Starting Sustainable – Suggestions on where to start when looking for new, sustainable actions to take
When hosting the This Sustainable Life: Solve For Nature podcast, I’m frequently helping others try to find personal challenges in sustainability. The goal is always to find a challenge that aligns with my guest’s values. This means focusing on my guest’s experiences in nature and what they love to feel in those environments, and then help guide them towards a challenge that would manifest those feelings in their lives even more.
This is harder to do than it sounds, because you have to leave your own values at the door.
Leaders guide, not command
Just to recap the methodology that we use on the This Sustainable Life podcasts, we walk our guests through these four steps:
- Describe what nature means to you – what feelings do you feel in nature? What do you value about nature?
- Is there anything you can think of that you could do to manifest those feelings in your life more?
- Make it a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound)
- Set a follow-up date to hear how it went
It’s in step 2 that I meet the most resistance. Many of the guests feel like they just can’t think of anything other than picking up litter or eat less meat. It’s understandable, we hear these a lot from news media as “simple things you can do for the environment.” My goal is to try to lead them towards a challenge that is more based on their own values – not the news media’s or mine.
This means guiding them towards a challenge that YOU haven’t selected or directed them towards. That means no judgment or suggestions.I find that if you suggest different kinds of challenges, they will often just pick one of the ones you suggested, which doesn’t necessarily align with the values that they themselves described, and probably won’t bring them more of those feelings into their lives.
This has always put me into a difficult spot: how do you encourage out-of-the-box thinking and getting away from “picking up litter” and “going vegetarian”? Picking up litter and going vegetarian are both great challenges if they make your life better and manifest more of your values into your life, but I find that more often they’re used to evade when someone can’t think of something that aligns with their feelings and values.
My goal is to get my guests into a mental sandbox: a place with freedom to roam and be creative, but with walls that keep them going too far outside of the box and getting them into a place where everything seems too pie-in-the-sky and impossible. There’s one way I’ve been thinking about to offer more “thought-flexibility” to my future guests.
Give them some tools in the sandbox
Instead of offering challenges past guests have done, instead framing different types of challenges that can be done. By offering types of challenges, it might jump start their brain into thinking of things they hadn’t already without actually offering them a challenge to take on. For example:
- Replacement Challenge: replacing something unsustainable in your life with something more sustainable. It could be an action (biking instead of driving), or an actual object (single use plastics with something reusable). I give these examples here to illustrate the idea, but I woudn’t necessarily give them to the guests.
- Augmentation Challenge: Taking something you already do and making it more sustainable. For example, adding picking up trash to your weekly walk to school, or using your computer more instead of paper when you’re at work.
- Time-Based Challenge: Often my guests think that whatever they decide to do, they’ll have to do it forever. Time-based challenges mean they could try to do something for a week. Or one day a week. It takes the pressure off of making permanent changes, though I always hope that doing the challenge for a short time might open them up to doing it more.
Know any more?
I’m not sure this will achieve the results I want, but it sounds like a good idea to me right now. What do you think? Would those 3 frames make selecting a challenge be any easier? Can you think of any more types of challenges? I’m always open to more ideas.
Josh, I hope you’re out there reading this, and I’d love to hear your input as well. Having done this methodology with literally hundreds of people, I’m sure you have a much better sense on this than I do.
If anyone out there is interested in going through selecting a sustainability challenge, feel free to send me an email or message! I’d love to walk you through it. You can even start by listening to my podcast (in the links above).
Thanks for reading everyone!
3 thoughts on “Starting Sustainable – Suggestions on where to start when looking for new, sustainable actions to take”
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I was thinking about something related: how to answer a question every interviewer asks, as if they can’t stop themselves: “What’s one thing everyone can start with?”
For context, people don’t pollute and deplete because they want to pollute. We do things we value and enjoy that our culture has made polluting and depleting necessary to do. Our culture has also engineered those activities to trigger the mechanisms of addiction. We are addicted to doof, social media, flying, etc. We don’t think of flying as taking us away from families, making businesses less secure, or homogenizing cultures, but it does. Nonetheless, being addicted, we protect it, feeling like it helps what it hurts.
My point, answering what simple things people can start with is like asking what simple things an addict can do to get off heroin or cigarettes. The question frames the problem in a way doomed to fail as much as “Just say no” failed. People weren’t saying yes to drugs that ultimately hurt them because they didn’t know they could say no. They said yes to them because they anticipated they’d solve a problem.
It’s more challenging with polluting and depleting because the person flying or using disposable diapers gets the benefit while someone on the other side of the world suffers. It’s like smoking where you get the joy and someone else gets cancer, or heroin where you get the euphoria and someone else gets HIV and hepatitis. Also, literally every person I’ve spoken to in years pollutes and depletes more than I do and promotes polluting and depleting more. It’s like trying to kick an addiction while everyone I know is a pusher.
Framed with something more comfortable than addiction is how to change behavior at the lifestyle level. Say someone wants to learn to play basketball or piano. You don’t look for one little trick. You know you have to practice, practice, practice, and that’s just the start. You need role models and a supportive community. You have to figure out diet, sleep, and how to handle injuries, periods of depression or discouragement, poor performances, and other setbacks. You have to learn to connect hard work today and for weeks with the rewards of a great performance, self-awareness, teamwork, and reaching your potential.
In the case of polluting and depleting, it helps to connect your sustainability work with benefiting others. I call helping innocent people through your own work love, so it helps to see that what feels like deprivation and sacrifice are actually love, but people who are addicted see it as withdrawal and pain.
That’s a really good point. I think we all want to look for silver bullets for everything we do. One thing that we can do that will make everything easy. In particular, our culture right now is just all about immediate gratification brain stimulation.
Fast food is taste without nutrition. Social media is “friends” without real connection.
We’re engineering everything for brain stimulation without any actual real substance.
Real happiness and real value comes from the things in life that are hard to achieve. They’re satisfying BECAUSE they’re hard to achieve.
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