 gwelio Cymrae ac mae'r celfwyr hynny. Felly fynd ddim. Andio yma. Felly hynny. Mae meddwl Gwyddi Oesol Llywodraeth. Mae amlaed i'm ar Aberystwyth. Felly mae'n gweld i Aberystwyth. Mae amlaed i'r gwendig wnaeth erothواeth. Fatha'r gweith iawn, mae'r cyntaf o'r ambell. Mae'r gweithio'r cyfaint i'r byd i wneud hyn. Mae'r cyfrifiadauach eich gweld i'r gweld i'r pwnghreunicaid. of just these starlings moving together and what I'm really interested in and have been interested in for a long time, I've worked on environmental and social change is how we can get better at doing that. And in recent years that's included how we understand our mind and it's also included thinking about how mindfulness can play a part in that. So I'm really curious and there is this bright light so it's hard to see you but there's just how many of you maybe stand up if you practice mindfulness or something similar. Wonderful, brilliant, quite a lot of you, quite a lot of us are practicing mindfulness and similar practices at the moment. And maybe just stay standing up for a moment, it'll help with concentration as well to be honest. If you really feel that this helps you create the change in the world that you want to create. So all of us, pretty much all, some of us maybe not, some of us maybe not, but all of us have this sense that these practices help us in our work in change. And that's what I'm going to look a little bit more at in this presentation. So I have a little sit down. So yeah, I live in Aberystwyth at the moment but I don't come from Aberystwyth. I actually come from Croydon, which is not too far from here. Oh cool, we've got some Croydon people here. So I come from Croydon. I went to a school called Llanfrank in Croydon, any of you that know it. And it was a pretty rough school in its day. I think it's changing now. And it was a very diverse school. And as I got older I realised that a lot of us in that school have been quite let down by the system. The system didn't really have resources to deal with the level of need and the levels of challenge and trauma that these young people had in their lives. So I kind of went on a journey that I'm sure a lot of you have been on to try and change things. And that journey included becoming a political activist. This is me in the 80s. I became a journalist as well to speak to some of the stuff that Jennifer was talking about because I felt that could really change things. And I also started working for Shelter, the homelessness campaign, because my family had been homeless a couple of times. But I really felt this wasn't quite creating the change, the kind of systemic change that was needed. So I carried on my journey and I worked in international development. I worked as a VSO, Voluntary Service Overseas, in the Gambia. And in a way I just discovered more of the same. A lot of people being let down by a lack of a kind of systemic view, systemic solutions. I got into permaculture when I came back from the Gambia. I ran the Permaculture Association for a while. And that, by a kind of wiggly road, took me up to Wales, which I never expected to go to from Croydon, I have to say. And I joined communities. I became part of co-ops and communities. And I thought this is a way to come up with a positive solution, an alternative to all this. And that was all about, very much about in those days anyway, technical solutions. And for me there was something really missing. And it was this mind thing, this thing that the people, where were we addressing this? And so I trained as a yoga teacher and a mindfulness teacher. And here's me at Shambhala Festival where I was working on sustainable behaviour change and also teaching mindfulness on stage. So it's this real sense that these two should come together. But in recent years, a recent couple of years really, a few years, this is coming into question. So why is this coming into question? I've become an academic, which I never expected to be coming from Llanfrank school either. I've become an academic and I've started to research a little bit more into this and come across work, and some of you may have seen this, called mindfulness by the helpfully named Ronald Persa. And really the argument that Ron Persa puts forward is that mindfulness does more to help us cope with a dysfunctional system than it does to help us change that system. So it's more about, you know, keep calm and carry on or increase performance within that system than it does to actually challenge the system. And I just put a few of the arguments to you that are in that book or this realm of thought that's developing at the moment. So some of this comes out, well, the people that brought mindfulness into the West, they represent a particular demographic that is white and mostly male. And unfortunately, if you start to pull this apart a little bit, not because of bad intention, but just because of the way things are, in some ways they kind of bring their own biases with it, which means that things are reproduced in the system that they wouldn't really want reproduced. Simly is coming through a therapeutic frame. Mindfulness and MBSR and MBCT that's being brought then into the workplace has actually roots in therapy. And therapy is about fixing individuals. And that's got its own issues in itself, really, when we think about more social models. But the roots of it are about fixing individuals. That's what we are kind of bringing through into workplace mindfulness type courses and programmes. Also we've got this, that it comes from a Buddhist background. And that also has an ethical base. And there's some question over whether we're really being ethical to bring a kind of coping mechanism, a performance mechanism into dysfunctional systems. And if we need to spend a little bit more time