National Emergency Briefing – ‘Humanise’

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Below is a link to download a couple of free chapters from my book ‘Humanise – how knowing ourselves can change the world‘.

Humanise is a popular psychology book that reveals the latest understanding about how human beings think and behave, and shows how we could use this knowledge to tackle some of our biggest challenges, from obesity to violence to climate change, and build a better future for people and our planet.

These chapters from the book are useful companion pieces to the National Emergency Briefing, as they explore some of the aspects of human thinking and behaviour that make climate change such a thorny problem for human beings to address, as well as setting out the most effective ways we might tackle it, given the creatures we really are.

>Download the free chapters here – Humanise – climate chapters for Kingston 12 11 26<

If you found the chapters interesting, you can buy the book here or at most good bookshops!

All the best,

Richard

Job opportunity – Business & Content Coordinator

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Freelance | Part-time | Flexible | Lewes, East Sussex

Interested in people, ideas and making the world a better place? Enjoy making things happen? This could be the role for you.

I’m looking for a creative, organised and digitally confident person to help me grow my coaching, consultancy and training business.

My work explores how we can help people, organisations and society flourish. It brings together coaching, psychology, philosophy and social change, with the aim of helping people navigate modern life, find greater meaning and create positive change.

I produce podcasts, write and share resources, run events and programmes, and work with individuals and organisations. I have lots of ideas and projects I want to develop — and I need someone who can help turn them into reality.

This role is a chance to help build something meaningful and get ideas out into the world that could make a real difference.

 

What would you be doing?

  • 🎙️ Helping edit, film, publish and promote podcasts and videos.
  • 💡 Turning ideas and existing content into engaging social media posts, short videos and newsletters.
  • 🌐 Updating my website and creating engaging pages for projects, programmes and resources.
  • 📅 Setting up online and in-person events, workshops and courses.
  • ✅ Helping with administration, organisation and the practical details that keep the business running.
  • 🚀 Bringing your own ideas about how to improve things and help the work reach more people.

Who might you be?

You could be a freelancer looking for another interesting client, a virtual assistant with creative skills, a recent graduate, or someone with experience who wants flexible part-time work.

You don’t need to be an expert in everything. What matters most is that you’re organised, proactive, comfortable with digital tools and enjoy getting things done.

Experience with social media, video editing, websites or event organisation would be a bonus.

An interest in people, psychology, personal development, learning or social change would make this especially rewarding.

The practical details

  • Rate: £20 per hour.
  • Hours: Up to 6 hours per week initially, with flexibility over how the hours are organised.
  • Location: Flexible remote working, with regular (at least fortnightly) in-person filming or events in or around Lewes, East Sussex.
  • Arrangement: Freelance, with the opportunity to develop the role as the business grows.

I’m looking for someone who can make a real difference within a small number of hours, take ownership of agreed tasks and help me focus more of my time on coaching, creating and developing the business.

More information

Click here to read a more detailed Job Description.

Interested?

I’d love to hear from you. Send me a message about yourself, the skills you could bring and why the opportunity appeals to you. Also, please include an up-to-date CV. Examples of previous work would be very welcome.

Please email me at info@richarddocwra.com.

And if you know someone who might be a great fit, please pass this on!

 

Doing good without burning out – session notes

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Hello!

Thanks for coming to my session at the CEE Fundraising conference – it was great to see you there and I hope it was useful for you.

As promised, I’ve put together some exclusive resources to help you take the insights from the day and turn them into action.

1. Session Slides and Bonus Materials

2. Don’t let the momentum stop here!

Every month, I share an email newsletter with some deep, practical insights designed to help professionals like you in navigating the challenges of work and life.

Join hundreds of other people who receive it – just sign up here – <CLICK HERE TO SIGN UP>

3. Taking things further – coaching and training

If you’d like to partner with me to get some meaningful, ongoing support in navigating work, life, or both, I would be very happy to talk to you about:

  • 1:1 coaching – either to deal with a specific challenge or to provide ongoing support in work and life
  • Courses, training and workshops – to help you, or your team, deal with anything from leadership to managing stress to planning your next career steps. Or even fundraising topics like how to raise funds for difficult causes.

