There is a question I find myself returning to, one that is simple on the surface but has a way of sitting with you long after you first hear it, and that question is this: Would I follow me?
Not would people follow me because of the arguments I can make, or the facts I have memorised, or the statistics I can recite about the number of animals killed every single day on this planet. Not because I can win a debate or hold my ground when someone throws the lions and tigers argument at me for the hundredth time. But genuinely, honestly, if I stepped outside myself for a moment and watched how I show up in the world, in a conversation at a dinner table, in a comment thread, in the way I carry myself when someone makes a joke about bacon in front of me, would I follow that person?
Understanding the Psychology of Behaviour Change
It is a confronting question and I think it is one of the most important questions any vegan or animal advocate can sit with right now.
Because here is what I have come to understand after nearly two decades as a vegan and thirty years as a vegetarian before that. The facts are not the problem. The information is not the problem. Most people in the western world have access to more information about what happens to animals in our food system than any generation before them. They can watch a documentary, read a study, follow an account, and know within minutes exactly what is happening behind those walls. The information is there. And yet nothing changes.
And that is because we have fundamentally misunderstood how human beings actually work.
We like to think of ourselves as rational creatures. We like to believe that if someone is presented with enough evidence, clearly enough, compellingly enough, they will reach the logical conclusion and change their behaviour. But decades of psychology, neuroscience, and frankly just honest observation of the people around us tells a very different story. We are emotional creatures first, and rational creatures a distant second.
- We do not make decisions and then find feelings to match them.
- We have feelings, and then we find reasons to justify them.
- The story comes after the emotion, not before it.
This is why the ping pong game of facts and counter-facts so rarely works.
- Someone says they could never give up cheese. You explain the dairy industry.
- They say their grandfather was a farmer. You cite a study.
- They say protein. You say plants.
And on it goes, each of you armed with your position, neither of you actually reaching the other, because the real conversation, the one happening underneath all of that, is not about cheese or protein or farming. It is about identity, and belonging, and the terrifying prospect of seeing something you cannot unsee and having to change as a result.
What actually moves people is not information. It is feeling. It is the experience of being in the presence of someone who is warm, and genuinely curious, and not even slightly interested in making them feel guilty, someone who just happens to be vegan. Someone whose life looks like something worth moving towards rather than a world of restriction and judgment and misery. Someone who creates, even for a moment, a felt sense that another way of living is not only possible but might actually be better.
That is a very different kind of advocacy. And it starts not with the message, but with the messenger.
From Vystopia to Legacy
This is the work I call the Vystopia Transformation, and it rests on three things.
- The first is Insight: the deep and ongoing work of understanding yourself, your conscious and unconscious drivers, the patterns that show up when you are triggered, the places where your own unresolved pain leaks into a conversation and makes it about you rather than about the animals.
- The second is Impact: which is learning to communicate in a way that creates a gap inside the other person between their stated values and their current actions, not through confrontation, but through the kind of trance-breaking, relationship-based engagement that invites genuine curiosity rather than defensive shutdown.
- And the third is Influence, which is really about legacy, about asking yourself what unique gifts, skills, and qualities you bring to this movement, and how you can begin using them right now, today, without waiting for the platform or the book deal or the moment when you finally feel ready enough.
Because that moment, I have to tell you, does not come. Readiness is not a feeling that arrives before the action. It is something that grows through the action itself.
The Invitation of Change You Offer is Your Leadership
So many people I speak to say they do not see themselves as leaders.
They do not have an audience. They do not have a following.
And I want to gently challenge that, because leadership in this context is not about scale. It is about example. It is about being the kind of person that someone, somewhere, looks at and thinks, there is something different about them. There is something I want to understand.
Would I follow me?
Sit with that question this week. Not with judgement, but with genuine curiosity. Because the answer, whatever it is right now, is the beginning of your most powerful contribution.
