In Conversation

Manda: Hey people. Welcome to Accidental Gods to the podcast where we still believe that another world is possible, and that if we all work together, there is time to lay the foundations for that future that we would be proud to leave to the generations that come after us. I’m Manda Scott, your host and fellow traveller in this journey into possibility, and it’s one of the key features of this podcast that we are endeavouring to find out how each of us can embody and spread the total systemic change that we definitely need if we’re going to make it through.

And that means doing things differently. We have known for decades that the yell and tell strategy of belittling people into behavioural change, of endeavouring to cajole or shame them into somehow being different into thinking how we think, and if everybody thinks how we think, then the world will be different.

This doesn’t work. It never has. It never will. It can’t. It’s not how we’re wired. Cognitive neuroscience has been telling us this for decades, but it’s only relatively recently that people have begun to listen at anything like a useful scale. One of those who has been speaking in the wilderness for a long time and is now finally being heard is this week’s guest, Renée Lertzman.

Dr. Renée Lertzman is a researcher, an advisor, and a strategist. Who translates relational psychology, cognitive neuroscience, in order to change our approach to our planetary crisis? All of it. The metacrisis, the poly crisis, everything that is above and beyond simply the climate and ecological crisis. Over the past two decades, Renée has worked with global leaders, startups, governments, and mission-driven companies, including Google, Ikea, the California Academy of Sciences, and the Worldwide Fund for Nature, helping each of them to navigate the emotional complexities of climate engagement, of engagement with the entire poly crisis.

She is also the founder of Project Inside Out, an initiative that equips change makers with psychologically grounded resources for collective transformation. And this is what she’s bringing to this podcast. This is the key to our survival. We need each of us to learn how to engage ourselves and each other in ways that will transform ourselves and each other.

We need to bring serious emotional literacy to the table so that we can create the containers and attune to the anxieties and aspirations of everybody around us. We need above all to equip people to make sustained and sustainable change. And this is the core of Renée’s work. And hearing her talk about it in depth is the first step to making it happen.

So there we go. People of the podcast, please do welcome Dr. Renée Lertzman of Project Inside Out, and so much more.

Renée, welcome to the Accidental Gods Podcast. How are you, and where are you on this – it’s the Full Moon actually on this day of the Full Moon in May.

Renée: Exactly. Full Moon in Scorpio. Yes. I am well, I’m very, very excited to be here with you and I’m happen to be physically in Portland, Oregon at this moment. Normally my home is in California, but right now I’m in Portland.

Manda: Sounds gorgeous. And beautiful trees outside your windows. It’s one of those places I always wanted to visit and the world being what it is at the moment, that’s probably not going to be a clever thing. I don’t think I’d get past the airport.

Anyway. I listened to your Ted Talk just before we came on, and I’ve been exploring your websites and you seem to me to be one of those people who is. Right at that liminal space between the psychology of the metacrisis, the existential chaos of our times, and the behavioural change that we’re all going to have to make if our species is going to make it through, frankly. So can you unpick for us in whatever way works for you that that liminal space and how we can expand it to encompass the whole world?

Renée: Sure. Thank you.

Manda: Fix everything for me in five minutes, Renee. That’d be great.

Renée: I’m going to do it! So the work for me goes back to the late 1980s when I was. A young person and I was primarily focused on psychology and specifically psychotherapy. I had been already influenced and impacted by my experience with psychotherapists from a teenager, you know, living in a family with addiction and trauma and so forth. So I was convinced I’m going to be a psychologist. And then once I found myself at university and, you know, started learning and specifically ended up in a environmental science and studies kind of one of these 1 0 1 courses, um, my whole world changed. And so right for me, these realms of psychological human sciences and environment and climate crisis, existential crisis are utterly interconnected or integrated. I can’t even imagine seeing these as separate domains. Because we are human beings who have generated and participated in creating, you know, a variety of, of existential threats and impacts to humans and non-human life. And the, the whole planetary biosphere. It seems to make sense to me that those who are working on behalf of existential threat, planetary crisis and so forth, would want to be opportunistic and really understand at the deepest possible level. One, how did we get here, right? And two, what do we do about it? And, and it turns out that psychology has a lot to offer us. So that’s where I’m at, at the intersection. And so yes, for decades now I’ve been sort of stitching these worlds together, often on my own, you know, kind of bridging, you know, whether that means partnering with people who have clinical training and bringing them into rooms and spaces with people who are focused more on environmental policy or, uh, climate, you know, action and so, Hmm. Or the other way around. So it’s a sort of, but, but that, that’s been going on for a number of years, but fast forward to now and it’s a really burgeoning dynamic, incredible field that right now.

Manda: Okay. Let’s let get to that in a minute. Let’s just take a step back to you’re training to be a psychologist and a psychotherapist. Uh, un unpack that for me. And you went to a 1 0 1. What was this about? What you heard there that shifted the trajectory that you were on?

Renée: So I was focused on training to be a psychotherapist. And I was a psychology major and taking a variety of courses in psychology. You know, social psychology, cognitive psychology, personality, psychology, you know, that whole realm. And then I found myself in this course where every week we were having lectures about different aspects of environmental degradation. And, you know, pretty profound, well, very profound impacts that humans have had on our planet.

Manda: And this was in the eighties, so that was nothing compared to what it is now.

Renée: Yeah, 87, 88. And so we were learning about deforestation, we were learning about, you know, toxins, we were learning about Rachel Carson. We were learning about species loss, we were learning about biodiversity. Um, and just beginning to hear more about climate change and global warming, right? So that, because. You know, literally it was the late 1980s that this was starting to kind of breakthrough.

