Hope-Based Communications With Thomas Coombes
This episode features a conversation with Thomas Coombes, Founder and Director of narrative change organization, Hope-based communications. It was recorded in January 2024.
Hope-based communications is a simple, open-source tool for anyone to use, as well as a community anyone can join. It centres around a pledge to apply five shifts to any and all communications output. Those shifts are fear to hope, problem to solution, against to for, threat to opportunity, and victims to everyday heroes.
It’s a pragmatic approach to winning support for policies and advocacy positions by showing how they’ll actually work, acting on the principle that we should be focused on building the world we want, setting the agenda with our values, our goals, our mission, rather than reacting to our opponent's frames and actions.
Borne of learnings and epiphanies during Thomas’ prior roles at Amnesty International and the European Commission, Hope-based communications offers a simple formula for telling stories of our own that contribute to the long-term changes in ideas, attitudes and behaviours, that we want to bring about.
Amongst other things, Thomas and I discussed the concept of hope as both active and visionary, how flipping our intuitions inside out and focusing on particular aspects of a story over others can strengthen our output, and how our brains work to trip us up at so many points along the way.
Additional links:
Visit the hope-based communications website
Check out Thomas’s TED Talk
Thomas’ article "Hope is Action”
Thomas’s piece "“A New Green Wave of Hope”
Follow Thomas on Substack or LinkedIn
“A Message From the Future” from Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
Dickon: Hi, and welcome to Communicating Climate Change, a podcast dedicated to helping you do exactly that. I'm Dickon, and I'll be your host as we dig deep into the best practices and the worst offenses, always looking for ways to help you and me improve our abilities to engage, empower, and ultimately activate audiences on climate-related issues.
This episode features a conversation with Thomas Coombes, founder and director of narrative change organisation, Hope-Based Communications. It was recorded in January 2024.
Hope-Based Communications is a simple, open-source tool for anyone to use, as well as a community anyone can join. It centres around a pledge to apply five shifts to any and all communications output. Those shifts are: fear to hope, problem to solution, against to for, threat to opportunity, and victims to everyday heroes. It's a pragmatic approach to winning support for policies and advocacy positions by showing how they'll actually work, acting on the principle that we should be focused on building the world we want, setting the agenda with our values, our goals, our mission, rather than reacting to our opponents' frames and actions.
Born of learnings and epiphanies from Thomas' prior roles at Amnesty International and the European Commission, Hope-Based Communications offers a simple formula for telling stories of our own that contribute to the long-term changes in ideas, attitudes, and behaviours that we want to see in the world.
Amongst other things, Thomas and I discussed the concept of hope as both active and visionary, how flipping our intuitions inside out and focusing on particular aspects of a story over others can strengthen our output, and how our brains work to trip us up at so many points along the way. So let's get on with it, this is Communicating Climate Change with Thomas Coombes.
From your perspective, how can communication best contribute in humanity's response to the climate crisis?
Thomas: Communication, at the end of the day, is the story we tell ourselves about what's happening in the world. It's how we make sense of things that are happening and something we do in every walk of life. And so the first thing we need to do is decide what the story is here. Is the story that we're doomed? Or is the story that we face a challenge that we have to come together as humanity and tackle together? And I think the way we decide to look at that story influences the way we act. We've evolved as storytelling beings. Our brains tell ourselves a story about what's happening in the world in order to drive our actions. So, the stories we tell are directly connected to the actions we then take. Our brains are predictive machines that are designed to judge whether something is dangerous or not. When we face danger, we go into survival mode. And so we make a decision when we tell stories. We can instinctively tell the story that first comes into our mind, or we can think, are we going to tell a story that is going to lead to the action, to the outcome, that we want to see?
Dickon: I wondered if you could provide an overview of Hope-Based Communications and how it differs from other communication strategies?
