Veganism… Organised

Welcome

This is the Guide edition of Veganism… Organised. It is written for you, the vegan who wants to lead this change. It will set you up to run your own Todoist project, step by step, in under an hour.

Let me start with a moment you will probably recognise.

You are at a dinner table, or in a comment thread, or in a family group chat. Someone says something about meat, or about what you eat. You answer, calmly at first. You say something true. And the other person does not move. In fact, they dig in. They defend what they do harder than before.

If that has happened to you, this guide is for you. It is not a book that tries to convince you that veganism is right. You have already decided that, for good reasons. This is about what comes next: how to be effective, and calm, and kind, while you are doing it.

Here is the short version of what the research says. Anger, shame and guilt rarely change minds. They tend to harden them. A calm example, good food and real curiosity tend to open doors. So this guide helps you become what I call a compassionate role model. That is someone whose life makes plant-based living look attractive, and easy to try.

This guide is built on a method from two fields that have nothing obvious to do with diet. The first is process mining. It asks one question: what is actually happening, as opposed to what we believe is happening? The second is organisational change management. It asks how to move people, kindly and effectively, to something better. Together, they give us a method I call the four Ds: Discovery, Dream, Design and Defend. Each one is a section of this guide, and a section of your Todoist project. The four Ds adapt the 4-D cycle from Appreciative Inquiry, developed by David Cooperrider and Diana Whitney, with process mining added to Discovery.

There is also a shared language for you and the people around you, called the six Cs. Compassion, Communication, Capacity, Commitment, Consideration and Consistency. You will meet those later.

Now, what does being organised have to do with veganism? Being organised is not about tidiness. It is about having the time, calm and confidence to lead your own life, and to bring other people with you. When you are organised, you have less on your mind. You can see what matters now and what can wait. You waste less energy on arguments you will lose. You can share the work with other people. You can see your progress. And the change keeps going on the days your willpower runs out.

The people around you gain too. They know what is expected of them, they have an easy way to contribute, there is less nagging and friction, and their effort is visible.

Listen all the way through once, and then come back to each section as you reach that stage. You do not need to do everything at once. The Full edition has the evidence and the reasoning in depth, and I will point you to it at the end.

Let’s begin with where we are going.

Your Goal and New Identity

Every change needs a destination. Here is yours.

Your goal is this. You understand why anger, shaming and guilt-tripping fail to persuade meat-eaters, and you lead instead as a compassionate role model.

And your new identity is this. You are calm, kind and influential. You are a vegan whose example makes plant-based living attractive, and easy to try.

Notice what this is not. It is not a goal to convert a certain number of people, or to win arguments, or to be perfect. It is a goal about how you show up: how you act when someone challenges you, how you answer a question, what you bring to the table, and how you look after yourself.

Identity matters here, so let me say why. A goal says what you want to achieve. An identity says who you are. Practitioners often find that change lasts longer when people stop thinking, “I am trying to be calmer,” and start thinking, “I am a calm person.” Each conversation you handle well is a vote for that identity.

You can start by writing a sentence about it. Something like: “I am a vegan whose example makes this way of living look good.” Say it in your own words. You will use it in the next section.

Before we go further, a thought about the people on the other side of these conversations. Most meat-eaters are not villains. They are people doing what they were raised to see as normal, in a food system that makes it easy. Treating them with generosity is not weakness. It is the most effective approach we have. And be generous to the vegans who use anger, too. They do it because they care. This guide is critical of a pattern, and never of the people who fall into it.

Setting Up Your Todoist Project

Now let’s put a system in place. A method you keep in your head is a method you will forget. So we will set it up in Todoist.

In this series, Todoist is the command centre. It brings your tasks, reminders, shared projects and calendar into one place. The principles work with other apps too. If you already use something you like, use it. The important thing is one place for everything.

If you are new to Todoist, I’d really appreciate it if you signed up through my affiliate link, which you’ll find on my website, ravi8.com. If my introducing you to Todoist helps you become more organised, using my link helps make all the effort I’ve put into these books worthwhile. Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Here is how to set up.

First, create a new project in Todoist. Call it Organise Veganism.