Manda: Yeah. Jim Hansen was just beginning to do his work and going to speak at Congress.

Renée: Right. So the thread throughout the course, it certainly wasn’t centred on climate change. So what happened for me as a young person who already I think had a predisposition to wanting to make the world better, or you know, caring for the world, caring for especially nature, I was so deeply troubled by what I was learning about and I was both troubled by what I was learning about. And I was equally troubled by the lack of acknowledgement and port for the experience of learning about these issues. So I would come out of the class kind of in a daze. You know, I would come out feeling so destabilized, like, well, nothing really mattered like it. It just struck me as very surreal and bizarre that people were just kind of going along, acting as if nothing was happening when we were going into this kind of space. Just like conferences now, like we have these events and gatherings where people come together and look directly at what’s happening with the planet and with degradation and with like all these crises unfolding, metacrises unfolding. And meanwhile it feels like the rest of the world is sort of continuing

Manda: Business as usual.

Renée: Right? And so I was perplexed by why there wasn’t more, you know, acknowledgement of what does it mean, especially as a young person, you know, 19, 20 years old, what does it mean to come to terms with our world, you know, right now? And so, like a lot of young people are today. For me, back then, I went through a similar experience where I just felt like I have to rethink everything. And so I actually dropped out of school. I first, I petitioned to get a professor, to sponsor me, to do my own independent study where I bridged. Environmental studies and psychology, and I was told, you know, I, I wasn’t able to find that, that support or sponsorship.

Manda: It’s so obvious now that that should be a thing.

Renée: It was, it was before its time, I guess. And then I went on a field study course where I was backpacking with a small group of people. And I mentioned this in the TED Talk where we were out in, in real wilderness, like everywhere we went, you know, involved hiking many miles into the back country and really reading and writing and reflecting on the state of the world. And that experience was really the, the turning point where I kind of started connecting some dots between the experience of being in a smaller group, like a little tribe or a cohort where your experience was validated. And normalized, and two, you know, just having that space to do some sensemaking. I think probably the most impactful of that experience, even though we were, yes, it was nature immersion and that was profound, was having my experience be validated. Which is, oh, you’re not crazy actually.

Manda: And you’re not on your own.

Renée: Yeah. You’re not on your own and, and you are onto something. And it was that teacher I had, you know, that instructor who, you know, had the capacity to say, I see you and you’re onto something and that’s all we need often is a little bit of like a, a little crumb to keep going.

Manda: Yes. That being seen, feeling felt, and getting gotten that, that sense of somebody going; yes, I hear you. So then did you drop back in again?

Renée: So then I dropped out, I migrated back in. I ended, you know, traversing back in a different entry point, which was a program where I could do exactly what I wanted and create my own in kind of interdisciplinary study. And, um, yeah, I mean, and then from that point on, this has always been my focus, my undergraduate, my master’s, my PhD research has always been on applying clinical psychology and specifically a trauma informed approach, which again, back then wasn’t talked about as much as it is now. You know, I wrote and gave my first conference paper in 1993 called Ecological Trauma, and it was roundly rejected except for, again, a couple of people, key people who were like. You’re onto something, keep going. But most people were like, we don’t get this. Like, why are you describing this as trauma?

Manda: Wow. I suppose everybody was busy declaring war in the Gulf and things in those days, weren’t they? And now it seems obvious. Mm-hmm. So, so I going from that where people looking at you like you’ve grown the horns in 93 to 2025, this feels to me like this is a whole subcategory all on its own. Now, there you are, not alone, but you were the trailblazer. What are you seeing has changed in the various professions that you touch on, because you’re touching on cognitive neuroscience, you’re touching on therapy, and particularly trauma informed therapy. You’re touching on the whole of the climate aware space, but also the, the metacrisis aware that this is about equity and governance and politics and sense making and AI and technology and all of the things. It’s not just about the amount of CO2 we chuck out in all of those, how are you seeing the response that you get shifting?

Renée: Well, I’m seeing. The influence in recent years on trauma informed work. So I often think about individuals who have helped to sort of break through what had been a more, uh, specialized esoteric field. There’s individuals like, you know, Bessel van der Kolk you know, there’s so many –

Manda: Gabor Mate and Peter Levine.

Renée: Exactly. Uh, who, you know, there’s women as well, but these, these individuals have done a lot to, to really get in the mainstream. I have a practice, I take photos of airport bookstores whenever I’m traveling, and it’s kind of amazing that Gabor Mate and Bessel van der Kolk’s books are consistently on the nonfiction table, you know, and airport stores around the world. So, all that to say that what that’s enabled is a language and a vernacular, and a way of describing and talking about the felt experience of living in existential crisis and poly crisis. So that’s one which is, you know, that I’m noticing is a, uh, a real, uh, acceleration of that. I think that it might be helpful to describe what I’ve observed of the evolution of the field. I think a lot of people know about this and I’m very excited to say I am. I just got a book deal and my book is going to this. The working title is The Change Maker Code. But I have a feeling that will shift, but right now it’s The Change Maker Code; a user’s guide to, you know, making the world better kind of thing.

Manda: Who’s your publisher? Can you tell us that?

Renée: Viking Penguin.

Manda: Okay. And they’ve gone for that? Well, marketing. Yes. I used to be with Penguin Random house and marketing does have a tendency to come in right at the end and go, no, that title won’t work. But The Changemaker Code feels good to me. And any idea of a publication date? Roughly?

Renée: I’m hoping for early 2027 or late 26.

Manda: You can come back when it’s ready to go and we’ll talk about it more.

Renée: Great. Thank you.

Manda: Congratulations. And yes, do tell us about the evolution.