thinking about the ethics of what we're doing. And another area I've got really interested in is because it's coming through a therapeutic frame and through a Buddhist frame, it's actually not bringing with it the best models of mind. And I'll talk a little bit about that in a bit. But the science around emotion and mind and consciousness has progressed amazingly in the last 20 or so, 20, 30 years. And this has not carried forward into developing these programmes. And another issue that is a little bit sensitive, but most of us kind of believe that somehow by practicing mindfulness, we're going to be connected with our values. And that's kind of our experience of it. And then we're going to live out those values due to the practices. But that's not entirely true. Our values also need reflection. They carry biases with them, just based on the fact that we're from certain places, certain histories, certain cultures. And so values without reflection are not necessarily going to carry through as well as we might want them to. And there's lots of examples. There's a recent example of someone from the all-party parliamentary group on mindfulness who's spoken often about the benefits of mindfulness, who's been suspended from his political party because of claims of sexual harassment and racist language, use of racist language. So I'm not going to, I'm not here to name and shame. I'm just here to say that it's not automatic. It's not a straight line. Mindfulness values behaving in line with our values. So moving on to a little bit of the positive, perhaps, or constructive, what I'm really interested in is what is the problem that mindfulness is attempting to solve? Why is it that we're also interested in this thing called mindfulness? And what I've come to think is it's a little bit of a canary and a coal mine for those of you who know that canaries were taken down into coal mines to signify danger, carbon monoxide. And I think it's a little bit of a flag that there's something that we don't really understand about mines. There's something we're looking for to understand about how mines work that's not in the workplace. So the problem that I'm looking at, or I've been addressing, is in Wales we have this amazing bit of legislation, the Well-being of Future Generations Act. You wouldn't believe how good it is. It says that all decisions made within the public sector in Wales have to consider future generations, the well-being of future generations. It's an amazing act, but the problem is how do we actually bring this act into reality? And within the act we need to change our ways of working, which is right. We really do need to change the way we work in the public sector to bring this forward. We need to be more collaborative, we need to be more inclusive and we need to think more long-term, not so short-term. Okay, we had a little bit of a trickiness around this video. The trouble is the government, as you all know, in the public sector are not designed to be inclusive, collaborative, or think long-term. This is a little video that was live streamed from Ceredigion County Council which is where I'm from, from a house board meeting that happened there a few months ago, we can play. In the six weeks, especially that Bronglais is strategically placed for us going forward. I'd just like some assurance please. Can we go back at all? Yeah, you saw. You can see how the public sector, see if we can click it back just a little bit further. Did you see there was like a table and there was those empty chairs opposite and then there was people sitting up on a huge kind of platform above them. There they are, that's it, great. So this is not the way to collaborate or be inclusive or have really good creative conversations about difficult problems like the closing of bits of hospitals in the area which this was actually talking about. What this is designed to do is really for people to justify their decisions and defend their decisions to each other. So this is based on an idea of rationality that is completely outdated and it links to some of the conversations we had about economics. The whole of the public sector is based on an idea of the mind as rational that there's an objective reality out there and that in some way we can rationally analyse this. And so we set up a system that looks like this and then when everybody gets very stressed out because this is really stressy kind of situation to working and it doesn't really work in terms of solving problems we put people on well-being programmes. We spend a lot of money on well-being programmes fixing the results of this. So this is the First Minister of Wales so I'm pleased to bring this a bit of Wales to you, Mark Drakeford. And even he agrees that hierarchies don't work. He said, I'm not a fan of hierarchies, we need to do something different. He says, because by the time one message has been passed from one layer to the next the person I'm speaking to knows no more about the subject than I do. So he knows they don't work and they're trying to change it. And there's this wonderful European Commission report out recently and it says a similar thing. So we know now that humans do not always think rationally. This is not necessarily a problem. What is problematic is to neglect it and base politics on the assumption that they do. And that's what we do. We're all working as though we're all kind of somehow rational. They don't do that in advertising but they do do it in politics. So, and I've done a lot of work with the Welsh Government now and analysing actually what goes on in Government and really they and probably a lot of us are using what might be called a common sense view of mind, a common sense psychology. And this kind of goes, well I kind of got a mind and so I kind of