Have you watched Don’t Look Up, Netflix’s metaphorical story about the climate emergency? How are you feeling about the climate crisis? Claudia Truesdell is a climate leader helping people come to grips with their feelings about climate change and providing guidance that helps them translate their feelings into action. In this interview, she shares how her own feelings led her on a journey to acting and leading on addressing humanity’s biggest challenge.
[Video Transcript]
Matt Schlegel:
Thanks for joining me in conversations with highly self-aware leaders. Today, we’ll be speaking with Claudia Truesdell. Claudia is a leader in fighting climate change, and she shares how she uses feelings for both inspiration and action. Now for the conversation.
Matt Schlegel:
Today, we’re speaking with Claudia Truesdell. Claudia is a leader on climate. She organizes in her community to bring awareness to the importance of fighting climate change, and she shows how people in her community can participate in that fight. She’s a mechanical engineering alumna from Stanford University, and she continues to engage Stanford students in her organizing. She also hosts a Climate Cafe meetup group in which participants share how they’re feeling about climate change. Welcome, Claudia.
Claudia Truesdell:
Thank you, Matt. Yeah, so nice to be here. Thanks for inviting me to talk to you today. I’m delighted.
Matt Schlegel:
Yeah, that’s great. I’m really looking forward to it. Why don’t we start there? Let me ask you how you are feeling about climate change?
Claudia Truesdell:
Forgive my dog. I’m sorry about that.
Matt Schlegel:
No problem.
Claudia Truesdell:
Okay. I feel worried daily. I feel anxious. I feel upset. I feel annoyed and frustrated, and I have been for a long time. This has been going on for years and quite a puzzle to me. A few years ago, I realized that even though I was feeling all these feelings, I wasn’t acting on them, and that was such a confusion to me. How could I feel these things so intently and not be dealing with the problem?
Claudia Truesdell:
Surprisingly enough, somehow, acting on the problem has made me feel not better about climate change, but better about myself and how I’m showing up in the climate struggle. It’s been immensely helpful to be active, just for my psychological wellbeing and self. So while I am still all of those things I listed earlier, I’m also much more hopeful, partly because I’m hopeful in my own ability to start acting, and it gives me hope for other people.
Claudia Truesdell:
And then, also, through this, I’ve met so many amazing people who are active and working to change, including yourself. So that part, finding the community of people working for the change, has been immensely helpful to my outlook and just my mental health.
Matt Schlegel:
Wow. Yeah. That’s very powerful. Claudia, thank you for sharing those feelings about your relationship with climate change and how that’s impacting you. I’d like to understand better how those feelings are, essentially, influencing your behaviors as a leader and how that’s influencing your direction now.
Claudia Truesdell:
That’s a great question. I’m really cognizant that there are many people out there who are equally as desperate and frustrated and worried as I am, and who are also not yet acting. I have just a firm resolution that there are these barriers, and I’ve been working to try to figure out how to remove the barriers in my work.
Claudia Truesdell:
You mentioned the Climate Cafes, and that’s an idea that came to me through the Climate Psychology Alliance. You can look them up, they’re a UK group, and there’s also Northern America Climate Psychology Alliance group, too. One of the things that they believe is that all of these feelings that we have that are so big and overwhelming, actually are in the way of us acting. They are barriers to us taking action. Because, in order to take action and to think about what we need to do and what needs to happen, we need to let in all those huge emotions, and it’s just so uncomfortable and so hard to do that, especially if the people around you are not really wanting to have that conversation yet for their own reasons, for those same reasons, actually. So, to do all that work that you need to do in order to squarely face the problem, it’s yucky and difficult.
Claudia Truesdell:
You and I actually talked recently about these kind of bouts of climate grief that are so sad, and it’s hard to do that outside of community. One of the things I’m doing is trying to form that supportive place that people can process those emotions, sit with that grief, and be heard and hear other people. We don’t talk about action in those meetings, but the goal is to get people ready to act after they’ve faced all of that. To get them to clear it, in a way, and then be able to move forward. That’s one of the ways that my having been so stuck and frustrated, not only with the situation, but with myself, is shaping what I do in my climate work.
Matt Schlegel:
That’s amazing. That is an amazing story. Thank you for doing that. You have now transitioned from those feelings into taking action, and I imagine that there are other people similarly situated that are also kind of on the cusp of doing that. What advice would you give to them at this point, in that transition, in that journey?
Claudia Truesdell:
My advice is to bring your full self to it. Bring who you are to the problem. I think one of the reasons that I took so long to act is that I didn’t see a place for myself in the big climate organizations. I wasn’t terribly comfortable going out with the signs and the protesting and possibly getting arrested, and I wasn’t that comfortable kind of writing letters to my Congresspeople. All of those kind of typical ways of acting are really powerful and really good, but even if you eventually do them, it takes a while to get there. I’ve really been trying to bring myself to this and to act in ways that are really true to myself, and also to use my network and the people in my world to bring to bear on this problem.
Claudia Truesdell:
You mentioned in your intro that I went to Stanford, and I have a relationship with that community. One of the things that I’m so looking forward to next year is we’re going to be doing a survey of transportation in Palo Alto, kind of people’s attitudes, kind of these deep ethnographic interviews around attitudes towards carbon-free transportation.
Matt Schlegel:
Wow. That’s amazing. That is amazing. You’re channeling-
Claudia Truesdell:
I won’t go into it too deeply, but I just want to point out that that is another piece of advice about bringing your whole self is also bringing your network and your interests.
Matt Schlegel:
Right.
Claudia Truesdell:
So acting through your beliefs-
Matt Schlegel:
You’re tapping into all of your networks and then channeling that into action in a situationally aware way to influence the other people in your network to also start taking action.
Claudia Truesdell:
Yeah. To influence them. Also, because you’re going to bring a unique perspective and unique ideas. It’s such a big problem that we all need to work on it, and we need all of the approaches. There’s not one best approach. We need all of them.
Matt Schlegel:
We need all of them. Yep.
Claudia Truesdell:
Yeah. You’ve got to bring yours. Bring it.
Matt Schlegel:
That’s perfect. We’ll end it here, but I feel like we’re just scratching the surface on this conversation, and I would love to have you come back and share more about some of the experiences that you’re having. Maybe when you have engaged the students more on that project, you could come back and give us an update and share more about how feelings and leadership and all of that are playing into approaching and attacking this big problem that we’re all facing.
Claudia Truesdell:
Oh, thank you. I’d love to. That would be great.
Matt Schlegel:
All right. Well, thanks again, Claudia. I really appreciate you sharing your experiences and your stories today.
Claudia Truesdell:
Thank you, Matt. Thank you so much for doing this work that you’re doing and bringing these stories out. I can’t wait to listen to your series and learn about what everyone else is doing. I’m so excited for it. Thank you.
Matt Schlegel:
All right. Thank you.
Matt Schlegel:
Thanks again for watching. I really found Claudia’s story very powerful about coming to grips with her own feelings, processing them, and then using those for inspiration and action, and how she went through that transition and got to a point where she felt like she could bring her whole self to contributing to solving the big problem that she’s trying to tackle, climate change. The advice that she’s giving for other leaders is to bring your whole self to the problem, and that includes feelings as well as your inspiration, your thoughts and your actions. She’s bringing all three of those, and that’s really important for showing leadership in any situation.
Matt Schlegel:
If you found this helpful, please click on the thumbs up button, subscribe to the channel and get notifications of future episodes. If you have any questions, leave them in comments, and I’ll get to them as soon as possible. Thanks again, so much, for watching.
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