Renée: So I’m going to share in five minutes the history of the psychology of existential threat and climate change. Okay? You ready? I have this visual that I use, it’s on my website. Uh, people can check it out.

Manda: If you send it to us, we’ll put it on the show notes.

Renée: I call them quadrants. And I created this, I’ll just tell a story:

So after leaving academia, I was very much of an academic. I had a postdoc fellowship here in Portland, Oregon in 2010-2011 after finishing my PhD from Cardiff University and I left academia and it almost very soon after, was commissioned by some incredible individuals with the Skoll Global Threat Threats Fund, which was a think tank offshoot of the Skoll Foundation. And what they wanted was a literature review of the psychology of climate change, of climate engagement. And I started diving into this and looking at the research and looking at the field. And very early on in that process some things started coming together for me. One was that there are almost like these factions within the field that aren’t necessarily being talked about but are very much there. So in the 1980s the first publication, journal publication, linking Psychology with Global Warming was published in the like 86, 87 by Baruch Fischhoff, a professor who really focused on risk psychology and decision making. That kind of like really looking at how do people make decisions? How do people, how do people evaluate risk? So what happened in the late 1980s was the psychology of climate change was primarily framed and looked at as a decision making and risk psychology issue. So that was Paul Slovic. Then it became a variety of individuals who all, you know, were working very closely together. But the orientation was a cognitive behavioural approach that, you know, was really looking at, I mean, affect was part of it, emotion was part of it, but not a big part of it. It was more like how do people weigh things up? And so the field was very influenced by behavioural economics and behavioural science, which is a very particular lens.

That lens is really asking the question, uh, how do we, you know, really get people to do what we want, you know, need humans to do. So that’s kind of classic behaviour change. And then from there we see nudge theory and we see incentivizing, we see penalties and fees and all of these things that come out of behavioural psychology. Then in the 1990s, we started to see a moving up the quadrant, we started to see more attention and recognition of language and messaging and framing. And so that became really a huge focus. And so we saw work like Anthony Leiserowitz who runs the Yale Center on Climate Communication, come up with the Six Americas. We started to see more people like George Lakoff who had really studied language and framing from a policy perspective, right? Like he has the book, Don’t Think of an Elephant and that started to really influence the field. And so then the problem definition was what is the right message in the way we talk about this? That will shift people’s engagement and get people to care. So then we move from the messaging and framing and storytelling kind of fixation. 2000. The design thinking and innovation sector really started in, you know, really interfacing with climate environment. And then the question was really how do we approach this as a design problem and applying design thinking? So then we started to see, you know, organizations like Ashoka and ideo.org, and a lot of this coming out of, not surprisingly, the innovation sector and Silicon Valley framing climate as a something to solve.

Manda: Hmm, yeah. Solve for climate. Absolutely.

Renée: Like the whole, John Doerr, you know, like the speed and scale and acceleration and climate tech and accelerators, incubators, hackathons, climate hackathons, prizes, the XPRIZE, all of that comes out of that space because. In actuality, that can really spark innovation in an incredible way. So each of these has a, a piece of the puzzle, right? Each of these is like a, an unlock in specific ways, but they all have very distinct theories of change and they have very distinct ways of understanding humans. Right? And then finally, the fourth quadrant is the more emotional, experiential, trauma-informed interventions. And from that, we see this incredible rise of things like climate cafes, climate circles, art-based interventions.

Dear Tomorrow just was written up, I think in the Washington Post, where you have people write letters to the future, you know, very experiential ways of engaging with these issues, and so that quadrant is really the most recent that I’ve been most affiliated with and associated with is how do we bring that into the picture? And now what we’re seeing is a progression of integrating across these, these factions and theories of change. Although I do still think there’s a lot of siloing happening, and I still see a lot of well-funded and well-resourced climate initiatives and work be largely colonized by particular ways of thinking that are in fact, I believe, mechanistic and rooted in a dualistic approach, which is as if we could create the head from the heart as if we can quote, ‘make people try to’ quote, ‘get people to do something’. Whereas, you know, we need to kind of get up to speed with where the neuroscience and where trauma-informed research is, which is in fact that, you know, it’s, it’s much less of an issue of getting people to care. Making people change. It’s actually about connection, belonging, meaning mattering, purpose, impact people, you know, working with people’s experience of, of helplessness and impotency and not just, you know, attacking that with a lot of cheerleading – educating and yelling basically.

Manda: I didn’t get, most of the names we’re going to have to go through at the end and get them into the transcript, but we’ll worry about that after. Because it seems to me that other than the fourth quadrant you just described, these are all fundamentally people working on the knowledge deficit model, which is if everybody knew, I knew everybody would care. And, and here are the ways to make everybody care. Like I care as if being anxious. Was an end point in itself. Because I’m not, I was not aware of, and I’ve perhaps not been looking in the right places, but nobody was offering, and here are the steps that we take to create a different reality and a different way of being, and not just minor tweaks in behaviour like recycling and, and driving different kinds of cars, but total systemic change and total behavioural change. And when I talk to very well-meaning people in the design space or the business space, that’s the point where they look at me as if I started talking a different language and, and it doesn’t land because I don’t have the language to say, just getting people to be aware is not actually an answer. And, and so I’m wondering within the cognitive neuroscience and the trauma informed space. What are the theories of change that aren’t simply theories of getting people to agree with us so that we’re all on the same page about how bad it is?