Second, add four sections to the project. Name them after the four stages. Discovery. Dream. Design. Defend.

Third, under each section, add the tasks you will hear in the sections that follow. I will read them out stage by stage. You can pause the audio and type them in as we go, or you can add them all at once afterwards. The tasks are also listed in the ebook edition of this guide.

Fourth, under Discovery, add one more item. It is called the Compassionate Role Model Pledge. This is a one-page statement, in your own words, about how you will show up in conversations about food and animals. It says what you will do. It says what you will not do. It says which boundaries you will keep. And it says what you will do when you notice yourself getting angry. You will write it during the Discovery stage.

A good pledge is short and concrete. For example: “I will answer the question that was asked. I will not lecture at meals. I will bring food worth sharing. If I notice anger rising, I will pause, take a breath, and either change the subject or leave the conversation kindly.” Yours should sound like you on a good day.

Fifth, please enable Todoist’s Habit Tracker integration. You can switch it on in the app, under Integrations. It fits into the method at Defend, where you put the plan into practice and keep it going. That is where check-ins and streaks earn their place. You will hear more about it in the Defend section.

A few tips. Keep each task short, and give the ones that matter a date. A short project you actually use beats a perfect one you abandon.

You are set up. Let’s start with the first stage.

The Four Ds

The four Ds are your method. We will take them one at a time. For each, you will hear what the stage is for, the key ideas behind it, and then your tasks.

Stage One: Discovery

Discovery is about seeing what really happens. Not what you assume. What actually happens. It has two halves. First you build the picture. Then you ask why.

Start with something people often skip: what already works. Before you look for problems, notice the conversations that went well, and ask what was different. Perhaps a friend asked a genuine question, or a family meal passed without tension. The best evidence about what works is usually in your own history, and it is the place to build from.

This is where process mining comes in. A process is any repeatable sequence of events. Each run through it is a case. Each step is an activity. And an event log is simply an honest record of what happened.

Here, a case is one conversation between you and a meat-eater. The activities are the topic raised, the approach you used, the reaction you got, any follow-up, and the outcome. That is all. A notebook or your phone will do.

You do not need to log every passing comment. Start with the conversations that stayed with you, the ones you replayed on the way home. Those are usually where the pattern is clearest.

Why bother? Because the moment itself does not feel like data. It feels like a moral stand that needs taking. A log creates a little distance between the moment and the pattern.

Keep it for a few weeks. People who try this often find something uncomfortable.

Keep the log to one line per conversation: the date, who it was with, what you said, how they reacted, and how you felt afterwards. Do it the same day, while you remember it clearly. The approaches that felt most satisfying, the sharp reply, the graphic image, the pointed question, tend to cluster under defensiveness and damaged relationships. And the approaches that felt underwhelming, the quiet example, the shared meal, the unforced invitation, tend to cluster under real change. That pattern is a tendency, not a law, but it is common.

The log also reveals your dominant variant. In process mining, that is the path that carries most of the cases. For many vegans it is this: the topic comes up reactively, under time pressure, often with an audience, and you use whatever argument comes to mind first. It happens by default because it needs no planning. And it is rarely the one that works.

Now, why do people not stop, even when they love animals? Researchers call it the meat paradox. Most people feel warmth watching a pig solve a maze, and then they go and eat pork. In 2010, Steve Loughnan and colleagues found that people told an unfamiliar animal was eaten as food rated it as less intelligent and less able to suffer. A single sentence changed their view. Psychologists call this moral disengagement.

People also lean on three justifications. Eating meat is natural, normal and necessary. Jonathan Haidt gives a useful image. Moral judgement is a dog, and moral reasoning is its tail. The dog decides. The tail wags to defend it. So when you argue against the three justifications, you are arguing with the tail. The dog is identity, comfort and belonging, and it stays put.

One more thing to discover is your own story. How did you change? Be honest about it. For most people the change was not about a new fact. It involved discomfort, lost foods, awkward meals, and for those who stuck with it, a point where it stopped feeling like loss. Families often hear a change like yours as a judgement, even when you did not mean one. The mother who has cooked a dish for thirty years can hear your new diet as a verdict on her love. What families need is safety: proof that the relationship does not depend on the food.