<CLICK HERE to book your free Discovery Call with me to chat through the possibilities!>

Let’s discuss where you are, where you want to go, and how I can help you.

Exclusive Offer – because you invested your time into today’s conference, I’d be happy to offer you an exclusive 10% discount on my coaching packages if you book your coaching by the end of this month (30th October).

4. Stay in touch!

If you have any questions or would like to find out more how I can help you personally or your team, please just email me at rdocwra@hotmail.com.

All the best,

Richard

Humanise in 5 points

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My new book ‘Humanise’ contains a rich set of insights about human beings, the challenges we face and how we can build a better world. Below is a very short summary of 5 key points to help open it up so you can see what’s inside:

  1. We need to understand human beings better in order to change the world. You can’t solve human problems effectively without understanding human beings accurately first.
  2. Most people – including our leaders and policy makers – have an inaccurate view of how human beings think and behave. We are not the rational, self-determined individuals most of us think we are. This inaccurate view of human beings leads us to set unrealistic expectations for ourselves, build societies that actually harm us, and struggle to solve the problems facing our species.
  3. Human beings are LASID creatures. Human thinking and behaviour can be summed up in a 5-point model, built from the latest psychological evidence – we are limited, adapted, simplifying, influenced and deceived. We evolved to think in particular ways that can lead to biases, inaccuracies and less socially useful traits, and are highly sensitive to our situation and cues from our social environment.
  4. We haven’t evolved to live in the modern world. Instead, our thinking and behaviour evolved to help us survive and flourish in the hunter-gatherer societies of small tribes that our ancestors lived in for most of human history, up to only 12,000 years ago. Yet the world we live in now has completely transformed in this relatively short time, so we are struggling in the modern world, which has become hostile to human flourishing, as LASID creatures.
  5. We need to humanise the world. To build a world in which human beings can flourish as the LASID creatures we are, within the parameters of the one planet we have, we need to give people the conditions they need to be the rational, healthy, cooperative creatures we want and need to be. This includes giving everyone access to basic resources they need for dignified, self-determined lives, protecting rather than exploiting their cognitive vulnerabilities, dialling down their tendencies towards tribalism and activating their capacity for cooperation. We therefore need to have a radical re-imagining of the structures, ideas and institutions that surround us in our daily lives – including banning manipulative advertising, making information useful for people and building better local facilities for everyone.

Buy the book here now!

Click on this link to hear me talk about the book on my podcast series ‘Humans & Hope’

 

Building a world fit for humans

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Our understanding how human beings think and behave is one of the most important tools we have available to make our world and our lives better. Yet, we are failing to use this knowledge.

A couple of decades ago, psychology was released into the real world in a discipline that has become known as ‘Behavioural Economics’, in which pychological knowledge is used to nudge, prod and cajole people into specifc actions. This is sometimes used to achieve behaviour change on important topics – for example the United Nations produced a report in 2021 showing how behavioural science can be used to help achieve its Sustainable Development Goals. In other cases, it is used for commercial purposes – for example, to help design the layout of supermarkets so that customers will buy more products.

There is a growing industry of consultants and agencies offering their services to help clients harness human behaviour to achieve their aims – whatever they are.

It’s no surprise that psychology is being used for commercial purposes as well as laudable humanitarian ones, as it’s a powerful tool. What is surprising to me however is that we only seem to be using it at a micro level – to gain detailed changes in individual human beings – and only very rarely to explore the bigger picture, of society, politics and our future.

It may simply be because behavioural economics is the most useful tool immediately from a commercial perspective, so this is where the money has gone. But there are significant ways we can rethink and improve the world if we applied our understanding of human beings to the systems, ideas and institutions that govern us.

Our knowledge of how human beings think and behave has dramatically increased in the last 80 years, as advances in knowledge and a desire to understand the horrors of the Second World War accellerated research into how and why we behave as we do.

Despite these advances in understanding, most people, including those who are writing our economic policies, building our instititions and setting our pollitical and social visions, still have an old-fashioned and innacurate view of human beings – one that can be traced back to the Enlightenment, over 200 years ago. It is the picture of human beings as ‘rational calculating machines’ – creatures that make balanced, informed decisions on the information available to them. The reality is far from this however, and a great deal more complex.