Renée: Exactly right. Well, first I just want to acknowledge that this perpetual, it feels like a very circular quandary of how do we get people to care? How do we make people aware and understand that’s grounded in a knowledge deficit model. Or what I talk about in my first book, Environmental Melancholia, I talk about this as this kind of, you know, notion that there’s a gap between what we know and what we do. The knowing-doing gap. And we have to like bridge this gap. And if we actually take a few moments to slow down and think about it, it’s less of a gap. It’s much more of a tangle. It’s where people get tangled up. And so coming out of, so one I would like us to put to rest this, it’s this like, oh, such a waste of time and energy to keep asking again, what will motivate people to care, what will get people to care? How do we motivate people? That to me is an absolutely unproductive line of questioning and takes up a huge amount of resource that we don’t have right now. So let’s just catch up with where the science is and let’s be science-based about our approach to climate action. Let’s like actually be science-based.

If we keep going around saying other people should be science-based, we should be science-based as well, right? Which means that we really look at, you know, the, the science of human behaviour. And one of the key, you know, elements of that, if we look at neuroscience, one, number one is when human, you know experience affect A-F-F-E-C-T. That involves fear.

Manda: That’s basically when they experience a feeling.

Renée: Feeling, yes. Not necessarily an emotion. It’s not the same as an emotion. because it’s not necessarily even at a like cognitive level. It’s like in your system.

Manda: Right. Deep, deep down in your hind brain somewhere.

Renée: Exactly. Yeah. Fear, anxiety, guilt, disgust, shame, those kinds of effects are well established to influence the way that we cognitively process information. And, you know, this is very well established, right? Like I have a mountain of research, you know, and I love to pull out quotes periodically because it’s sort of like if the climate space took any of this on board, it would absolutely change the way we go about what we do. If you actually accept that these affects impair and impede our cognitive process, that ideally invokes a, a pause –

Manda: hang on. They impair and impede our cognitive process, so let’s just unpick that bit. So if we are feeling any of the things that you just outlined our capacity to think clearly, downgrade.

Renée: Exactly. Yeah.

Manda: Right. I just think that’s worth highlighting.

Renée: And not in the same ways for everyone. Right. But, but this isn’t a very well established that. So that begs the question, what are the conditions? To me, this is the only question we should be asking right now. Okay. Literally, it’s like what’s guided? Everything I do, if that’s the case, which it is, what are the conditions that enable humans to face. What is scary and overwhelming and threatening, and what are the conditions that enable and cultivate our capacity to want to repair, to want to mend, to want to do something, to want to help. That is it. How do we look at what’s hard and how do we, you know, create the conditions that foster repair, that foster what’s called reparation? Reparative instinct that we have? And so if you really like unpick that, then it becomes a much more richer. A more dynamic, a more nuanced set of interventions and practices and skill building that we can all be engaging with. And you know, and so again, all I’m doing is going to what we know from trauma, trauma-informed work, that’s all I’m doing. I am literally, I say very openly that I’m appropriating. I don’t think that’s in a bad way.

Manda: That’s what science does. Yes, exactly. Is we learn from other science and we bring it together.

Renée: I try to, I aspire to give attribution whenever I possibly can. You know, as a human being, it’s not always like, you know, you don’t always track. But I think attribution is really important right now to just acknowledge like, oh, here’s the lineage, here’s the source that I’m referencing. So all I’m doing, again, I’m looking to, well, what do researchers and people who actually work with other human beings, what do, what have they found? And then I like to pull that in and see how do we rework that like I’m going to be doing in London next week. Literally, I’m gonna be working with a leadership team in London who are doing really high impact work in the climate finance space.

How do we take this work and make it into tools that they can actually apply so that they can be more effective at their ninja level, extremely high impact work they’re doing. Like that’s all I’m doing. It’s like a translation that a lot of us can be doing.

Manda: Okay, so give us the tools, right? This sounds really important. This is it.

Renée: Yes, this is it. So after many years of, of, uh, experimentation, working with amazing people, gifted people, we have these, these five guiding principles that are in a bit of a distillation and kind of a simplification, but, you know, sometimes that’s helpful. So first is, and just, just high level first is the recognition of containers. What are containers? And that humans need containers to feel safe enough to look at what’s hard.

Manda: Are we going to unpick these as we go along, or do you want tell us all five and then go back?

Renée: I’ll go, yeah, I’ll go through all five. But I wanted to share the container pieces almost like at the highest level. It’s like, okay, if we can get that piece dialled in, that, that’s a lot.

Manda: I don’t even know what a container is. What does that mean?

Renée: That’s great. Um, so a container is a term that tends to be used in the trauma-informed world and in the clinical world that speaks to the relational field that a human is in that cultivates and fosters a sense of being held.

Like there’s a container, there’s a boundary here. So an example would be when I’m working with a team, an organization, I’m very attentive to the container. Meaning that how do we set things up? How do we establish the kind of rules of engagement, right? How do we create the conditions so that people feel seen and heard and respected and safe? You won’t be attacked here. You know, you’re not alone. It’s really about, you know, in any conference, any gathering, any meeting, it is a form of a container. And this is why, you know, I’ve said in a number of places and ways that the role of conveners and curators right now has never been more important because folks who are convening are in fact setting the container.

Manda: Yes. So it’s a set of social agreements that allow everyone to feel as safe as possible within that space.

Renée: Yes, and it can be a relational container. So an example is, I’ve been seeing recently responses to the new Attenborough film on oceans and on social media – people are basically sharing their emotional responses. And a lot of people are saying, you know, I wanted to be inspired by this, but I left feeling really scared. Right. So this goes to the heart of. What does it mean to create the conditions and the containers that allow humans to process and metabolize information that could feel and evoke very difficult feelings and responses? Because if we don’t attend to that, people generally tend to kind of shut down. We shut down, we disconnect, we push it away. And so an example of creating a container would be if you are producing a film like that, you better make sure that people feel supported in some way. And so this is an area of, of real innovation where if you are producing a film like this, you could consider leading up to the launch. You know what if we partner with an organization that has facilitators and invites people into online forums or like it, you could be very creative about it, where you, I know, and I’m speaking for myself, I will not watch a film like that by myself. Right. I won’t do it. But if I knew that this film was partnering with a really cool organization that’s like, Hey, we wanna support you in really like processing this so then we can figure out what we wanna do.