Your story is also a story of upkeep. There is a law of physics called entropy. Left alone, ordered things drift towards disorder. A room does not stay tidy by itself, and neither does a habit. That is not a sign you are weak. It is just what happens, and it is why Defend never really ends.

Now the second half. Now that you can see what happens, why does it happen? In particular, why does anger backfire?

There are four explanations. Each is a tool.

The first is reactance. In 1966, the psychologist Jack Brehm described it. When people feel a freedom is being taken away, including the freedom to choose what to eat, they push back. They reassert the freedom, often by doing more of what they were told not to. Studies of meat-reduction messaging often find this pattern: pressure produces resistance, and sometimes the reverse of what was intended. The findings vary, so it is a tendency, not a law. But it is a steady one.

You can spot reactance in the moment by listening for a sudden tightening: shorter answers, a sharper tone, or a joke with an edge. That is your cue to slow down and give the choice back.

What reduces reactance is autonomy. People who are invited to consider something, at their own pace, with the choice clearly theirs, defend less. That is not a trick. It is simply honest about what is happening: one free adult offering information and an example to another.

Some hostility is out of all proportion to a sandwich. Researchers link it to something called terror management. The idea is that people manage their awareness of death partly through traditions and food practices that tie them to something bigger. A challenge to those can feel like a threat to far more than a meal. That does not excuse hostility. It explains why matching it with force only produces more.

The second tool is identity-protective cognition. Dan Kahan and colleagues at Yale found that we judge evidence partly by whether accepting it would threaten our standing in a group we care about. And they found that smarter, more numerate people are often more polarised on these questions, not less. They are better at finding clever reasons to reject evidence. So a meat-eater who follows an argument about emissions and still rejects it is not stupid. “People like me eat meat” is part of who they are. The way through is to avoid making the facts a verdict on who they are. And the people best placed to persuade are trusted voices from inside their own group, like a family member, rather than a stranger with an infographic.

The third tool is the dominant variant, which you met a moment ago. At the level of culture, meat is the dominant variant of food. Menus default to it. The word “meal” assumes it. It did not win by being rigorously compared with the alternatives. It won through history, infrastructure and being the default for a long time. Once something is the default, most people stop seeing it as a choice. So the alternatives are not rejected so much as invisible. Your job is to make them visible again, without asking anyone to admit their whole life was a mistake.

It is also worth knowing that this dominance is partly built. A handful of companies process most of the beef in the United States. Industry-funded campaigns promote it. And food makers use flavour science that makes many foods hard to resist. None of that needs a villain. It means the person eating the default was handed a menu. So be generous to individuals, and clear about systems.

The fourth tool is stages of change. James Prochaska and Carlo DiClemente developed this model, from research on how people quit smoking. People pass through five stages. Precontemplation: not yet thinking about it. Contemplation: weighing it up. Preparation: ready for a first step. Action: doing it. Maintenance: keeping it up. The key point is that the right approach differs at each stage. The most common mistake in advocacy is using the same approach, usually information or moral pressure, on everyone.

How do you tell the stage? By listening. Avoiding the subject suggests precontemplation. “I know, but…” suggests contemplation. A question about how to start suggests preparation. Talking about obstacles suggests action. A settled, unremarkable relationship with plant-based food suggests maintenance.

One more diagnostic habit: check claims. Not just the ones you disagree with, but the ones that flatter your own side too. The economist Alex Edmans, in his book May Contain Lies, makes a simple point. A statement is not a fact because it is said with confidence. Two things moving together do not prove one caused the other. And one study does not prove something is true everywhere.

Here are your Discovery tasks.

Note what already works well, and why.

Record conversations about veganism and how they went.

List the approaches vegans commonly use: debate, graphic footage, shaming, humour and role modelling.

Note how meat-eaters reacted to each.

Write down your own story of change.

Gather research on persuasion and backlash.

Identify where anger and shaming caused defensiveness.

Map identity-protective reactions.

Match approaches to stages of change.

