In my last post, I wrote about recognizing and reclaiming power over your career choices. But I couldn’t stop thinking about the courage it takes to make hard choices - especially before you know whether they’ll be successful or not. So when I saw my friend Simon Donner post an instagram video of his climate policy talk “The Scientific Case for Courage,” I asked him to tell me more. Here’s an artistic rendering of our delightful conversation, with liberal editing and commentary.

You say at the  top of your talk that you asked to change the title from a ‘‘case for optimism’ to a ‘case for courage’. Why is that difference meaningful? 

My colleague and good friend, Kathy Harrison, and I are both Canadian climate people. We are interviewed frequently and every interviewer asks us this question: “Despite everything you know about climate change, how do you maintain your optimism?” We think it’s the wrong question. It really is not about how we feel, but whether we have the courage to act, despite uncertainty about the outcome.

But let me give you a little bit of the backstory. That talk on the scientific case for courage was for a national conference and they had asked me to give a keynote in the middle of it. Everything else was panels and all planned in advance. They knew the questions, they knew what people were going to say. My keynote is the only wildcard. I’m the only one who knows what’s in it. I guess they thought, well, Simon will be fun, right? 

So I arrived in Ottawa, and I hear something about a teleprompter, and I’m like, ‘What? They don’t even have the notes from my talk’. And then we are told there is going to be a surprise guest at our conference. And the surprise guest was the Prime Minister, Justin Trudeau. 

I can't believe that no one told me that I'm speaking from a teleprompter and then the Prime Minister is coming up on stage shortly after! I was so intimidated. But what are you going to do?

What Simon was going to do was to give a new talk, for the first time, using a teleprompter, for the first time, and to be followed that day by his Prime Minister… No big deal.

I spent the evening until like midnight, just freaked out in my hotel room, thinking, “I don't know that I can do this.” But I just had to do it. And that’s the thing, once you start acting, you start feeling better. All of the nervousness just goes away because once you're in the arena, you're in the arena. 

And this is the thing, right?  I think people make the mistake of concluding that action comes from feeling. Rather than feeling comes from action. We all know this in our daily lives. You can have a bad day, but if you just get yourself out of the house, start doing something, you start noticing you're feeling a little better.

I remember once hearing a psychologist talk about the idea that if you're struggling with something that you really need to do, but it takes you to a dark place, you don't want to spend all your time there, but you don't want to pretend it isn't there either.

So there's a pit in front of you. You could jump over the pit. That's risky. You might fall in it. You could go ahead and climb down into it. That's risky as well. Or you could just walk around it and say, I see the pit is here. I recognize the pit is here. I'm just going to go past for now. But you're not denying that it’s dangerous.

So we make choices about our lives. We take actions. But I don't pretend to myself that suddenly I'm confident or whatever.

So it’s not about ‘faking it until you make it’, but more about making choices and taking action. It makes me think about pop culture, and how we portray heroic choices. I ask Simon about this assumption that you're either a courageous person or you're not, as if it’s a fixed trait, but you won’t know until you’re in the heat of the moment. 

Yeah. Look. I was a shy kid. I was not small, but on the smaller side. I was not strong. I was nervous about trying things. But I wanted to have experiences and adventures in the world, so I decided I was going to do them anyway. I do all sorts of adventure sports now [skiing, surfing, windsurfing] They are not things that I was raised or trained how to do–like, I didn't grow up in a family for whom this was a thing. And you would assume that the fact that I learned how to windsurf 35 years ago would mean I'm confident when I'm on the water. But, no, I'm petrified. And that's why I do it.

There are all sorts of people we look at, folks we know, folks we look up to, folks we see in the media, who we think of as courageous. But then when you hear them talk about it, honestly, they were scared. I learned that you don't have to be confident. You just have to do it. 

Part of what is so fun about conversations like this one is just getting to ask a friend why they do what they do. I’m probably never going to be a windsurfer, but I think it’s cool that Simon is, and because of the way he talks about it, I’m open to the idea of trying it now in a way I wasn’t before we talked. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?

I think courage is practical. It comes from doing something even though you're not confident you'll be successful, to me that's the critical piece. We need the guts to imagine that the future could be different than it seems like it's going to be.