know how to use it. You know, I kind of muddle through. It's a bit similar to looking at the horizon and saying well I can see it's flat so it must be flat and I'm going to operate as though it's just flat. And the thing is that the science around mind and emotion is changing dramatically as I said earlier demonstrated by this quote from a behavioural scientist from Warwick Business School. Almost everything we think we know about the operation of our own minds are intuitive introspections, justifications and explanations needs to be abandoned wholesale. So this is akin to other moments in science where we've had whole paradigm shifts, you know, when we thought that, you know, the sun and the earth moved in a certain way and we discovered it completely flipped around. This is the kind of paradigm shift that we're talking about. So let me ask you just for a moment, maybe just, we haven't got long. Talk to your partner, what is an emotion? Just for a second, what is an emotion? What do you understand an emotion to be? I have to bring you back unfortunately because we've only got 20 minutes. I haven't got time to ask you, I'd love to hear what you said but generally when I ask this question people talk about an emotion being triggered. Emotions get triggered by something outside. We also tend to think of emotions as kind of hardwired and universal, kind of joy and happiness. They're all kind of the same for all of us and a lot of people, and I know in government because I've talked to them, feel like we need to kind of somehow suppress emotions. Emotions kind of get in the way of clear thinking. But the truth is all of that is being thrown out by some of the new science. I really encourage anyone to look at the work of Lisa Feldman Barrett on this and what we're understanding that cognition and emotion, felt sense and cognition are entirely interlinked. How I feel and what I see are completely linked. If people have a piece of their brain damage that they're emotion centres they can't actually make a decision. So it's a little bit more like this. Emotion and cognition interact so strongly a demarcation between the two of them is a fruitless exercise. We must talk of an emotion, cognition and Malcolm. So we haven't got the whole picture. On the other hand there's a European flag on the other side of that person there. So these people are dealing with minds. That's what their job is. Day in, day out, negotiating, dealing with emotions, cognition all the time. But they don't understand it. Simply our activists are dealing with mind, cognition all the time. But they haven't really got the opportunity to really understand it. It's like sending someone into a garage to fix a car, apologies for the car analogy in an environmental kind of context, without telling them anything about the car works and they say, oh yeah, I've driven a car. I kind of know how a car works. And then we give them a spanner but no instructions. And then when things don't really go right as in government, as in policy perhaps, we tell them they don't care about the car. But we actually haven't told them anything about how the car works, really. So that's where my works come in. I've developed something called the Mindfulness Based Behavioral Insights and Decision Making Programme. So a specific mindfulness programme that was about helping policymakers understand how their mind worked. It was interactive, really getting them to understand dialogue practices, using dialogue practices to understand how minds work during dialogue and using theories which were really relevant to their particular context, behavioural economics, cognitive bias, predictive mind, supported by short mindfulness practices. And the kinds of things that came out of that, just four comments I'm going to finish off with. Comments like this. So one director saying, I have felt unequip to deal with those sorts of things because my professional training has been logic, evidence, rationality, objectivity, and it's driven out that emotional component. So they were saying, yeah, this is our job, but we don't really know how to do it. But now they're starting to understand the world is something people create. And they think that understanding this helps them challenge how the system runs. So thinking back to earlier on, we were talking about mindfulness just for individuals, mindfulness to help people kind of calm down a little bit maybe. This is helping them see through some of the systems. For another person, it was saying, it was a bit of an eye-opener in terms of how we deceive ourselves. So they're starting to see more of how emotions and how biases kind of get in the way of this rationality that before they thought was there. And this was really speaking to, I think another speaker said to it, an understanding, I understand better kind of how I work, my own behaviours, how others work, and then how I deliver stuff out there. And so it's not me kind of doing psychology to them, it's us all understanding using the latest science, some really fascinating stuff. The same as we use science to inform us about climate change, to inform how we go forward from here. So this is a whole new area of work in terms of social and environmental behaviour change. There's lots of people working in very different ways to bring it together. I'm one of them, this is me, this is a couple of websites. On the bottom here you'll see the mindfulness and social change website, which connects a lot of people who are working in this area. And it's not just me, I have spent four or five years talking to lots of people, some of whom I've listed here. We are part of a system, we hold hands with others, we stand on the shoulders of others, and I just want to recognise that just to finish off. Thank you very much.