The Three As
We have a shorthand for applying attunement to ourselves and each other, to support the mindset needed to advance our work today.
To go deeper in attunement, we use the Three As as a way to support coming to a new mindset. That shorthand focuses on naming some of the things that keep us overwhelmed in the face of crisis.
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Renee landed on the Three As while teaching a university class several years ago about the psychology of climate change. On reading the journal accounts about their encounter with the issues, she realized there was a consistent pattern: acute anxiety about the scale and nature of the issues, ambivilence and dilemmas about how to respond and making different choices about how we live, and aspirations to live in alignment with our deepest values and to be part of the solution, not the problem. She distilled this into a code to help us unlock inaction, paralysis, apathy, and resistance to change.
She discovered these three aspects of our encounter with the crises, when called out, can help any of us working on these issues tune into ourselves and each other. When applied across our insight gathering, strategies, messaging, and approaches, they serve as a tool to ensure we can be as attuned and empathetic as possible. Understanding and working with these Three As supercharges our work. They help us navigate people’s felt experience, and move us from a focus on how do we get people to care to how can we partner and enable and support people to move through these Three As? Are we suggesting that we all do in-depth therapy with each person to resolve their Three As? No. While we experience these things subjectively, this is not only about our individual personal psychologies.
The Three As play out at social, cultural, political, and organizational levels.
When we acknowledge and meet the full range of the Three As with curiosity and compassion—when we attune—in our messaging, leadership, strategies and campaigns, it helps soften the tangles and defenses many people get wound up in. This includes the tendency for many people to have shame, guilt, and remorse, all of which are natural and normal responses to have. These feelings are often the greatest barriers to engaging people on climate and sustainability. Even if you have an upbeat message, these feelings are likely under the surface. And will remain there, impeding our natural concern for our world, unless they are understood, met, acknowledged, and engaged– as we address in our Guiding Principle, reveal.