Check persuasion claims against evidence.

Spot the approaches that actually led to change.

And write your Compassionate Role Model Pledge. Keep it to one page, and keep it honest.

Stage Two: Dream

Dream comes next. Its job is to set out what success looks like, which is the goal and new identity you heard earlier, along with what it will take and who is involved. Then you tell the people it affects.

Most changes fail quietly at this point. Not because people lack willpower, but because nobody wrote down what they were aiming for. Without a dream, every conversation becomes a fresh test of your mood.

Start by writing your new identity in your own words. Then write a short description. Make it specific. Think about twelve months from now. What do you want to be true? Perhaps: fewer arguments and more shared meals. Perhaps: one or two people in your life who have started trying plant-based food, because they wanted to. Perhaps: that you feel calm at family gatherings.

Here is an example you could adapt. “Over the next twelve months I will be a calm, kind vegan. I will bring good food to gatherings, answer questions briefly, and let most provocations pass. I will have at most a few serious conversations a month, and I will review how they went.” Notice that it describes your behaviour, which you control, rather than other people’s choices, which you do not.

Next, be honest about your energy. This work takes emotional energy. How many hard conversations a month can you take? Where do you need rest? Deciding this early protects you from burnout later.

Then think about the people whose views matter most to you. A parent. A partner. A close friend. Those relationships are worth more than any single argument, so name them.

And decide your boundaries. What will you not do? Which topics are off the table at the family dinner? Boundaries are not a lack of compassion. They are how compassion lasts.

Finally, tell people. Share your description with the fellow vegans and communities you belong to. That way, they know what you are trying to do and can help.

Here are your Dream tasks.

Write the new identity in your own words.

Define what compassionate role modelling looks like for you.

Decide how much energy you can give to conversations.

Name the people whose views matter most to you.

Agree the boundaries you will keep.

Set a date to review.

And communicate the dream to fellow vegans and the vegan communities you belong to.

Stage Three: Design

Design defines how you want things to work. Having seen what happens and why, you now choose the few changes that matter most.

Your design is the compassionate role model. Here is what one does. There are four things, and each supports the others.

First, visible thriving. People watching your life ask a simple question, often without noticing: does this person look healthy, energetic and well? Psychologists have known since Solomon Asch’s conformity experiments in the 1950s how strongly we are shaped by what we see others do. In those experiments, about three quarters of people went along with an obviously wrong group answer at least once. So if a vegan looks tired and joyless, that is evidence against the whole idea, whatever their actual health. The point is not to put on a show. It is to take the nutritional basics seriously. That means protein, vitamin B12, iron and omega-3. If you have a medical condition, or you are not sure, talk to a doctor or a registered dietitian.

Second, warmth without an agenda. People can tell the difference between someone who is glad to share a meal and someone using the meal to win them over. Warmth that expects nothing is rarer, and more persuasive, than warmth with a plan behind it.

Third, answerability. You are someone whose questions get answered, patiently and without a lecture.

And fourth, consistency over time. One good conversation does not move someone through the stages of change. What moves people is the accumulated weight of repeated, unforced exposure to a life that looks good. This is an infinite game. There is no final winning move. The aim of each conversation is not to convert. It is to stay a credible, trusted presence for the next one.

Now, the skill of answering questions without lecturing. A friend asks, “What do you even eat?” It is tempting to answer with the whole moral case. Don’t. Answer the question that was asked, at the length it was asked, and stop. If they want more, they will ask, and that is a good sign. It often means they are moving towards contemplation or preparation. Pre-empting it with unrequested depth is the pressure that triggers reactance.

A related skill is letting things pass. You do not need to correct every inaccurate thing you hear. Being corrected in public feels like being shown up, and the defensive response has nothing to do with whether you were right. Often the better move is to let your example do the correcting over time.

Then there is food. The best argument you have is a good meal, served without a speech. The most common objection to plant-based eating is not ethical. It is that people assume it tastes worse. That assumption is often built on one bad meal. So cook something genuinely delicious, and share it as hospitality, with no scorecard. If your guest thinks “that was good”, you have done more to make the alternative visible than any statistic could.