Thomas: The key idea, the heart of Hope-Based Communications is that if we want to make social change happen, we have to talk to people about what that social change looks like. As an ordinary person, our instinct is to be careful, to be wary of change. Something changing could involve danger, could involve me losing something. And we have to show people, actually, this change is desirable and worth taking part in. A lot of people, they hear the word hope, they immediately think, “Oh, it's about being optimistic or positive.” But hope is very different. Hope is about the idea that tomorrow can be better than today, if we take action. So when I talk about communication being hope-based, it means it's based on the things we're trying to achieve. So we're basing our communication on showing people the change we want to see. We're showing them the outcome we hope to achieve, to make it desirable. We're showing our values in action so that other people share those values. We're basically putting out attitudes and behaviours so that other people copy them. The basic point is if we don't put forward the things we want to happen in the world, other people can't copy them, and then they will never happen.
So I think the key thing we're trying to do differently with Hope-Based Communications is bring about actually a mindset shift in social change work. That the way we achieve change isn't actually showing people what's wrong, but showing people the alternative of how things could be instead. There's a basic insight underlying this, right? Is that the basic how do humans learn behaviour. There's very understandable desire to highlight and sort of shame and emphasize things that we don't like. But what we want to start doing actually is the more we focus on the things we want to see, the more likely they are to happen. The point of this mindset then is: we need people to focus their energy on putting in front of people with their words and their actions, actually what they want more of.
Dickon: I'm reading a book at the moment called Switch. It was recommended to me by another guest, actually. It chimes so nicely with what you just said, where the example it gives is a child coming home with its test scores and showing them to its parents. And, you know, if you've got three A's and an F, well, what does the parent typically focus on? It focuses on the F. Whereas in this book, they're kind of emphasizing, well, but what's going right? And why is it going right? And shouldn't we be supporting that?
Thomas: 100%. There's one other thing I'd like to add. Hope-Based Communications is a tool for anyone to use themselves. And it was actually designed that way. So what we like to say is it's not about just finding a hopeful story. It's about finding the hope in every story. And this came about when I first discovered this wonderful world of narrative strategy, when I worked at Amnesty International, I realised it doesn't make sense to go to all my fellow activists and say, “You should say these messages.” Actually, everyone needs to discover for themselves what it is they want the narrative to be.
Well, because all of us human beings are going around with this inbuilt negativity bias, our brain is programmed for us to, at first, focus on the thing we're against. Hope-Based Comms is based on these five simple shifts that anyone can apply. You integrate your narrative into everything you do. So, whether you're writing a press release, a social media post, designing a campaign stunt, whatever it is, you can ask yourself, have I talked about my values? Have I shown people what the actual solution is? Or am I focused on the problem?
And to me, that's also more sustainable. Because the way to change narrative is for us to constantly repeat our ideas so that they become more salient, more common, more common sense in society. For that to happen, we can't just have one little side campaign about narrative. We have to be constantly pushing our ideas, our values in everything we do. And so the purpose of Hope-Based Comms, we're not actually an agency. We're a social change organisation. We're a community of people using this approach. And it's creative commons. Anyone can use it because the goal is for activists to focus more on our values and promote social values in society.
Dickon: For listeners who might be wondering about the basis of this approach, I mean, you mentioned the negativity bias just there, could you give an idea of the research, the science of positive communication, I suppose, that it rests on?
Thomas: Yes. Hope-Based Communications was born essentially by me discovering all this science about how human beings work, behavioural science, neurobiology, and thinking, “Oh my God, how have I spent half a career in activism and not known any of this stuff?” The starting point for me really was the basic concept of fear. So, as a human rights communicator, I think my goal is to make my audience feel empathy and compassion. And no, that's not pity. Really, compassion, solidarity as equal human beings. That's what I'm trying to achieve. The basic science that really made me shift from being fear-based to hope-based was, “Oh, actually fear shuts down empathy.” That happens on a scientific level, right? Literally, when we have our fear response, our amygdala fires up, we start sweating, our heart rate increases, our body's preparing us to run away. And the part of our brain that thinks, “Well, what about future generations? Or just what about a group of people who are different from me?” That part of the brain is shut down. I was literally appealing to the wrong part of the brain for the emotional response that I want. There's a wider conversation, I think, part of the problem is the world of political science, economics, law, are actually based on this false idea of how human beings function, that this idea that we're purely rational, but actually all our decision making is a mix of reason and emotion.
