feeling in those meetings

was actually about control.

I had moved my life from Brooklyn
in New York to Bonn in Germany

with the extremely reluctant
support of my wife,

my children were now in a school
where they couldn't speak the language,

and I thought the deal
for all this disruption to my world

was that I would have some degree
of control over what was going to happen.

I felt for years that the climate crisis

is the defining challenge
of our generation,

and here I was ready to play my part

and do something for humanity.

But I put my hands
on the levers of control

that I'd been given and pulled them,
and nothing happened.

I realized the things I could control
were menial day-to-day things.

Do I ride my bike to work?
And where do I have lunch?

Whereas, the things
that were going to determine

whether we were going to be successful

were issues like, will Russia
wreck the negotiations?

Will China take responsibility
for their emissions?

Will the US help poorer countries
deal with their burden of climate change?

The differential felt so huge
I could see no way I could bridge the two.

It felt futile.

I began to feel that I'd made a mistake.

I began to get depressed.

But even in that moment,

I realized that what I was feeling

had a lot of similarities

to what I'd felt when I first found out
about the climate crisis years before.

I'd spent many of my most formative years

as a Buddhist monk in my early 20s,

but I left the monastic life,
because even then, 20 years ago,

I felt the climate crisis was already
a quickly unfolding emergency

and I wanted to do my part.

But once I'd left
and I rejoined the world,

I looked at what I could control.

It was the few tons of my own emissions
and that of my immediate family,

which political party
I voted for every few years,

whether I went on a march or two.

And then I looked at the issues
that would determine the outcome,

and they were big
geopolitical negotiations,

massive infrastructure spending plans,

what everybody else did.

The differential again felt so huge

that I couldn't see
any way that I could bridge it.

I kept trying to take action,

but it didn't really stick.

It felt futile.

Now we know that this can be
a common experience for many people,

and maybe you have had this experience.

When faced with an enormous challenge

that we don't feel we have
any agency or control over,

our mind can do
a little trick to protect us.

We don't like to feel
like we're out of control

facing big forces,

so our mind will tell us,
"Maybe it's not that important.

Maybe it's not happening
in the way that people say anyway."

Or, it plays down our own role.

"There's nothing that you
individually can do, so why try?"

But there's something odd going on here.

Is it really true that humans will only
take sustained and dedicated action

on an issue of paramount importance

when they feel they have
a high degree of control?

Look at these pictures.

These people are caregivers and nurses

who have been helping humanity
face the coronavirus COVID-19

as it has swept around the world
as a pandemic in the last few months.

Are these people able to prevent
the spread of the disease?

No.

Are they able to prevent
their patients from dying?

Some they will have been able to prevent,

but others it will have been
beyond their control.

Does that make their contribution
futile and meaningless?

Actually, it's offensive
even to suggest that.

What they are doing is caring
for their fellow human beings

at their moment of greatest vulnerability,

and that work has huge meaning,

to the point where I only
have to show you those pictures

for it to become evident that the courage

and humanity that those people
are demonstrating make their work

some of the most meaningful things
that can be done as human beings,

even though they can't
control the outcome.

Now, that's interesting,

because it shows us that humans

are capable of taking
dedicated and sustained action

even when they can't control the outcome.

But it leaves us with another challenge.

With the climate crisis,

the action that we take
is separated from the impact of it,

whereas what is happening
with these images

is these nurses are being sustained not
by the lofty goal of changing the world

but by the day-to-day satisfaction
of caring for another human being

through their moments of weakness.

With the climate crisis,
we have this huge separation.

It used to be that we
were separated by time.

The impacts of the climate crisis
were supposed to be way off in the future.

But right now, the future
has come to meet us.

Continents are on fire.

Cities are going underwater.

Countries are going underwater.

Hundreds of thousands of people are
on the move as a result of climate change.

But even if those impacts are no longer
separated from us by time,

they're still separated from us
in a way that makes it difficult

to feel that direct connection.

They happen somewhere else
to somebody else

or to us in a different way
than we're used to experiencing it.

So even though that story of the nurse
demonstrates something to us

about human nature,

we're going to have find a different way

of dealing with the climate crisis
in a sustained manner.

There is a way that we can do this,

a powerful combination
of a deep and supporting attitude

that, when combined
with consistent action,

can enable whole societies
to take dedicated action

in a sustained way towards a shared goal.

It's been used to great effect
throughout history.

So let me give you
a historical story to explain it.

Right now, I am standing
in the woods near my home

in southern England,

and these particular woods
are not far from London.

Eighty years ago,
that city was under attack.

In the late 1930s, the people of Britain

would do anything
to avoid facing the reality

that Hitler would stop at nothing
to conquer Europe.

Fresh with memories
from the First World War,

they were terrified of Nazi aggression

and would do anything to avoid
facing that reality.

In the end, the reality broke through.

Churchill is remembered for many things,
and not all of them positive,

but what he did
in those early days of the war

was he changed the story
the people of Britain told themselves

about what they were doing
and what was to come.

Where previously there had been
trepidation and nervousness and fear,

there came a calm resolve,

an island alone,

a greatest hour,

a greatest generation,

a country that would fight them
on the beaches and in the hills

and in the streets,

a country that would never surrender.

That change, from fear and trepidation
to facing the reality, whatever it was

and however dark it was,

had nothing to do with the likelihood
of winning the war.

There was no news from the front
that battles were going better

or even at that point that
a powerful new ally had joined the fight

and changed the odds in their favor.

It was simply a choice.

A deep, determined, stubborn
form of optimism emerged,

not avoiding or denying the darkness
that was pressing in

but refusing to be cowed by it.

That stubborn optimism is powerful.

It is not dependent on assume
that the outcome is going to be good

or having a form of wishful thinking

about the future.

However, what it does is
it animates action

and infuses it with meaning.

We know that from that time,

despite the risk
and despite the challenge,

it was a meaningful time full of purpose.