A few practical tips. Cook something familiar rather than exotic: a curry, a pasta, a pizza, a chilli. Put real effort into flavour, with salt, acid, spice and texture. Ask about allergies and tastes first. And bring enough to share, so that people can simply help themselves, without it feeling like a test.

If the person asking is a child, answer honestly and simply, without frightening them. Many young children feel sympathy for animals. In one small 2021 US study of four- to seven-year-olds, about four in ten sorted bacon as a plant food. Let their questions lead, and leave other families’ choices to them. If you are feeding children a vegan diet, ask a paediatrician or dietitian about planning and vitamin B12.

Finally, choose your conversations. You cannot, and should not, have every one. Decide in advance which are worth your energy. A close friend who asks a real question is. An anonymous stranger in a comment thread, usually, is not.

These are your Design tasks.

Define what a compassionate role model does.

Plan how you will answer questions without lecturing.

Prepare good plant-based food to share.

Set personal boundaries without judgement.

And choose which conversations are worth having.

Stage Four: Defend

Defend is where you move from plan to practice, and then keep it going. It has two halves. First, deliver: lead by example, in real conversations, with real people.

The central tool is motivational interviewing. Two psychologists, William Miller and Stephen Rollnick, developed it, first in addiction treatment. They noticed that confronting people about something they felt ambivalent about tended to make them more resistant. So they built an approach around helping people explore their own reasons for change.

It rests on four simple practices.

The first is open questions. Ask “What’s your thinking about how you eat these days?” rather than “Have you ever considered going vegan?” The first invites a real answer. The second invites a defence.

Here are some more open questions you can borrow. “What do you usually cook in the week?” “Have you ever tried anything plant-based that you liked?” “What would make it easier, if you ever wanted to eat a bit less meat?” None of them pushes. All of them hand the choice to the other person.

The second is affirmation. Recognise the other person’s effort and values, rather than hoping they will approve of yours.

The third is reflective listening. Say back, in your own words, what you heard. It sounds too simple to matter. In practice it helps people hear their own thinking, often for the first time.

For example, if someone says, “I like the idea, but my family would never go for it,” you might say, “So part of you is interested, and part of you is worried about how your family would react.” You have added nothing. You have simply let them hear what they said. Often they will carry on from there, and say the next thing themselves.

And the fourth is summarising. Gather up, at a natural moment, the reasons for and against that they have given. Do not add your own.

The idea underneath is called change talk. People are more persuaded by reasons they come up with themselves than by the same reasons from someone else. Much advocacy supplies the arguments. Motivational interviewing draws them out.

Next, hostility. Sometimes someone responds with anger, out of all proportion to anything you said. There are three responses.

First, do not match the escalation. Hostility answered with hostility produces more hostility, with no winner. Stay calm, and treat their anger as information about their state, not a verdict on you.

Second, gently name what is happening, and give the choice back. Something like: “I can see you feel strongly about this. I’m not trying to tell you what to do.”

Third, know when to stop. “Let’s leave it there for now.” Say it without resentment, so the door stays open and not just propped.

Then, supporting people who are trying. When someone decides to try, they need a different kind of help. Offer support without surveillance. Be available for practical questions: what can I use instead of this, where do I find that, what should I cook this week. Ask what has been hard and what has been easier than expected. Do not ask whether they have slipped up. People can tell when they are being accompanied and when they are being checked.

And celebrate partial change. Someone eating plant-based five days a week is causing meaningfully less harm than before. Meeting that with “but you’re still not fully vegan” punishes the effort, and tends to push them back. Treat partial change as real change.

Introduce people in transition to others who have made the change, too. Even a shared meal or a group chat helps more than individual encouragement.

One more delivery skill is knowing when not to debunk. In 2013, the programmer Alberto Brandolini observed what is now called Brandolini’s Law: it takes far more energy to refute misinformation than to produce it. So you cannot correct everything. Correct what is spreading in your own circle, where you can reach the same people the claim reached, and where the relationship can take it. Let the rest go. That is not surrender. It is triage.