That was part one. There's actually all sorts of other aspects of neuroscience then that have come in as we've evolved the approach. The key piece, I think, is that sense of fear primes self-interest. And if we want people to be open-minded, ready to change their minds, if we want people to care about people who are different from them, to have empathy, try and understand those different perspectives. And above all, if we want people to take action, we need them to feel hope.
I think there's another piece that's really important that's worth adding is this sense of how our behaviour changes. So human beings are social animals. We learn attitudes and behaviour from seeing other people do them. We're more likely to share an idea, such as we should welcome people fleeing war and persecution, if that idea has social permission, because we see other people saying it.
So basically, this shows the power of attention, the things we give attention to, the things we reshare on social media, the things we talk about, the things we campaign for or against influence what's actually going to happen in the future.
So again, there's this idea that our brains are predictive. We can only support things or understand things that we've seen before. So our brains are constantly gathering our experience, categorizing them, and using that information to make decisions about what we do in the future. And so I think ideas like confirmation bias are now common to most people, thanks to Donald Trump. But a lot of the time, actually, showing someone facts isn't necessarily going to change their mind if they already have a story in their brain about how to process that information. That can be depressing for some people, right? “Oh, I can't reach this person. They don't listen to the facts.” But we also can take hope from the science because there's a key concept in brain science, which is called neuroplasticity. Our brains are constantly changing. We can change. Our ideas can change. We can become more empathic and compassionate. We can become more kind and caring. But how does that happen? Well, because we've got predictive brains and we learn behaviour from other people, the way to make that change is to actually share that information. And so we need to show it, to put it in front of people. If we want people to be kinder, they need to see more kindness. If we want communities to welcome refugees, they need to see people like them welcoming refugees.
So, on the one hand, that kind of is a big red light to a lot of activism right now, because we're shining the light on the stuff we don't want to grow. And the things that we want more of are kind of left to the side of the news cycle or to what you see on the social media feed of activist groups. Right now, we're focusing all our attention on the most negative aspects of humanity. Imagine what would happen if we actually had strategic campaigning focused on the things we want more of.
Dickon: What happens when there's an absence of hope? What does hope-based communication absolutely not look like?
Thomas: It's really meant to be the counter to fear-based communication. To me, the danger with fear-based communication is that we create a sense of despondency, right? If all our communication is about the problem that's going to create despondency, why would people act if there's nothing we can do about it? There's also this another bit of brain science: is this idea that we adapt very quickly to make the current situation our new reference point. So, another risk when all we do is communicate about the problem is that people then come to accept that as “this is just how things are.”
A lot of the time, we not only with our sort of fear-based communication reinforce the sense that how things are today is how things will always be, but we also have to accept that we're not going to be able to do anything about it. But we reinforce an underlying way of thinking, which you could call like a scarcity mindset; that's just how you know it's just a natural order of things. What is missing when we don't talk about hope is the alternative, is how things could be. But what's also missing is a better way of thinking that makes people more likely to change, whether they're a decision maker, someone who works in a company, or an activist, or someone deciding whether or not to get involved in activism.
Dickon: In previous episodes of this podcast, conversations have touched on the adversarial nature of the climate communication landscape and the frames employed by opponents to climate action. What can Hope-Based Communications teach us about how to respond?
Thomas: The Hope-Based Communications approach is really inspired by Anat Shenker-Osorio, a progressive messaging expert in the United States, and what she says is “What you fight, you feed.” A lot of the work we do is focused on countering populism, for example, so I think the first, most important thing to do is to realise that the thing that I think big polluters or populists fear most are alternatives.
I spent a lot of my career writing press releases about big companies causing human rights violations or corruption, and I was a big believer in the idea that you have to name and shame, and that that would change people. But since the sort of big emergence of populism around 2016, I had to ask myself, “How do you name and shame people who are shameless?” And actually, these people just want attention. When we're reacting to people, when we're just opposing them, we're just part of their story and we're just reinforcing their message. What we need to do is not reactivism. We need to do activism.