Manda: Exactly. And we want to bring you together with all the other people who aren’t coping, but so that you can actually do something. ’cause we don’t give people direction, agency and empowerment.

Renée: No.

Manda: What is the point in filling the knowledge deficit. Exactly.

Renée: That’s exactly right. So we’re really good. We’re really good at stimulating and evoking feeling. We’re really good at generating, you know, anxiety or worry or concern or shock. Like, oh my God, I can’t believe humans have done this, oh my gosh, this is making me feel so sad that we’ve lost this.

Manda: Yeah. This is the whole of social media at the moment. Let’s trigger your limbic Exactly so that you feel constantly on edge and pulled.

Renée: And it’s irresponsible to do that if you are working on behalf of existential threat and you want to. Enable people to do something, it’s, it’s irresponsible to go around just activating people without really following up with looking again at what these conditions are that support people to really sort of process and then want to do something. And that tends to need a container. It tends to need a relational home of some kind, which is why schools are really powerful and nature centres and anywhere where people are coming together, these are really powerful engines, especially if they include some acknowledgement of how people are feeling and let people kind of name their feelings and so forth.

Manda: So I have a question: I’m just thinking of things that happen locally in my community of place, and there are a certain class of people where that even that language is triggering. Because you’re asking people to feel in public. And particularly people of a certain age, but not exclusively, are particularly people who are not customarily exposed to trauma informed thinking and feeling. Even inviting them to check in of how are you, before we go around the meeting is, it’s labelled woke, frankly, and then instantly rejected. And so how do we go about creating containers that work in a mixed culture where even the language itself would fracture the capacity of a container to exist. Does that make sense as a question?

Renée: Yeah, it does. And I don’t think we need to be open and explicit about, you know, feelings. We never even need to use the word feeling or anything like that. One, I think it’s important to partner with people who are coming from a different perspective and kind of co-create it together. Like, okay, let’s come together and what, you know, in other words, not to come in and start imposing a way of being and thinking, but really like coming from a place of recognizing that we all care about our place and where we live, basically. So an example of that is when I did PhD research and I, I was doing it at Cardiff, but my research was based in the United States and the Great Lakes region, right? And I was, um, researching and interviewing people, living in a community near the Great Lakes called Green Bay, Wisconsin.

And having these conversations with people who, ordinarily you would, from the outside, would say, well, they’re conservative, they’re, you know, whatever. They don’t care. because they weren’t involved with anything environmental. They didn’t fill any of that criteria, right? And, and often these are the people that get written off from environmental groups. So I went and spent time with a number of these people in their homes, and the opening prompt was always, you know, tell me about where you grew up and where you live. Like, it was literally like that. And then from that prompt, we get into all kinds of territory about, you know, people showing me photos of their boat and people, you know, telling me stories about growing up fishing and now they can’t anymore, or, you know, can’t swim. And someone who told me that, you know, he went swimming in the river and got hepatitis, you know, and, but this is someone who deeply is connected with the water and the river and, you know, so it’s through telling stories.

It’s not necessarily, like I never once asked anyone, and I very rarely ask anyone ever. How are you feeling? Because I mean, okay, that’s a lie. I do, I do actually ask people how they’re feeling, but it’s, it’s often in a, in a very, you know, non directive way. And there’s just many ways of finding ourselves there. Like, tell me about, you know, what you did, whatever, like invoking a story. So that’s how I would approach it, is not like, okay, we’re going to all talk about our feelings now. Right? Bring an object to the meeting and talk about, you know, why it has significance for you. Right? Like, things like that. We get it. Feelings in all kinds of ways.

Manda: Okay. Brilliant. All right, so on your list of five, we start with container. And, and that seems that’s a skill in its own right, actually training people to hold the container sounds like a very important thing to be doing. Are you doing this?

Renée: It’s a big part of what I do and, and I think there’s a lot of people in the world who are skilled at this, who could be doing, be leveraged more than they are. So that’s not one of the principles that’s like the overarching kind of meta concept. Okay. So the guiding principles, they’re, they’re kind of a playbook for being a change maker, a relational trauma informed change maker, and the first one is called Attune.

And Attune is about recognizing the necessity to be attuned to yourself, first and foremost, right? Like connected with your own reactivity, connected with your own sense of, um, presence, connected with your own experience like that, you know, everything starts from the that essential place

Manda: And just being aware of what you’re feeling, which is what we just said we weren’t going to talk to other people about. You’ve got to have the capacity to turn your awareness into the various parts of yourselves that are active at the time.

Renée: I mean, there is no effective change making in the world without some modicum of self-awareness in, I mean, I think that’s just a law of nature. I mentioned that my Ted talk spontaneously, I wasn’t, that was scripted, but I basically said, I’m sorry to have to say that there’s no bypass. You can’t get around it. We have to practice inner awareness. And it’s an, it’s a lifelong practice of tuning into ourselves in order to be attuned to those that we are working with and for. And so there’s a variety of ways of being attuned. There’s listening, there’s doing listening tours, there’s doing, using surveys. There’s many, many ways of tuning in and, and really sensing what your either stakeholders, communities, audiences, followers, funders, partners, vendors, your, what I call your people. Okay? So being attuned to their anxieties, being attuned to their ambivalence or conflict or dilemmas or competing priorities and being attuned to their deepest aspirations for themselves and for what they want in the world. And, and if we, we need to hold those three a’s together. You know, often there’s a bypass and we wanted to be cheerleaders and say, oh, we know – Yay, yay.

