What is stevepavlina.com doing on a climate crisis website?

Stevepavlina.com is a personal growth website. Briangordon.ca rallies people to action on the climate crisis. What on Earth is the former doing in my list of frequently-read blogs?

You might think it’s because I’m a personal growth junkie, and you would be partially correct. I have read literally hundreds of self-improvement books. Anthony Robbins’ Awaken the Giant Within : How to Take Immediate Control of Your Mental, Emotional, Physical and Financial Destiny! and Unlimited Power are still on my bookshelf after many years, full of Post-Its marking ideas that moved me when I read them. I actually attended a Robbins seminar over 15 years ago, driving to Washington, DC from Smiths Falls, Ontario in my ageing and untrustworthy Ford Tempo. I even walked across the burning coals. There were 1,100 of us there, and I still remember Robbins telling us on the first night that we would all walk across the coals. You could literally feel the reaction from the room, which was, essentially, not bloody likely. But we all did, that very night.

I also read Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People and took several of his courses, all excellent, and managed not to become particularly successful or happy. I must have missed at least one of The Six Pillars of Self-Esteem by Nathaniel Branden, because my self-esteem remained abysmal, and my behaviour self-sabotaging. Think and Grow Rich did not make me rich. The Power of Intention made no impact, although at the time it felt powerful.

The list seems endless, but at no time did I become financially secure or happy. In fact, none of the books, tapes, CDs, movies, seminars, or even therapy helped very much, and some of them were pretty good.

What finally started me moving in a healthier direction was a simple decision. I had been painfully shy most of my life. No doubt my parents’ divorce, childhood experience, genetic propensities, and so on and so forth were the cause, but when you get to be in your forties and you’re still too shy to ask a girl (they were now women) out, or to make friends, you cannot really blame your parents any longer. Well you can, but it’s a waste of your life.

My decision was simply to stop being shy. I had finally had enough, after two divorces, after sabotaging myself into bankruptcy, after years of trying to be what other people wanted, I finally said: I am not going to be shy any longer. People who knew me, especially other shy people, could not believe I had major issues with self-confidence, because I had been married and had children, I had owned two restaurants, I had been a manager at a major corporation with promises of upward mobility if I toed the corporate line. However, in every case, I had plunged into something and then sabotaged myself into failure. Divorced, bankrupt, quit the job, not necessarily in that order, was the story of my life, and still not very happy at all.

So, of course, I bought a book. Reading about change is a great way to avoid doing anything about change. I bought Shyness: A Bold New Approach, which had been recommended by someone, somewhere along the line. This time, however, was different. I had made my decision, and I was determined to change or die. The book was quite helpful, and I highly recommend it to shy people, but the key factor was my decision to change.

Believe it or not, my first step was simply to go sit in the nearby Starbucks and read a book (not the Shyness book!) while having a coffee. I was terrified someone would want to talk. Ridiculous, no? But the mind works in mysterious ways. Well, I did it, and survived the first session. And I did it again, and again, and again, until the fear was gone. That was key: repeating a new behaviour until it no longer felt alien or aroused fear, and was something I had never done before.

Anthony Robbins gives good advice. So do Branden and Covey and Chopra and Dyer and many of the other modern-day philosophers, but none of it works if you don’t follow it – consistently and for long enough to change habits, something I had never done. I had always run – or sabotaged myself – when things felt overwhelming. At the time, it didn’t feel like running away, because everything was subconscious. I was clueless about the real reasons I did things, which were ultimately attempts to please someone else, a legacy from my childhood, a stage that I had never matured past.

I was finally attempting to grow up and become my own person, at the age of 43. After the coffee shop, I went on to join a local vegetarian group (VIVA), even lead some activities. I made friends. I did crazy things – anything I could think of to break the shyness habit.