I think what actually scares, for example, big polluters is when someone comes up with an alternative of how things could be instead that actually threatens their dominance over the narrative. So Naomi Klein in her big climate change book said “there's no more potent weapon in the battle against fossil fuels than the creation of real alternatives, just a glimpse of another kind of economy can be enough to energize the fight against the old one.” I think that's what's really happening in a lot of these fights right? It's basically the more we talk about coal or oil and gas or big polluting cars, that just becomes a reference point for people that like well those things are there we have to have them right that's just how things are. Actually what's scary for like, you know, those big 4x4 cars, those big gas guzzlers, is seeing an electric car. We saw these stories about how for example the George W Bush government did all this work to stop the electric cars coming out 20 years ago. Alternatives scare people. We need to think about what's going to surprise our opponents.
If you are in a position where you're in a fight I'm pretty sure that the other side is expecting you to react really angrily to whatever they do. What would surprise them? Maybe doing something built more around love or kindness or forgiveness or saying, “Hey guys, actually we believe you can do a lot better. We think you guys could actually help drive a whole new wave of clean technology.”
Imagine for the perspective of the big, you know, polluting oil company or whatever, it's very easy for them to just say, “yeah, look, it's just us against tree huggers and they just want to go back to the past, you know, take us back to the Stone Age. We're modern, in the future, the economy depends on us.” But if someone comes along and says, "Well, actually here's our vision of what a good company looks like,” suddenly they have something they have to live up to, and that's putting a lot of pressure on the economy and a lot more pressure on them, actually, than just being in a sort of confrontation.
Dickon: A lot of contemporary climate communications revolves around naming and shaming the biggest polluters. What does Hope-Based Communications have to say about employing this kind of messaging?
Thomas: So, one of the interesting bits of neuroscience around how attitudes form is actually the idea of motivated reasoning, that a lot of our decision making comes from our identity, of who we are, and so actually a massive driver of support for a cause is belonging. Shame is really very strongly connected to fear. It’s basically about being expelled from your community. And the strongest driver we have as human beings is to belong. To belong to a group. You can imagine, living in caves, our safety comes from the group working together, sharing food, taking care of each other. So, when we shame someone, we’re triggering their basic fear response. What’s interesting is, our brains haven’t evolved a separate fear response for sort of social media or social interactions. The same fear response that would be triggered for physical danger is triggered by rhetorical shame, suggesting we should be kicked out of our community. So I'm just not convinced that in most circumstances, shame is actually that effective for changing behaviour. Because first of all, people will either just rationalise away why they shouldn't be ashamed, or they will just build a new identity, a new in-group that justifies rejecting what you want to say.
So if we actually want to change how people act and think, we also need to create a sense of belonging to a cause. So to me, what's very effective, for example, is the LGBTQ+ movement, which moved away from shame and actually gave people a chance to be part of their movement.
So, in Hope Based Comms, we talk about shifting from threat to opportunity. Can we give people an opportunity to be part of change? For example, the LGBTQ+ movement might show parents who were religious and homophobic, but then meet someone who's LGBT and change their mind, or perhaps support and recognise the sexuality of their child and then change their mind. So if our goal is just to feel good about ourselves, go ahead and shame people, because that's essentially what's happening, we're getting a dopamine hit because we're good and they're bad. If we want to change the world, if we want things to be better, and I think with climate change, it's pretty important we do, we need to actually have a place where we can plan for how we want people to act and think differently in future. And then we actually put in place strategies that will make that happen.
So I feel particularly when we're dealing with big companies, we're not going to tackle climate change without those companies changing. The world in which we're living in harmony with nature, those companies are still going to exist, but they're going to have changed somehow. Maybe they're producing solar panels instead. Maybe they're just making ice cream, who knows? But they're still going to be there in that world and they're going to have had to change.
And also think of it when companies are, are harming the communities where this oil is drilled, for example, life's not going to get better for those communities until those companies change their practice. If we want to make the world better, it really impinges on us to start using these new tactics that are actually going to change those people's behaviour.
Dickon: What might be some ways that climate communicators could embrace Hope-Based Communications? Five narrative shifts you mentioned them earlier, and you you gave an example just then. But if we take them one at a time, they are: fear to hope, against to for, problem to solution, threat to opportunity, and victims to heroes.