Manda: Right? Go for your aspirations, but ignore your anxieties and your ambivalence.

Renée: And if you skip over that, the anxiety and the ambivalence will get louder and louder and louder and will actually undermine our deepest aspiration. That’s psychology. That’s just, that’s how it works.

Manda: But we’re asking then people. Either the person doing this has to be incredibly good at reading the room, or the nation, or whatever they’re reading. Or you’re asking everybody to be self-aware and to know what their own anxieties and ambivalence are. And you know, I’ve done decades of therapy, and it can take a long time to get to the ‘I’m aware that there’s something cramped up inside’, but can take a long time to bring it to a point where I could name it.

Renée: I’m not saying that we all have to be completely and totally self-aware all the time. I’m just acknowledging that as a practice, we want to include being attuned to our experience. It’s not about having perfection. I mean, people who know me well and work with me. I can tell you that I’m not always the most regulated person. You know, I have a lot of anxiety. I can get very hijacked by my anxiety if I’m not careful.

Manda: I’m thinking that’s human, Renee, that everybody’s like that.

Renée: I have a high bar for myself.

Manda: That too is human, right?

Renée: So I’m certainly not wanting to suggest in any way it’s about perfection or we all have to be evolved and we all have to be super enlightened. I’m just saying, as a human practice, we need to at least be committed to our own inner development some way or another, whatever that looks like.

And the second guiding principle is Reveal. And Reveal is about telling the truth. Communicating. You know, whether that’s science or data or this is what’s happening, or here’s a film about oceans, or here’s a TV series, or here’s a podcast, or here’s a conversation or a class. Like all the ways that we reveal what is happening and doing it compassionately. So how to be Compassionate truth tellers is that second guiding principle reveal.

The third is Convene. So how do we bring people together and actually show up in our work as conveners? And this is particularly relevant for organizations who I think need to evolve as conveners. I don’t care what kind of organization you are, you can be convening people, you can be bringing people together. But it also is about, as a leader, this is a leadership capability, which is to know how to convene and really, quite honestly, like facilitate. So, I do master classes and sprints on Convening 101 and Facilitation 101 specific to people working in the impact space because stake are high and emotions are high. And so I think that we can learn some basic tools that can make a meeting, a gathering or what have you much more. Effective and metabolizing and integrating as opposed to, you know, bringing people together. Let’s all feel really high and great, like, and then disperse. You know, I, I hear about conferences like that all the time, you know, including one that just happened not long ago at the Eden Project, you know, which people were like going on about. And I also heard that there was a sense of like, okay, what happens now?

Manda: What now? Right, right. Because there’s the theories of change that I hear in these circumstances don’t hold water.

Renée: Exactly.

Manda: They’re back to knowledge deficit. Let’s get everyone to think like we do. Yay, cheerleader. We’re all thinking the same. And then it’s okay. Now, what? And there’s a great big gap with the Okay. And now, what? Okay, but we’re going to Attune, Reveal, Convene, and Equip.

Renée: Equip is equipping people with tools and resources. So this is very much about the model of we’re going to provide. We’re going to scale, uh, tools and resources. And in a way, each of these guiding principles is an intervention. They’re all interventions on ways of working and being that haven’t been working so well in the climate and environmental space. This particular equip principle is an intervention on the tendency of those working in the space to unintentionally hold the work very closely and say, we got this, and we’re going to basically push out campaigns and try to, again, it’s the same thing, like, get people, you know, we’re going to try to get you engaged, we’re going to get you to sign up, we’re going to get you, as opposed to – this is not just about us as a team or an organization, it’s about all of us. So how do we equip you with the tools and then we are going to be here as your partner and we’re going to support you, like, check in, how’s it going?

And so imagine if that was the primary approach in climate space is to, we’re going to give people tools and resource and scale. So if there’s anyone listening to this who’s a funder, this is where you want to be investing your funding is, is equipping people and scaling tools and resources.

And finally, sustain is the fifth guiding principle, which is this notion of really encouraging ourselves to go beyond the big launch. The big foot. The big, you know, events or whatever. And really, and you see how all these work together because when people feel co-ownership, they feel connected, they feel part of something, then it is not only about you trying to keep oxygenating something, it’s about we are sustaining. And so in the work I do with organizations, for example, one of the areas I work in is employee engagement. And I’ve worked with a number of companies where we look at the way they engage their employees, including in a very large multinational company. And in that case, an application of this and of sustain would be get members of that community to take co-ownership over it and basically say, I’m going to do this for the next year.

Like I’m going to be a part of a steering committee or whatever, as opposed to some overwork staff person trying to keep something going. You know what I mean? So that’s is like co-owning. And you see, in order for that to work, you have to give people tools and resources. You have to equip them. You have to convene them. You have to give them information and knowledge and then you have to attune to what they’re doing.

Manda: Attune to them. And then you have to have the container within which it all works.

Renée: Exactly.

Manda: And can you tie this up for my inner cognitive neuroscience geek and anybody listening, what’s the cognitive neuroscience that links all this together? What’s the theory of change behind the theory of change? Does that make sense? I want to understand the neurophysiology that underpins this, and then I want to look at actually what theory of change is.

Renée: Right. So the neuroscience underpinnings has to do with when we feel supported.

We’re not alone, that we’re in relationship with others and we feel that there is some way we can channel our feelings or energy or, and so forth in a constructive way, then we will move in that direction when we short circuit and sort of opt out, like what difference is it going to make anyway? I have nothing to contribute. I’m all alone. No one around me understands, um, that that’s, you know, where a lot, the majority of humans tend to get stalled out.

