I regularly find myself speaking in terms of the things I’m against. Anti-consumption. Anti-waste. Anti-discrimination. The list goes on.

In a recent board meeting, my co-founder Lucy pulled me up on it. Reminding me we need to be more positive and solution-supporting in how we speak.

Which got me thinking… when I’m a generally happy and optimistic person most days, what is causing me to slip into the anti trap?

As I sit here midway through the third record-breaking heatwave of the year, I think I might have the answer… I think it’s anger.

• Anger at what we’re doing to the world.
• Anger that my five-year-old daughter is facing such a perilous and uncertain future.
• Anger that a beautiful, sunny day I should be enjoying with her is tainted because I’m carrying the burden of the underlying science and the worry that comes with it.
• Anger that when my family have booked a summer holiday, I find myself researching forest fires in the region.
• And anger that so many people outside of certain circles just don’t seem to care.

Anger is an emotion that’s easier to channel and process by being against things.

Anger is an emotion that’s easier to channel and process by being against things.

But we also know the angry, anti-message just isn’t cutting through.

A few years back we wrote an article about a shift we’d seen in NGO and charity comms away from shock messages to more empowering, optimistic messages.

So when I know this consciously, why do I find myself so often subconsciously defining what I stand for in terms of what I’m against?

Is it because the algorithm rewards anger and divisiveness, and that’s how we’re being trained to cut through online?

Is it because virtually everything climate-related is framed in terms of the negative? Stop this, reduce that, etc.

Is it because in some areas of systems change we simply don’t have the solutions yet? And it’s easier to articulate what’s broken than to put forward a fix?

Or is it simply because, in the face of the news and the trends we’re seeing, being optimistic just seems a bit, well, to put it bluntly, naive?

I honestly don’t know the answer.

But it might be found in some research conducted by Lancaster University last year. They looked at 1.2 million posts linked to 25,000 change.org petitions and found that angry, morally outraged posts got shared far more, but weren’t any more likely to get the petition signed. Posts that talked about helping people showed the opposite pattern. Less viral, but more likely to lead to actual signatures.

Which makes me wonder if the real question isn’t whether we should be anti or pro in our message generally. It should be more about understanding whether we are looking for attention or an outcome.

Anti-messaging is useful to grab that initial attention. But you need to be positive in your message to turn that from short-term awareness into sustained action.

Which means for the work we’re doing, Lucy is right as usual. 😂