Finding Good News
I recently went one on one with Dr. Lynda Ulrich, founder of the multimedia platform Ever Widening Circles, which aims to offer a break from bad news with bite-sized stories that are uplifting and inspiring.
Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?
Lynda: Adam, my story validates the notion that it is good to focus on all we are learning from the journey, not the destination.
In 2013, I was a dentist, mother of three teenagers, and I had been a global traveler all my life. I was an artist, a writer, and a student of leadership by way of reading voraciously. My professional mission was to keep the humanity in healthcare, so the best part of my work was having the opportunity to chat with dozens of people every day. The best conversations often gravitated toward my patients’ hopes and dreams. But as early as 2011 and 2012, I started noticing that a sense of “future fatalism” was creeping into the mindsets of people who I had always known as super positive.
Yes, the negative dialogue about our times - the fear, division, and outrage that grips us now - began building quite some time ago and I started to question why someone was not doing something about it! My life experiences taught me that the world was full of generosity, ingenuity, wonder, and kindness. But we were seeing that version of ourselves less and less in the media.
Then one day I received an email from a 19-year-old boy who I had known since he was a toddler. He was writing to me from an army base in a bleak place in the world. And in the email, he expressed a level of hopelessness that was heartbreaking.
The email became both a confirmation and a calling. Confirmation that I had been right to find something to celebrate with every patient who visited us. And it was a calling because it sent me on a mad search of the internet for a trustworthy place for good news that I could point people to.
And I quickly found that the linchpin in that quest was the “trustworthy” bit. Every time I found a possible winner, I would discover they had a political agenda, or they would be bombarding us with advertising, or we would have no idea where they got their information.
So, when I could not find any place for news about real progress in the world - with no politics or ads - I built it.
And since 2014, Ever Widening Circles has published over a thousand articles about all the insight, innovation, and thought leaders going uncelebrated. We are changing the negative dialogue about our times and championing the fact that it is still an amazing world.
That “someone who should do something”, became me. I suspect we all can add our wisdom and efforts to some problem that needs our unique lived experiences.
In my second climb now, I have the sense that everything that came before was in preparation for this moment.
Adam: What are the most inspiring stories you have come across over the years? What are the most inspiring stories you have come across of late? And what inspires you?
Lynda: I am inspired by innovators who come at problems from entirely fresh angles that have the potential to bring us together, to elevate what we all have in common.
I believe that is where we need to be working from now.
The best of these thought leaders are those who are asking new questions that break down long-held assumptions. They are often the ones who come up with novel solutions that feel like a win for everyone, and seem obvious, once they are in place.
Often, they are outsiders who have had life experiences that they fearlessly apply to a completely new set of problems. These thought leaders do not know enough about their new field to be limited by the rules of convention: the things that seem like barriers to people well entrenched in the fight. They often see a landscape of possibilities and connections that no one ever thought to consider.
I will give you two wonderful examples from the countless thought leaders that we are celebrating at Ever Widening Circles.
Topher White was an engineer vacationing in Borneo when he had his ah-ha! moment. During a visit to a gibbon sanctuary, the staff suddenly stopped what they were doing and ran into the forest in the direction of a faint sound. Topher followed and was astonished to realize that a short distance from the sanctuary, in a protected region of forest, illegal loggers were taking down an enormous tree. The normal rainforest sounds had almost completely muffled the sounds of their chainsaws.
Topher’s life was changed forever. He founded an organization called The Rainforest Connection and he has devised an ingenious way to end illegal logging using the old cell phones that many of us have thrown in a junk drawer.
He and his team tune them to pick up only the frequency of the sound of a chainsaw, and then they are placed at intervals in the forest canopy to relay information across vast distances, and powered by their own tiny arrays of solar collectors.
The minute a chainsaw is fired up, the phones send a signal that alerts forest rangers in surrounding communities who can swoop in to stop the illegal loggers!
Topher estimated that one device in a tree can help protect three square kilometers of rainforest. “That equals taking three thousand cars off the road...” Imagine this solution at scale around the world!
And the innovation just keeps coming. After working with the Cornell Department of Ornithology, the Rainforest Connection team realized that the birds of the rainforest start to make different noises when a logger enters the forest. So now the phones are set to detect that change and forest rangers can arrive before the chainsaws are even started!
Why should we care? Well, in my research for an article about Topher’s work, I learned that deforestation is responsible for releasing more C02 into the atmosphere than all the world’s cars and trucks put together. At scale, Topher may have the solution to solving twenty-three percent of our greenhouse gas problem and it all revolves around something we have in excess: old cellphones.
That is the kind of genius we will need to come to the surface and improve our shared futures.
