On with it.

It's always hard to locate, you know, an origin story because life unfolds, you know, often in mysterious ways.

But if I had to pick a time and place, it would be as a young person in my late teens.

I was already very kind of obsessed with psychology.

So I was reading, it was pretty much most of what I was reading.

I was already seeing a psychotherapist privately.

You know, I got myself into therapy when I was 15 in high school.

I, I feel that frustration too, and I, I, I do wonder if that's how, there's a problem with how we define what even the problem is in the first place.

when you think about the three A's, like what do those words mean in this context? And what do they mean specifically for changemakers?

So the three A's is a really simple framework that I came up with.

early in my consultancy when I had just left academia after like 15 years of academic research and, you know, doing papers and all this stuff.

And I realized that if I really wanted to work with practitioners, I needed to like bring it into something more applied.

And so the story of the three A's comes out of when I was teaching my last professorial role at Portland State.

I was teaching a class on the psychology of climate change and I had people keep a journal.

of just what are they seeing in their life? Like it was almost like a sensitizing journal, like just notice what are you seeing about climate change, you know, and how does it make you feel kind of thing.

How do you see control showing up for those of us who do this work?

What brought you to bring the world of psychology together with the world of climate or environment or sustainability or however you want to frame that?

I mean, basically my experience is that the separation of climate change, environment, biodiversity, like anything regarding the planet and our relationship with the planet and what we've done to the planet and how we repair the planet, all that is fundamentally about how humans behave and process and relate and all these things.

So I don't understand the separation.

But going back to, for me, the origin was really in the late 1980s, 19, 20 years old.

And I was very identified as being a psychologist because I had loved psychology, you know, in high school.

I had actually already been seeing a psychotherapist.

I had benefited a lot from psychology.

What is the myth of apathy? And, um, you know, where, uh, that was work that you did in the past, but are you, is that still sort of rippling out for you, and you still finding that to be a relevant critique?

What is the gap?

I just want to acknowledge how very special it is to have this conversation with the insights from the community because I feel like in a way it's simulating a conversation, which is a- actually a theme of what I think we're gonna be talking about, which is seeing our work through the lens of conversation and through the lens of relationship.

So this theme around the gap, it's pervasive.

So basically I just wanna step back and say in my experience, most people experience themselves as sort of isolated or alone with the work, and I think that's a reflection of where we are socially and culturally, which is that you may go-- You may have had an experience of really getting how urgent the issues are.

But many of us are still surrounded and embedded in relationships, whether that's work culture, organizations, family, or community, where people are not necessarily on that same track.

And what it can do is it can induce an incredible sense of disorientation, isolation, where you feel like, "Is it just me? Is it like, what's up?" And that's just I think where we are in our, the evolution of doing this work.

There's a famous Aldo Leopold quote which is to, "The price of a ecological education is to live in a world of wounds, to live alone in a world of wounds," which is to say that it can feel like you're living alone in that world of wounds.

Tell us a bit, a bit more about that phrase and if the educating, persuading, making formula, if that actually works.