And stay honest about your own side. Claims that flatter your cause deserve the same scrutiny as claims against it. A movement that reaches for a viral falsehood, because it spreads faster than the truth, eventually loses the credibility its true claims depend on.

Now the second half: defend. Its job is to keep all this alive, by watching for drift and relapse, and then going back to Discovery. Remember entropy. Nothing stays organised without upkeep, and that includes your patience.

Start with the hardest part: burnout. The psychotherapist Clare Mann, working with vegan clients, noticed a pattern and gave it a name. She calls it vystopia. It is the distress of seeing the scale of normalised animal cruelty, together with watching almost everyone you love carry on as normal. In her survey of 850 vegans, most reported some version of it. Anxiety, grief, a creeping difficulty seeing the good in people.

If this sounds familiar, you are not doing this wrong. It is a cost of having seen clearly. But left unmanaged, it leads straight to the anger this guide is trying to help you avoid. Mann’s conclusion is that the pain does not simply vanish. It can be redirected, from private grief into shared, deliberate action.

In practice, three things help. Community, so you are not carrying it alone. A bounded relationship with distressing material, because repeated, unmanaged exposure to graphic content tends to make it worse. And permission to grieve what you have lost, such as easy trust in people and the comfort of not knowing. If you feel overwhelmed, or low for a long time, please speak to your doctor or a qualified mental health professional.

That brings us to community. Back to Solomon Asch. In some of his variations, adding just one other person who gave the correct answer dramatically cut how many people went along with the group’s wrong one. A lone vegan at a family table is the one person facing unanimous pressure. A vegan in a visible community is in a different position.

Building a community does not need an organisation. It can be a regular shared meal, a group chat that offers real support rather than performative purity, or introducing people in transition to each other. The test is whether it is warm, and welcoming to people who are still finding their way. Be wary of any internal ranking of who is the strictest. That recreates the shaming dynamic you are trying to leave behind.

Then build a rhythm. Once a month, sit down for twenty minutes with your project. Look at your log. What worked? Where did you slip into old habits? Which conversations were worth it? Have you cooked for anyone lately? Did you protect your energy? Then adjust.

And watch for the warning signs of drift. A sharper tone. An unrequested lecture. A moment of contempt. These are not failures. They are signals to return to Discovery.

On your monthly review, a few questions are worth asking. Which conversation went best, and what did I do differently? Which went worst, and what was happening for me beforehand? Did I protect my energy, or run on empty? Is there someone I have been avoiding, or someone I have been pushing too hard? Write the answers in a comment on the Defend section, so you can see the pattern over the months.

Finally, there is a hopeful side to entropy. It is also the reason improvement exists at all. Nothing gets better on its own. Every good thing in this story, a repaired family relationship, a friend who tried a plant-based week and then another, a community worth joining, took someone paying the ongoing cost of effort. That is not evidence the cause is unusually hard. It is simply what building anything good requires.

Here is where the Habit Tracker fits. In Defend, the routines matter more than the plans. Set up a few small habits in the tracker, and log your check-ins honestly, including on bad days. Good ones are your monthly reflection, cooking for someone once a week, a daily pause before you react, and time set aside to look after yourself. A missed day is information, not failure. Over the months, your streaks will show you what is working.

Here are your Defend tasks.

Share food rather than arguments.

Use motivational interviewing with curious people.

Respond to hostility calmly.

Support people who are trying.

Celebrate small steps.

Reflect on conversations monthly.

Watch for drift back to anger or frustration.

Look after your own wellbeing.

Stay connected with supportive communities.

And log your check-ins and streaks in the Habit Tracker.

Putting It Together: A Sample Conversation

Let’s hear how this sounds in practice. Imagine a colleague, over lunch, says, “I could never be vegan. Don’t you miss cheese?”

The old approach would be to explain dairy farming. The new one sounds like this.

You say: “Sometimes, honestly. There are some good swaps now, though. What do you like most about cheese?”

They say: “Mostly pizza, to be fair. And a good cheeseboard.”

You say: “Pizza is easy to get right. I’d happily bring one over some time.”