And I dated. Boy, did I date. I was on Match.com , Lavalife, and VeggieDate simultaneously. I went speed dating repeatedly. Eventually, I even asked women out face-to-face. A huge turning point for me came at the end of a first date that had gone very well with a very nice woman when I said, “It was nice meeting you. Good night.” I did not say I would call her or that I would like to see her again. (Thank you, David DeAngelo.) The woman was floored – but I could see the respect in her eyes. This had never happened to her before. She was an attractive, confident woman, and the date had gone well. And there was something else in her eyes, and in her whole posture: she was intrigued, she was challenged, and she wanted more.

How can all this possibly relate to my decision to start a climate change site, and to list www.stevepavlina.com? It all comes back to self-confidence and maturity. As I grew, I became more comfortable with the truth, and with doing what was right for me. Some of those things turned out to be bad (meaning unhealthy), but over time I got better at recognizing what was right for me.

For example, one of those things was not completing a Masters degree I had started as part of my largely unconscious journey of self-discovery some years before.  Yes, I learned valuable things. Certainly, it would look good on a resume and would help get jobs, especially as a Bachelors degree seems to be the new high school diploma. Absolutely there was a lot of childhood and social programming telling me I should finish whatever I started, and I had a bad history of not finishing things I should have. Ultimately, however, it wasn’t my path, and I walked away.

Another change was relying on facts, not opinions – not mine, not others. I had lived most of my life asleep, and I wanted to be conscious now, unafraid of reality. As part of that, I read the BBC online every morning for a few minutes, and every day there were one or more articles about glaciers retreating, species going extinct, deserts expanding, and other effects attributed to global warming.

After several months of this, I began to wonder if perhaps there was something to this global warming after all. I had spent the previous eight years in the United States under the Clinton and Bush II administrations, and hadn’t heard much about it on American media. Now, thanks to the BBC, I was. I decided to be an honest sceptic, and while I won’t go into that journey here, suffice it to say that I did discover this: there is indeed a very strong consensus among the world’s climate scientists that we are in deep, deep shit.

So deep, in fact, that it can be overwhelming. I think that is one reason so many people really don’t want to hear about it. (The other is a feeling of powerlessness to do anything about it, given the vested interests obstructing action.) Briefly, there is a very high probability that climate change and Peak Everything will destroy civilisation and wipe out the majority of humanity within this century, with the collapse and die-back starting literally any time now. The probability increases as time advances, but I would be very surprised if really horrible things were not happening within 25 years. This is all based on the best and most current science; it is scary but it is not scaremongering. If you have children, their life will probably be nasty, brutish, and short. Few of them will have children. Many scientists are now saying that significant climate change is occurring, meaning significant numbers of people will be displaced into already crowded areas, that there will be starvation, water wars, and great pressure on civilisation no matter what we do.

Given that, it is easy to become negative, depressed, cynical, bitter, hopeless. The antidote to that, and the only hope we have of preventing complete catastrophe, is sensible action. That is the purpose of this site. We really must go green or die, and this site is one of the few charting a realistic path forward. There are lots of good (meaning honest) sites about climate science, peak oil, and other looming disasters. There are lots of sites and science about solutions, and there is much we can do to reduce the impact. This site attempts to provide a clear path forward, to provide a holistic solution. We have some hard decisions to make, and some powerful people, systems, and beliefs to overcome – and so far, have made nary a dent. The “environmental movement” has failed catastrophically.

Steve Pavlina is hope, and without hope, we are lost. After I read Steve’s blog, I come away energized and far more aware of positive possibilities, and I need that. We need that. He helps me keep focused on what we can do. I don’t agree with everything he says, but then, that applies to everyone, doesn’t it?

If we are to salvage civilisation and humanity, we need to channel anger and fear into useful actions, not destruction. We need rapid, focused action. We need to move quickly and confidently to realign civilisation with reality and remove the obstacles, whether human or systemic, to that. Changing light bulbs is nowhere near enough, and there is enormous resistance to this kind of change from vested interests and our own fear. Steve is anti-fear. Read his blog and see if you do not come away feeling more hopeful, believing that the impossible might just be doable.

That is why Stevepavlina.com is on my blogroll.