Thomas: Yeah, let's start on “fear to hope”. I think the the first step is to make people believe that change is possible, and also give them sense of agency that they're part of the change. Start to think about what sort of emotions we want to connect with our cause. Emotions like awe, generosity, admiration, for example, I think is a really key one. Also just empathy and compassion for other people. We can't just depend on big climate conferences that set different states against each other, we need a mindset that we're all human beings that requires a lot more empathy between us.
I think a really important one for climate change is shifting from telling people the problem. Everyone knows the problem right now and if they don't they're in denial. We need to shift from problem to solution and showing people change is possible, so showing people a vision of that future, moving away from the idea of environmentalism being a minus - “we want to take your cars away and take away your holidays” to a plus - “What do we stand to gain from that future?”
I always give the example of the Message from the Future video that Alexandria Ocasio Cortez made when she put forward the Green New Deal. I think Solarpunk can also be really inspiring, you know. So much of our culture shows us the world in which we're doomed; there's very little that shows us the world in which we live in harmony with nature. So, Solarpunk is this idea of science fiction where we've got all this new modern technology like associating greenness and nature with advancement. You know, would you get on a train if you don't know the destination? We need to show people that it's not just what we're running away from, it's running towards something that actually excites people.
Fear can get a short reaction, but our brains are designed to have a short burst of fear to run away from a saber-toothed tiger. It's not fear that builds the village.
Shift three is moving from what we're against to what we're for. And here it's really about the values case, so what is the case that we're making for the actions we want? This is something where, a lot of the time, we think we need to talk about what's good for the economy. We make the argument that we think people want to hear about what's good for the economy and what's not good for the economy here rather than the actual values that drive us so there's this concept that a group called Common Cause talk about which is that we have extrinsic values, which is like self-interest, so like being successful, making money, but all human beings also have intrinsic compassionate values like having good friendships. But crucially one of those is connection to nature, so rather than thinking what's the best way to make an argument today based on what seems to be the dominant value, we need to think differently and actually change what are the dominant values in society right now? And right now, we've got a lot of the values that actually would help us with climate change, such as the value of connection to nature, the value of well-being or free time versus making lots of money. We need to just change the underlying way of thinking and that opens up so many avenues for communications people because our comms doesn't have to be all about how we're doomed; we can actually make content and tell stories that reinforces these values without necessarily always being about a specific policy issue. So it's about thinking about these underlying ideas and we use to make the case.
Shift four is about shifting from the threat to the opportunity. So, we talked a little bit about that already. Rather than telling people that you know we're doomed or making them feel guilty. For example, I'm sure other people will have covered that it doesn't work to make people feel individual responsibility for climate change. Can we instead show people how they can be part of the solution? You know there we get into all the stuff around habit formation. But I think one thing that's really key is how do we make our movement something people want to be part of? So how do we make environmentalism or greenness part of someone's identity? Look, for example, at the Pride movement, see how they shifted away from just talking about discrimination of a group of people to creating this wonderful beautiful concept built around love and openness and joy and celebration that you didn't have to be LGBTQ+ yourself to be part of. How do we do the same thing for environmentalism? Because when you want to be part of something you're more like to actually take those actions.
So again a lot of social change activism is quite transactional it's just like “we know what's best, support our policy, sign this petition.” We're missing a lot of the basic movement building, which is giving people a sense of belonging and agency, and that kind of moves us towards the final shift, which is victim to human.
So, the basic thing we want to move away from is just talking about like powerless victims, for example, like indigenous communities are being you know pushed off their land or people forced to move already because of the impact of climate change, which is actually kind of dehumanising to just make them victims without agency.
There was a wonderful campaign in Ecuador to prevent drilling for land in the Yasuni National Park last year, that actually put the indigenous people forward themselves and gave them the voice. The idea of our shift from victim to human is instead of just like telling the story of people as powerless victims, is to actually first of all have people tell their own story. But the crucial thing is to make sure that the stories we tell are what will bring our narrative to life. So this is actually the most practical simple thing that all of us can do to change a narrative: make a decision about the stories we tell.
And so, what we like to say at Hope-Based Communications: you can't just change a narrative with words, you have to be the narrative. I think a really key piece of taking a movement like environmentalism forward is thinking what does it look like for an ordinary person to be part of our movement?
