How to shift your mindset and choose your future

When it comes to big life problems, we often stand at a crossroads: either believe we're powerless against great change, or we rise to meet the challenge. In an urgent call to action, political strategist Tom Rivett-Carnac makes the case for adopting a mindset of "stubborn optimism" to confront climate change -- or whatever crisis may come our way -- and sustain the action needed to build a regenerative future. As he puts it: "Stubborn optimism can fill our lives with meaning and purpose."

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 that 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
those people are demonstrating

makes 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 assuming
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,

and multiple accounts have confirmed

that actions that ranged
from pilots in the Battle of Britain

to the simple act of pulling
potatoes from the soil

became infused with meaning.

They were animated towards
a shared purpose and a shared outcome.

We have seen that throughout history.

This coupling of a deep and determined
stubborn optimism with action,

when the optimism leads
to a determined action,

then they can become self-sustaining:

without the stubborn optimism,
the action doesn't sustain itself;

without the action, the stubborn optimism
is just an attitude.

The two together can transform
an entire issue and change the world.

We saw this at multiple other times.

We saw it when Rosa Parks
refused to get up from the bus.

We saw it in Gandhi's
long salt marches to the beach.

We saw it when the suffragettes said that
"Courage calls to courage everywhere."

And we saw it when Kennedy said
that within 10 years,

he would put a man on the moon.

That electrified a generation
and focused them on a shared goal

against a dark and frightening adversary,

even though they didn't know
how they would achieve it.

In each of these cases,

a realistic and gritty
but determined, stubborn optimism

was not the result of success.

It was the cause of it.

That is also how
the transformation happened

on the road to the Paris Agreement.

Those challenging, difficult,
pessimistic meetings transformed

as more and more people decided
that this was our moment to dig in

and determine that we would not
drop the ball on our watch,

and we would deliver the outcome
that we knew was possible.

More and more people transformed
themselves to that perspective

and began to work,

and in the end, that worked its way
up into a wave of momentum

that crashed over us

and delivered many
of those challenging issues

with a better outcome
than we could possibly have imagined.

And even now, years later and with
a climate denier in the White House,

much that was put in motion
in those days is still unfolding,

and we have everything to play for
in the coming months and years

on dealing with the climate crisis.

So right now, we are coming through
one of the most challenging periods

in the lives of most of us.

The global pandemic has been frightening,

whether personal tragedy
has been involved or not.

But it has also shaken our belief
that we are powerless

in the face of great change.

In the space of a few weeks,

we mobilized to the point where
half of humanity took drastic action

to protect the most vulnerable.

If we're capable of that,

maybe we have not yet tested
the limits of what humanity can do

when it rises to meet a shared challenge.

We now need to move beyond
this narrative of powerlessness,

because make no mistake --

the climate crisis will be orders
of magnitude worse than the pandemic

if we do not take the action
that we can still take

to avert the tragedy that we see
coming towards us.

We can no longer afford the luxury
of feeling powerless.

The truth is that future generations

will look back at this
precise moment with awe

as we stand at the crossroads
between a regenerative future

and one where we have thrown it all away.

And the truth is that a lot is going
pretty well for us in this transition.

Costs for clean energy are coming down.

Cities are transforming.
Land is being regenerated.

People are on the streets
calling for change

with a verve and tenacity

we have not seen for a generation.

Genuine success is possible
in this transition,

and genuine failure is possible, too,

which makes this the most
exciting time to be alive.

We can take a decision right now
that we will approach this challenge

with a stubborn form of gritty,
realistic and determined optimism

and do everything within our power
to ensure that we shape the path

as we come out of this pandemic
towards a regenerative future.

We can all decide that we will be
hopeful beacons for humanity

even if there are dark days ahead,

and we can decide
that we will be responsible,

we will reduce our own emissions
by at least 50 percent

in the next 10 years,

and we will take action to engage
with governments and corporations

to ensure they do what is necessary
coming out of the pandemic

to rebuild the world that we want them to.

Right now, all of these
things are possible.

So let's go back
to that boring meeting room

where I'm looking at that note
from Christiana.

And looking at it took me back

to some of the most transformative
experiences of my life.

One of the many things I learned as a monk

is that a bright mind and a joyful heart
is both the path and the goal in life.

This stubborn optimism
is a form of applied love.

It is both the world we want to create

and the way in which
we can create that world.

And it is a choice for all of us.

Choosing to face this moment
with stubborn optimism

can fill our lives
with meaning and purpose,

and in doing so, we can put a hand
on the arc of history

and bend it towards the future
that we choose.

Yes, living now feels out of control.

It feels frightening and scary and new.

But let's not falter
at this most crucial of transitions

that is coming at us right now.

Let's face it with stubborn
and determined optimism.

Yes, seeing the changes
in the world right now

can be painful.

But let's approach it with love.

Thank you.