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:

1. Describe what nature means to you - what feelings do you feel in nature? What do you value about nature?
2. Is there anything you can think of that you could do to manifest those feelings in your life more?
3. Make it a SMART (specific, measurable, achievable, realistic, and time-bound)
4. 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!