We are creatures with a range of mental and behavioural adaptations to help us simplify the world, pass our genes on, live in tribes and function in the environment that our hunter-gather ancestors lived in up to 12,000 years ago. As a result, we are not rational calculating machines – we are much more complex than this. Our particular thinking and behavioural traits have enabled us to build our population to 8 billion people on this planet that live relatively peacefully together.

As creatures evolved for a hunter-gatherer existence and environment however, we can find it difficult to adapt to the challenges and expectations we face in the twenty-first century world we have created – from the need for global co-operation on existential issues such as climate change, through to the need to deal with massive levels of information and lifestyle choices.

We expect ourselves to overcome these challenges, and we tend to label people as stupid or evil if they fail to do so. Yet we are living within systems and institutions (political, economic, social and many others) that have been built based on the incorrect ‘rational calculating machine’ view of human beings. And some have been built on other aims than helping human beings to flourish in a finite world. This means, in some cases, we are using tools sucha as behavioural economics to actually exploit our mental vulnerabilities, rather than helping to protect them to enable human beings to flourish. Why would we set up supermarkets to ‘nudge’ people to buy more unhealthy food otherwise?

Our knowledge about human beings could help us redesign the world and our lives in a way that is suitable for the creatures we really are – and with the aim of helping human beings to flourish within the parameters of our planet. From systems that promote greater international co-operation through to mass communication methods that don’t incentivise hate and division. But our challenges are urgent, so we need to get on to this job now – and encourage those who are applying psychology to the ‘real world’ to think big, and use it to challenge the systems and ideas that govern us.

It’s time to unleash the full power of psychology to create a better future for human beings and the planet.

Reflections on human beings

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We are a number of episodes into ‘Humans & Hope’, my podcast series about human beings and the challenges and expectations we face. This feels like a good time to reflect upon some of the key themes that have been appearing regularly in the episodes so far.

A central issue issue is that human thinking and behaviour has evolved to live in small tribes (of up to 150 people) – the sort of hunter-gatherer societies that we had for most of our history as a species, until about 5,000 years ago when they transformed into agrarian societies, bringing ever-larger groups of people together, based in villages, towns and eventually, cities.

This transformation of human lives has accelerated at an even greater pace over the last 200 years, leaving us in a complex modern world where there are 8 billion people on the planet, linked together by global trade, travel and communications. The things we do in our own small lives affect a much wider range of people (and environment and world) than they did when we lived in tribes 5,000 years ago. Each of us is also part of many different tribes at the same time (for example, football supporter, Christian, member of a political party, citizen of a nation etc).

Some of the key problems we face (such as climate change) and the expectations we have of ourselves (such as achieving global peace and co-operation) require us to extend our ‘radius of concern’ (or ‘moral circle’) beyond our immediate surroundings and our tribe of 150 people, and to the whole world. We face some common problems that transcend all our other tribes to involve our one human tribe.

In short, our thinking and behaviour as human beings has evolved for a completely different world and life from the one that we are currently in, with all its pressures, challenges and expectations – and all taking place way beyond one single, small tribe. And this simple point presents us with enormous challenges as human beings.

This requires us to radically change how we think and behave. In the tribal societies that we evolved for, we were able to live pretty well based on our instinctive feelings – our ‘automatic settings’. But, to meet many of the challenges and expectations that we commonly set ourselves in the modern world (including reducing inequality, building better relationships and tackling climate change) we have to go beyond this automatic, instinctive thinking and behaviour and switch to our ‘manual’ mode of rational thinking and behaviour.

Switching to this ‘manual’ mode requires us to put in a lot more cognitive effort – something we are instinctively not always keen to do. It may sometimes also conflict with what our instincts and feelings are telling us – and this can be hard to overcome. For example, your instincts telling you to eat that doughnut (to get the calories needed for survival), whilst your ‘manual’ mode telling you not to eat it, as there is an abundance of food around you in the modern world and eating it would leave you with too many calories for your health.