I just wrote an article actually for Green parties ahead of the European elections to think like how do we build movements as strong as some of the kind of scary populist movements we're seeing emerging? And part of that is about thinking of what are the actions that reinforce our values? And we actually need to sort of rebrand tree hugging and things like bird watching, spending time in nature, not only does it actually like trigger the right emotions, hormones and chemicals in our brain for empathy, but it's also just an action that reinforces that value of connection to nature.
And so we need to start sort of reclaiming some of those actions and building our movements around them.
Dickon: To help make things a bit more tangible for listeners, I mean, I think we got some tangible examples there for sure, but perhaps you have some more? Let's see... Can you think of any climate or environment based campaign or messaging examples that epitomise a Hope-Based approach?
Thomas: I think a really good example of environmental campaigning was the Green New Deal. It was a great example of shifting the Overton window, which is this idea that politicians tend to go with whatever is popular right now, but what is popular changes over time and so you can take a radical idea that really seems extremist and no one wants to support, but by constantly talking about it, you can shift it into the mainstream. That's something we've seen happen to a lot of like right-wing ideas in the last few years, but we can do the same thing with ideas that feel radical to us right now.
So, what the Green New Deal did was put a package around really practical measures, but it gave a nice brand and a lot of people attacked it. But by attacking it, everyone kept talking about the Green New Deal. And so that gave it familiarity. So I think the first lesson that's really important for anyone working on narrative change is, I’ve literally have been asked, “what happens if we talk about solutions and they get criticized?” Or, “what happens if politicians who don't agree with us start using our messages?” Other people attacking you or trying to co-opt your messaging is part of the process of narrative change. When those things happen, you know you are successful because that is a process of your idea moving from just something your group talks about and no one else to it becoming a mainstream political idea. And when things become mainstream, common sense, political ideas, they're more likely to get acted on.
In the last few years, I think our politics has had a trend that an extremist puts out a horrible extreme idea and progressives freak out about it. And then all we talk about for the next week is their idea. So they get more attention, our agenda gets no attention at all. And so our agenda dies.
So what the Green New Deal did was put out an idea that dominated the landscape. Not only did it end up actually getting passed under a different name, the European Commission passed a Green Deal of their own. So, you have to put forward your ideas and be ready for the conversation around them.
Going back to the Green New Deal, I think what was very powerful about it was they did this campaign where they showed what the impact of the policy would be. There's actually a psychologist who's developed hope theory, mainly thinking of people dealing with diseases like cancer. But he says hope is built on a goal, a pathway to that goal, and agency, a belief you can walk that pathway.
So what the Green New Deal did was show people the goal. It created an image of what the country would look like if all these policies were put in place. It showed actually the story of how they would carry it out, listening to indigenous wisdom, retraining oil workers to build solar panels. And above all, it gave people that agency to show actually we can get this done.
Dickon: Having gone through the whole conversation now, of course, it's great news for them to respond to your message or try to co-opt it because it's the inverse of what we talked about earlier, which is trying to avoid responding on the opponent's terms. Well, now you have them responding on your terms.
Thomas: And it's amazing how often activists are really worried about this happening. They don't want people to do it. We talk a lot about greenwashing. So we're really worried that a company is going to start saying that acting on climate change is important, but without doing enough action. The danger there is that we end up with green hushing instead, that companies who are actually taking action don't talk about it because they're afraid of getting criticised. But again, let's go back to our key insight about human nature. We learn behaviour from what we see others doing. So if a company has taken one step towards acting on climate change, and there's five more steps to take, we need to talk about that one step because it makes them a lot more likely to take the next steps. As humans, we learn behaviour because our brain gives us pleasing chemicals when we do something. So then we do it again. If people associate being attacked with doing something, they're not going to do it again. But what's more important is when the company takes that one step, if we celebrate that, more companies are likely to also take that one step. So again, we have a very glass-half-empty approach to how we react to other people. When people actually do what we want, our immediate response in activism is to say, “It's okay, you've got all these other things to do.” I used to write the press releases. This is a good step, much more work left to do. Whereas instead, today, the Hope-Based press release would be, “this shows that every company can and should be taking this measure. This measure is a step towards the world where we live in harmony with nature, and we're calling all the other companies to follow their example.” We should be celebrating any small bit of progress because it makes more people likely to copy that, yet we're actually shooting ourselves in the foot a lot of the time.