Manda: Right. So I just watched this. Let’s say I watched the Attenborough, which I haven’t, but let’s suppose I had, I’m on my own. I am now completely terrified that the oceans are going to become devoid of life within 20 years. And I have no idea what to do about this

Renée: Exactly.

Manda: Whereas if I had a group of people, even if it’s a group of people spread across the rest of the world to connect with, to share my despair with other people who get it, and then to begin to act, we’re back to building tribes again, aren’t we? We’re back to building communities that work – communities of place and purpose and passion. And it strikes me that these things will only work if we have a theory of change that says, okay, so we’re going to equip you and we’re going to sustain this to do what? So in your connecting with all what sounds like some really high level people. What are their theories of change of. Changing the whole of human behaviour. What are we trying to change it towards?

Renée: Well, we’re trying to change it towards a way of being with care. We’re trying to change it towards what is life in our world look like if it’s informed by care. For others other than ourselves.

Manda: Sure. The, the web of life and all the rest of, what does it look in your world or in your thinking forward? What does that look like? What does it feel like? I want you in the time we have left, which is about three and a half minutes to take us from swimming inside the death cult of predatory capitalism to emerging into something that is based on Reciprocity and Respect and Relationship. And, and all of the Rs that build community Are, are you seeing people who have a sense of the granularity? 

Because that, that’s where I always see the big gap is we know where we are, we have a sense where we want to get to. That Thrutopic root is really hard. Because capitalism, much as Trump seems to be trying to dismantle it in real time, if it crashes, it’s going to be bad. How do we make that transition in a way that keeps people alive? Is that a, is that a place that anyone that you meet is going to go?

Renée: Well, yes. I mean, I’m seeing it expressed in all kinds of ways, primarily through individuals who are able to give voice to their care and concern, um, and desire to want to change whether it’s in the fashion industry or the tech industry or in your community. I’m seeing this, this happening unfolding primarily in our realms or our spheres of influence. Like that’s the magic right there. And less about, you know, as much as I personally would like to change the world, I’m in touch with my, my own like heroic complex. You know, we, a lot of us have a hero complex, right. And it’s very natural because we’re all little children inside. All of us are the, the very small child who deeply, deeply cares about nature and the world and the soil. And, you know, I am still that little child that used to go to the creek and like collect whatever frogs and tadpoles. I am that child who would take dead bugs and bury them in the whatever. So all of us have that, that child is not gone. And I feel like that’s what we’re able to tap into is like, uh, our love, our care, and our desire to want to heal and make things better. Hmm. But that has to be connected with compassion, with empathy, and with skilfulness or what’s, what Buddhist called skilful mean, because a lot of

Manda: Say that last bit again.

Renée: Using skillful means to get things done because otherwise what we are doing instead. Is we’re going around just sort of radiating our fear and worry and all that and all, and all we’re doing is creating a lot of like, anxiety and worry and all this. So again, it comes back to how do we process some work with our own feelings, our own experience, get the support we need, whether it’s therapy or circle of friends or nature or whatever that is. But we need to find ways of continuously sort of metabolizing this work so that we can show up in the world as kind of, you know, present and clear as we possibly can.

Manda: Brilliant. Okay. We came quite close to answering the primary question of life, the universe and everything. And it sounds like you’re connecting with people who get this and who are listening to what you’re saying. If you were to project us five years forward. And if they’ll listen to what you’re saying. Have you got a sense of how we could be at a cultural level, I guess is what I’m aiming for?

Renée: Well, a lot more people, I think, would, uh, see themselves as included in part of a movement of caring for the planet and for the future. That doesn’t rely on identities of being an activist or an environmentalist or this or that, but we, we would see a much more diverse and inclusive approach to attending, to repairing, grieving, and cultivating new ways of being. I think we would see, you know, the so-called kind of environmental advocacy groups or nature advocacy become much more porous and diverse and less like, you know,

Manda: An elite group of particular thinkers who all think the same way.

Renée: Yeah. I have this phrase, Yell, Tell, and Sell. There’s, that’s kind of been the, the modality for many years is the yelling, selling and selling. And if you actually applied what we’re talking about, it would look so much more like listening, partnering, collaborating, you know, joining forces and yes, debating and arguing. And it’s not like I’m saying it’s all some fantasy, kumbaya, whatever, but I’m talking about like cultures of respect and reciprocity, as you said. But we’ve got to be able to confront some really dark stuff in our histories in our past, like we have to have the ability to do that or we can’t move forward. It’s just like the truth and reconciliation process in South Africa, which I know is far from perfect, be a very imperfect, but at least they made an attempt to create a process that allowed the culture to really like have that confrontation with the past. And unless we do that as a human species, you know, it’s hard for me to see a way forward.

Manda: Okay. It’s back to your concept of containers, which is now landing with me much better. I had a coach who said we need to set up a container, and I spent six months in coaching still not quite understanding what that was. So thank you. How I do setting up the space so that feels not like an assault on somebody’s core being.

Renée: Yes, exactly.

Manda: And that also requires a lot of self-awareness, doesn’t it?

Renée: Yeah. And humility.

Manda: Yeah. And connecting to the web of life because I, I would say once you’re an integral part of the web of life, one’s ego is less bound up with cultural identities that have to be defended. And that sense of defending a space, I feel as we’re, it feels to me that what you are talking about are the necessary steps towards an evolution of being and an evolution of consciousness. And that, that we have to evolve our consciousness. We’re going to get to somewhere that is capable of the reciprocity and the respect and the connection to the web of life. And it just chinking open the door a little bit. Allows for there to be more change than we could possibly imagine.