Another thought leader with the same kind of outsider’s courage is Damien Mander, an amazing thought leader in the field of saving endangered species. He has discovered that, for a host of reasons, single mothers make the best game wardens in Africa, benefiting wildlife, communities, and generations. His organization, The Akashinga Initiative, is a perfect example of how we will be expanding our view of who and what is helpful in the coming era.
Damien’s outsider’s genius starts with his experiences as an Australian military sniper. After his stint as a counter-insurgency specialist in Iraq was over, he serendipitously discovered that his experience might be useful in the war against wildlife poaching.
He describes this journey in his 2013 TED Talk that is one of the most powerful Ted Talks out there. What has transpired since then has gone way beyond his original modest ambitions and he has developed a model that, if scaled, could change the future of wildlife conservation and communities around the world. (704)
Adam: What are your best tips on how to stay positive in difficult situations?
Lynda: Look for the helpers and ignore the chaos builders.
What we give our attention to expands. It is just that simple.
This is true in our personal lives, our business lives, and our digital lives.
The first step to expanding in a positive way, more fluidly with every passing day, is to stop running on “autopilot”, especially when we are on the internet, social media, or sampling the 24-hour news cycle.
What we give our attention to their matters now more than ever. In fact, one of the most important things I have learned in my journey from ordinary web-user to global web-publisher is that the internet is an “attention economy.” It is built to amplify our worst impulses to manage our attention. And what we click on we will get more of. Someone is counting every click we make.
Our click is a vote.
Now I know that sounds like more doom and gloom, but it is quite the opposite! This secret of the internet, social media, and the 24-hour news cycle means that we have all the power there. We can lift the helpful, thoughtful influencers, ideas and innovators to the surface and ignore the chaos builders into obscurity.
It is all about pausing and deciding what we are going to give our attention to, in our families, business and digital lives.
Do not know who is worthy of our time and trust? The helpers will be the ones who are asking new questions that open completely new doors to possibility. They will be the ingenious people who can help us focus on the things we can agree upon and work from that position of strength. Most importantly, they will be complaining less and collaborating more. Instead of fighting for their team, they will be fighting for ideas that can translate into real progress for everyone.
I stay positive in difficult situations because I have developed the habit of rarely following my emotions blindly over a cliff. I am exceedingly careful about what I give my attention to. What we give our attention to expands. It attracts more of what we want to give our attention to. I very purposefully make it positive.
We have a choice. Look for what is helpful and thoughtful.
Adam: You write and speak about how to maintain positive relationships with people you disagree with politically. What is your advice?
Lynda: The very first thing we need to do is exchange our contempt for curiosity.
We need to get curious about why people have connected the dots so differently than we have! When we do, we will almost always be rewarded with some level of “ah-ha” moment.
I am curious about people who are passionate.
I have never met anyone with the heart of a lion who does not have a story to tell and I have found that the more I understand their lived experiences, the more the contempt between us dissipates.
Get curious about people on the other side and you may find you have more in common than you think. You can become multipliers for the best in each other.
That is the spot we need to be working from now.
Adam: In your experience, what are the defining qualities of an effective leader? How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?
Lynda: I have the sense that we are at a great tipping point in society. The “influencers” and the “thought leaders” in the new era will be people whose ideas create remarkable new ways of looking at what is possible. They will be those who can help us all shift from division to discovery.
To do that, you must start with the mindset that everyone has the potential to improve your way of thinking. Everyone.
When you start there, you are always essentially among friends , and every interaction has the potential to change the future.
Adam: What are your best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?
Lynda: I have been studying leadership for decades and the best leaders never follow their emotions over a cliff. They are the ones who de-escalate the drama.
To be able to act with clarity and wisdom when chaos seems to rein around you, I have three grounding principles are helpful:
Celebrate what’s right around you. We cannot be happy all the time, but there is always something to celebrate.
When you walk into a room where people are struggling, competing, and the drama is escalating, be the one to point out the things we can all agree on. Be the one to ask the question, “What do we all want more of?”
Pause more. Consciously decide what you will give your attention to next.
Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?
Lynda: The best piece of advice I ever received was, “Examine the stories you are telling yourself.”
So much of our daily lives, our decisions, and our reactions, are shaped by the stories we are telling ourselves about others and the world around us. Our frenetic world leaves us full of snippets of information and we then fill in the blanks based on our assumptions. Often these are colored by the limited view of the world we are getting from our digital intake as well.
I am constantly reminding myself to notice the gaps in my real knowledge. And then I work hard to avoid the impulse to fill them in with assumptions.
When someone acts in a way that does not make sense, I remind myself that there is a key piece of information I am missing.
Assumptions make poor foundations for decisions.