Dickon: What's the single most important aspect of communication that we should be paying attention to in our communications endeavours?
Thomas: Oh my God, that's such a good question. I think, you know, it's such a cliche. I really apologise for the cliche. It's in Maya Angelou's quote that “people won’t remember what you told them, but they'll remember how it made them feel.” It really is about the emotions we're triggering. There's also science behind it. So, to me, what we should be looking at with narrative is salience, the salience of our ideas. That's something we look to change, right? So making, for example, the idea that connection to nature is just as important as wealth, for example. Salience is not just volume in a conversation, but also the strength of the emotional connection. People have strong emotional experiences that they connect with a concept or a value or a movement. When they think of that again in future, they'll also think of those emotions. So it's really, really actually connecting strong emotions like awe, admiration, joy with our cause, with our messages, with the very words we use is really key. So like when we say “climate change”, do you want people to feel guilt? “Oh shit, you know, I drove to work today instead of getting the bus.” Or do we want to feel like joy, “That time that I was in nature with my family and I felt like a sense of transcendence?" So it's really about thinking strategically about the emotions we want to connect to our movement, to our messages.
Dickon: Conversely, what's the biggest mistake that you see communicators make when attempting to engage the public on climate change issues?
Thomas: With Hope-Based Communications, we're trying to grow it as a tool that people use, like a mindset that people train, because I still make this mistake. It's reactivity. I want to react to things that anger me, that I disagree with. I mean, there's so much hypocrisy and cruelty in the world. And so it's a natural instinct, the second you see it, to react against it. What we need to do is take a deep breath and calm our own fear and anger response and think strategically about how we replace that with something else. So why is it that we're having this reaction? And what is it we want to see instead?
What we're doing when we're reacting to things is what we fight, we feed. And so we're part of that story. Doing Hope-Based Comms is just about training yourself to constantly be able to be mindful. “Oh, I'm just reacting to them. Let me think what is it I'm trying to build instead?” And how could I build some content or tell a story? And it shows that. Let's say we see a government that's failing to act. Can I elevate a government that is acting? Because what's going to shame the government who's failing to act more than actually seeing someone else celebrated for doing the right thing? So the goal is to train our mindset. If we see something that's failing to live up to our expectations, rather than shaming that, let's think how we can change that by showing something else that we want to see instead.
Dickon: It was really eye-opening talking to Thomas for this episode. But what in particular stuck with you from our conversation? What will you take from it and apply to your own work?
For me, it's this idea of starting with what we want, not what we don't. So often the intuitive move is to say what's wrong, to focus on what's not working, rather than shining a light on what is. For starters, this can lead to a lot of pretty one-dimensional storytelling, same old, same old. Whereas doing the opposite can not only attend to some of the issues that Thomas raised, but also generate some new and interesting angles to present the issue that we're working with.
As I said at the start of this episode, this conversation was recorded back in January, and since then, I've been working hard to implement some of the shifts that Thomas champions. I can tell you from my experience that it's not easy. It requires quite a bit of mental gymnastics, but the process and the results can be pretty rewarding. So that's what I'll be taking with me. But how about you? What did you hear? What will you be incorporating into your work? What will you be incorporating into your communications endeavours?
Thanks to Thomas Coombs for sharing his time and perspectives with the show. It was great. You can find links to some relevant resources in the show notes. Thanks also to you for listening to Communicating Climate Change. If you enjoyed this episode, why not leave it a rating or a review? Your feedback not only helps to shine a light on the guests and themes that resonate with you the most, but also boosts visibility, meaning the series reaches more people, expanding the community, and driving the conversation forward. You can find more episodes wherever you get your podcasts, or by subscribing so you never miss out. You can find Communicating Climate Change on LinkedIn too, and if you think the series would be of interest to friends or colleagues, why not point them in the right direction? Remember, each and every episode attempts to add to our toolkits, to help us develop the strategies and the smarts that we'll need for this complex task. So be sure to stay tuned for more. For anything else, just head on over to our website, www.communicatingclimatechange.com. Until next time, take care.