Notice what you did. You answered the question that was asked, in two sentences. You asked an open question. And you offered food, with no speech attached. The conversation is still open. If they ask more, you can say more. If they do not, you have lost nothing.

Now imagine they turn hostile: “Honestly, you lot are so preachy.” You do not argue. You say: “Fair enough, I’d hate to be that. I’m not trying to tell you what to do.” And you move on to something else. That is the whole method in miniature.

The Six Cs

The four Ds are your method. The six Cs are different. They are the shared language that you and the people around you use while the change is happening. For each C, I will tell you what it means here, and how you can model it.

Compassion. Meet people where they are, with no shaming, guilt-tripping or anger. That includes meat-eaters, fellow vegans, and yourself. A conversation that goes badly is information, not a verdict. You model it by naming your own slips lightly and without drama.

Communication. Answer questions with curiosity, not lectures. Say what you need early and clearly, in the agreed place. For you and your fellow vegans, that is usually the shared Todoist project. You model it by asking a genuine question before you offer an opinion.

Capacity. Protect your own energy. You do not have to win every conversation or answer every comment. Be honest about the time and energy you have. You model it by sometimes saying, plainly, “I’m not up for this conversation today.”

Commitment. Live your values visibly and kindly. Do what you said you would do, or say early that you cannot. That applies to your pledge, your monthly reflection, and the dish you promised to bring. You model it by keeping small promises, because that makes the large ones believable.

Consideration. Respect other people’s choices, cultures and pace. Think about how your words will land before you say them, especially at a family meal, a wedding or a workplace lunch. Food carries memory and identity. You model it by treating someone’s table as theirs.

Consistency. Be the same calm role model online and offline, in good weeks and in bad. You model it by keeping your agreed routines going when no one is checking.

A tip for using the six Cs. Introduce them to your people early. Agree that anyone can name a C, gently, when things drift. “I think we’ve lost a bit of Consideration here” is far easier to hear than “You’re being rude.”

Leading Your People

You are not doing this alone, and you should not. The people around you, fellow vegans and the communities you belong to, can help a great deal. But they need to know how.

Start with the Support edition. It is called Veganism… Organised: Support, and it takes under ten minutes. It explains the six Cs, what you will expect of them, and what to do and avoid when working with you. It is written to be warm and practical, and it never blames them. Share it before you share anything else.

Then share your Todoist project with them. In Todoist, open the project and use the share option to invite people by email. Once they accept, they can see what is going on, add tasks and comments, and tick off what they have done. The Support edition shows them how.

When you share, be specific. Tell them what you are trying to do. Use your Dream task for this. Tell them what is useful: bringing good food, answering questions with curiosity, joining a monthly meal. And tell them what is not: lectures, shaming, correcting strangers online.

Then model it. People copy what leaders do more than what they say. If you slip, say so lightly. It makes it safe for everyone else to do the same.

Finally, say thank you, often and specifically. Visible contributions deserve to be noticed.

Next Steps

Here is what to do next.

If you have not already, set up your Organise Veganism project in Todoist, with its four sections. Add the tasks you heard, and enable the Habit Tracker integration. Write your one-sentence identity statement, and your Compassionate Role Model Pledge. Pick a date for your first monthly review, and put it in the calendar. Make it a recurring task, so that it comes back every month without you having to remember. Start small, and let the system carry the rest.

Start the conversation log this week. That is the single most useful thing you can do first.

Share the Support edition with your people, and invite them to the project.

If you would like the full picture, the evidence, the reasoning, and the research behind everything you heard today, read Veganism… Organised: Full. It goes into much more depth on every stage.

To continue learning, and to find the rest of the series, visit ravi8.com.

And one last time: if you are new to Todoist, please help me by signing up through my affiliate link, which you will find at ravi8.com. If my introducing you to Todoist helps you become more organised, please help make all the effort I’ve put into these books worthwhile by using my affiliate link. Disclosure: this is an affiliate link, so I may earn a commission at no extra cost to you.

Thank you for listening. What you are doing matters. You are choosing to lead with compassion, in a world that often rewards the opposite. Be patient with others. Be patient with yourself. And keep going.

Ravi Sandhu London