Conflict between practitioners and communities can prevent important projects from moving forward. Responding to two reader's challenges, this article explores possible causes of conflict and how to overcome them....
Clean air, clean water, healthy soil that produces healthy foods. These are things we can ALL get behind, even climate skeptics. It's time to move beyond our impasse of arguing about climate change and start to motivate more people by focusing on personally meaningful benefits...
Our traditional messaging approaches focus too heavily on why the current behavior isn't a good choice, yet that's not producing the results we want to see. Let's flip the script and focus on why the alternate behavior is the better option! See how it can...
What are you asking people to do? While this may sounds simple, it can be surprisingly difficult to answer in a way that is clear, specific and actionable. Use this quick guide that I start all my workshops and courses with to refine your "ask"...
As communicators, it's our responsibility to try and be as clear as possible for our receivers. But even then, we sometimes won't reach everyone. This personal - and somewhat embarrassing - story highlights how tricky the communication game can be....
All of us have different layers of people we interact with regularly, either directly or by being strangers in the same place. And all of these people have the potential to influence our actions and behaviors. Do you know who's in your spheres of influence?...
In most cases, knowledge is not needed as a precursor to behavior - but that doesn't mean there aren't important roles for knowledge to play. Check out the two key moments when knowledge can help audiences sustain new behaviors....
Behavior change doesn't have to mean culture change, which can be a concern for international conservationists working in community-based programs. The movie Moana can teach us many important lessons on how to successfully connect the two....
Over the course of my career I have only resigned from a handful of jobs. But once, I did experience resigning from two jobs within the span of 4 months. Which means I had the pleasure of going online multiple times to research best practices...