In short, it’s not easy to make this switch to ‘manual mode’, and it’s not clear whether we can do it consistently and on an ongoing basis as a species – hence our questions in the podcast as to whether achieving our modern challenges and expectations as human beings (from solving climate change to tackling hate and prejudice) is possible.

The other (significant) complication is that, as we move towards more ‘manual mode’ thinking, the answers of what we should do and how we should behave are not as clear as they are in ‘automatic’ mode, where our feelings and instincts give us very strong guidance – often accompanied by physiological nudges, like pain, hunger and arousal. In ‘manual’ mode, the question of what to do is often arbitrary and people can disagree vehemently on the answers – from politics to religion to moral questions.

One thing’s for sure – we’ll need to give ourselves all the help we can if we are to successfully make these ongoing changes in our thinking and behaviour. I’ll explore these in more detail in a later publication, but some ways we could do this include:

  • Educating everyone about what human beings are really like as creatures. By understanding ourselves better we can help ourselves to meet our challenges and expectations, both as individuals and a species. It could be said we need another Enlightenment, in which we all develop a more modern view of human beings.
  • Trying to activate what the psychologist Jonathan Haidt calls ‘hive mind’ behaviours – those that help each of us to transcend our individuality and feel part of something bigger with our fellow human beings.
  • Trying to ‘outsource’ some of our rational, manual choices to make them effectively automatic, when they’re not automatic within us – to take the cognitive burden away from us.
  • Using our new, more accurate picture of human beings to build ideas, institutions and societies that will help us to thrive, given the creatures we really are. This may mean a radical rethink of many areas of our lives – including those areas (such as advertising) that currently seek to exploit rather than protect our vulnerabilities. There are big questions to be asked here – about the society we should have, given the creatures we really are, and about whether we are prepared to build a society based on flourishing for all humans, rather than just some.

Next episodes

Naturally, these issues will come up in some of the future episodes of the podcast as they are central to many of the challenges and expectations we face as human beings. We will also directly tackle the overall question of where we’ve got to as creatures – indeed, one episode is simply called ‘can human beings cope with the modern world?’.

As always, our focus will not only be on understanding human beings and the challenges we face but also on considering how we can harness our thinking, behaviour and capacities as creatures to address them as effectively as possible.

I am particularly keen to explore the broader question of how we can build better societies, institutions and ideas that take into account the creatures we really are, and help us to flourish, within the parameters of the one planet we have.

100 places that changed the world

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Here’s a new idea rather than a new, fully formed initiative – putting it out there to see if people would find it interesting.

There are hundreds of places and sites around the world that have an amazing story to tell – from the Trinity site in the Nevada desert where the first atomic bomb was exploded in 1945 to the Chicxulub crater   underneath the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico that is believed to be the impact site of the asteroid that caused the extinction of the dinosaurs.

I think telling the stories of what happened at these places is a fascinating and different way of exploring events and ideas in history, and would make a great book, blog and/or podcast series. Before I go to the work of starting to put something together it would be great to hear if it was of interest to people – please drop me a line on the contact email address on this site to let me know!

Thanks and all the best, Richard

Seeing through the fog

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We’re living in a time when it’s increasingly difficult to tell fact from fiction, discern a real news story from a PR puff piece, understand what a politician is really trying to say, escape from the influence of advertising or work out how to manage our kids’ lives online.

We’re surrounded by hot air, interest groups, information and influence everywhere and it can feel overwhelming. Everyone’s talking at you, trying to influence you, and yet no-one is helping to lead us through this fog, so that we can deal with this stuff and live well-informed, flourishing lives.

One of the reasons I set up the not-for-profit Life Squared was to help people deal with these issues – as no-one else helping them to do so, including the present education system. The modern world has created a unique set of pressures on people that human beings haven’t faced before. Life Squared helps people to understand what these pressures are, deal with them better and then live the lives that they really want.

A couple of good starting points in their (free) resources to help people understand these pressures are:

The Life Trap – and how to escape it

The modern life survival guide

Do get in touch with me if you’d like to find out more about how Life Squared could help.