And I, I know that in my own life that’s the case with therapy is that where I think we’re going, where we actually get to are radically different places because what I was capable of imagining changes and evolves. And so I’m thinking again, in the spaces that you’re working in with the kind of levels of people that you’re working with, are you seeing that kind of awareness of potential shifting amongst the higher restaurants?

Renée: Yes. It’s yes, everyone’s becoming  more aware. The people and the leaders that I work with and who reach out to do work together absolutely see this and are doing whatever they can within their realms of influence and their spheres of influence to actually create a transformative culture in which people’s capacities and innate, you know, abilities are able to really come forward. Because again, that we have to just keep coming back to what are the conditions that really support and enable human ingenuity and creativity and care and love. We have to keep thinking about what are the conditions, right? And that’s a very different question than how do you get someone to care or not? We need to retire that question. Stop asking how to get or make people care.

Manda: Okay. That’s back to the yelling and the telling instead.

Renée: Really, it’s what are the conditions and when you feel your way into that question of what are the conditions, I think you’ll, you know, folks who try it will start to see, it will uncover and yield maybe some unexpected practices, interventions, experiments, and processes.

Manda: Okay. That’s sounding good and it’s sounding probably, Because what I’m thinking actually is this is the opposite of what’s happening in the administration of your country at the moment. If they had sat down and thought, what are the circumstances that, that minimize all of those things, that’s what they’re endeavouring to enact. But having that so clearly laid out then I’m fairly certain there is a majority of people, definitely a plurality of people and a tipping point of people who, who now are ready to ask the question of, okay, what are the circumstances? I think, how can we set the stage?

Renée: I think so. Yeah.

Manda: We hope so. Alrighty, so I would definitely like to talk to you again when your book is about to come out right between now, just as we’re closing, is there anything else that you wanted to say that we haven’t got to, that you feel would be useful for people?

Renée: Only to acknowledge that these kinds of conversations that we’re having are themselves creating sort of containers for processing sensemaking. So this, I hope so, very generative and really important to be having these conversations. So I want to acknowledge you in having this podcast and really opening up these, you know, these interactions with people is itself an expression of what we’re talking about. Thank you. Yeah. And I, and I want to encourage other people to consider, well, what can we do in our, you know, realms, whatever that is. To, you know, invite reflection and inquiry and humility. Okay. Um, and the final thing I would just say is that this is a time of humility. You know, there’s a quote I always introduce in my work, uh, by my colleague and friend, Amy Edmondson, where she says ‘It’s hard to learn if you already know’.

And I love invoking that because it is uncomfortable to be in that place of not knowing. And at the same time, what I also want to say, like really like affirm is there’s a lot we already, we do know, so we, we know quite a bit about humans and about human nature and about, you know, like we don’t need to do a lot more research on like what motivates people to want to make a change. We already know, right? But what we don’t know and where the humility has a place and how we apply that, how do we innovate? How do we see ourselves as innovators when it comes to change making?

Manda: Right. And how do we bring it into our culture such that these kinds of conversations become the norm instead of the exception. Because if this was happening, I don’t know, in in the soap operas on television, in the Marvel movies, in in David Attenborough, this level of conversation. Then it becomes accessible to everybody and then it becomes the way people are thinking. And our politics would, for instance, our whole governance system, our economy, our business, everything would change because people’s baselines would be different.

Renée: Absolutely. So let’s do it. Let’s scale it.

Manda: Absolutely. Yes. All right. That is a good place to end. So, Renée Lertzman, thank you so much for coming onto the Accidental Gods Podcast. I’m really looking forward to another conversation with you and probably about a year’s time.

Renée: Yeah. Thank you for inviting me.

Manda: There we go. That’s it for another week. Enormous thanks to Renée for everything that she’s doing out there in the world to help people become more emotionally literate, to help people to create the containers and attune to each other, to help people know that this is what we need to do. That simply frightening people into behavioural change is not going to work, and we have the tools that will work.

As you have gathered by now, I think this is critical. This is what we all need to be doing. And definitely when Renée’s new book comes out, whatever it’s called, we will invite her back onto the podcast and we will talk through this again, probably with a slightly different focus. But in the meantime, each of us can begin to do this work ourselves.

Renée has a load of resources on her websites. There are links in the show notes, reneelertzman.com and ProjectInsideout, (all one word) .net. I’ve also put a link to her TED talk, which is well worth a listen. But even with just this podcast, you can begin to explore how to create containers. You can think about how to attune, reveal, convene, equip, sustain, do these things with all your communities of place, of passion and of purpose.

This is what we talk about all of the time. But here with Renée, we are being given building blocks and each of us can pick them up and use them. And I think each of us needs to pick them up and use them. So that’s your homework for this week people, even just picking one of these and beginning to explore how you can bring it into your various communities, that would be a start. Nobody is suggesting this is easy. It’s not trivial. It is essential. So go for it and we’ll be back next week with another conversation. In the meantime, thanks to Caro C for the music at the head and foot, to Alan Lowels of Airtight Studios for the production, to Lou Mayor for the video and this week for the transcript, to Faith Tillary for the website and the tech, and for picking up all of the outside work around the small holding when I wasn’t well, I am beyond grateful – thank you. And as ever, an enormous thanks to you for listening. If you know of anybody else at any level of any of your communities that wants to know what we need to do to get ourselves through the existing pinch point, then please do send them this link. And while we are here, if you feel like giving us five stars and a review on the podcast platform of your choice, that’s always enormously appreciated.

And that’s it for now. See you next week. Thank you, and goodbye.

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