The Life Trap – coming soon

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I’ve just completed a booklet for Life Squared that has turned into a book!  It’s a piece of work that I’ve been putting off for years as I knew it would be large and complex, but I’m delighted to have finished it as I think it’s a critical issue, yet one that hasn’t been exposed in any significant way to date.

It’s called ‘The Life Trap – and how to escape it’. Or – ‘how to think for yourself’. Here’s a brief summary.

You may not know it, but you’re probably caught in the Life Trap.

You live in a complex world where you are bombarded daily with a wide range of powerful messages and influences, but at no point in your life have you been given the skills or tools you need to manage this assault on your mind.

As a result, you have ended up caught in a trap, like most of us in the modern world – with worldviews, values and lives that are stifled and restricted, only following the path that we’ve been led down by the dominant ideas of the people and society we’ve grown up in. As a consequence, you pursue career achievement and material success, worry about what other people think of you and lead a busy, distracted life. Your life feels meaningless and isolated yet you find it hard to stop, take control and change it.

This book explores what causes the Life Trap and why it matters so much – not just for our own lives but for society as a whole.

You will find out how to escape the Life Trap – as well as how we can change our education system, politics and other areas of society to give everyone the best chance of independent, fulfilled lives, and build a peaceful and civilised society.

The book will be free to download from the Life Squared website in the next few weeks. More news as soon as it’s published!

 

 

 

The future of the left

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In the current political climate, I’ve not been surprised to see a particular question raised more than once – namely, does a proper left wing movement/party stand a chance in Britain? I’ve seen articles saying it doesn’t, and arguing that no really left wing party has held power since the early 70s.

So, is Britain just a bit right wing/centrist, and destined to remain on that track?

It’s certainly a more difficult battle to fight now, given the erosion of tribal politics where people were ‘Labour’ voters for generations, the massive bias of the establishment, media and powerful towards the right (and, at the same time – although not tautologically – aggressively against the left) and the continuing growth in influence of wealthy and powerful interest groups since being unshackled following the rise of neoliberalism in the 1970s.

So, it’s true to say that the progressive left is fighting a trickier battle than ever, but it should never stop trying to get people behind the vision of the future and values it believes in – a) because, in my view, they’re the most humane vision of how society should be and also b) because if history has taught us anything, it’s that no political situation is permanent. Commentators such as Peter Hitchens are therefore spouting nonsense when they espouse (out of hope rather than evidence) that there’s no chance of left wing electoral success and, essentially, that left wing progressive parties should abandon their cause.

I therefore have no time for politicians who seem to share these progressive values yet cosy up to neoliberalism not because they believe in it but out of so-called ‘pragmatism’ – because they think it’s the only way to get power. This philosophy of neoliberalism is fundamentally broken and inhumane – so we have to oppose it and put forward something different – even if it’s not the most popular view at the moment, given the political environment we’re in. So we should be faithful to the vision we care about and stay committed to moving towards it.

If it is to improve its position, the left also needs to get a whole lot better at articulating its vision of the future and its values in a way that resonates with people, not using the abstract and politically-loaded language it’s so accustomed to using but that means so little to people. Forget ‘social justice’ – talk about ‘jobs for everyone’.

A new progressive movement needs to meet the public on the issues that matter to them rather than judging them negatively for the things they care about, and talk to people in a way that resonates with them. It needs to show that its solution is the best one for their problems – but not change its principles entirely in order to gain power. The language it uses and the focus it takes (i.e. it needs to take the focus of the vote) is vital to its ability to succeed – and it’s been dreadful at this up to now.

I’m currently working with some progressive political entities to help them put together a more powerful and engaging vision of a progressive future, and I’ll aim to share some of this here soon, as well as some of the thinking behind why we’ve chosen to present the vision in this way.

A quick postscript – I long for a future in which we ditch the nomenclature of ‘left’ and ‘right, as these labels are laden with history, meaning and past tragedies and successes that can be employed in an almost infinite range of ways to inflict damage on the ideas coming from them in the present, and therefore obscure all useful debate and passing on of new ideas. Instead, let’s discuss how parties and policies are – in other words, judge them by the values and vision of society they espouse.