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SUSTAINABILITY

SIMPLIFIED

SIMPLIFYING SUSTAINABILITY

If you’ve found your way to this take action theme then you’re probably interested in demystifying sustainability. Taking the great big wicked complex idea that is sustainability (real sustainability not the green-washed version you see in marketing) and working it from its abstract wicked-complex context, to simple values based actionable plans for your Sustainable Self to successfully enact.

The content we cover this month ties together the approach we take to guide your year of sustainable action in our Self-Coaching planner, with some of the free resources that exist on this website.

Join us now as we start with an exploration of what sustainability REALLY means (in its wicked complex glory), understand how your Sustainable Self fits into the picture, identify what your values are and how they can be used as a navigational system, and scale the wicked complexity back to simple, easy to implement actionable steps for sustainable living success. 

The outcome?

Your Sustainable action plan simplified!

Let’s get started. 

TAKE ACTION

This post is your part of our  ‘Sustainability Simplified’ content. If you love it, click the ‘back’ button for more information about living life in Sustainable Style.

SCALING ACTION

As we start to pull all the pieces of the simplifying sustainability puzzle together, we contemplate Values Motivator’s, Sustainable Self and Scale.  So far we’ve unpacked just how complicated navigating sustainability news, media and advertising can be, explored the challenges of macro-scale global sustainability, and addressed how you can rein your action plan in to focus on what you value most. Now we share a simple and effective tool for scalable action.

The final stop on the path of simplifying sustainability is our 4 G’s approach to dealing with scale and Sustainable Self scope. Nope, it’s got nothing to do with cellular communications, however, the prevalence of the term 4G is a handy tool for anchoring this process to memory. Instead, it’s a super simple guide to scaling grandiose ideas down to go-for-it actionable daily steps.

The grandiose scale is generally macro-scale issues that are of interest to you or prevalent in popular media. These issues will likely be of high importance or urgency. Your ability to affect change at this level will be limited. Despite this, many of us will begin our sustainability missions trying to directly solve these large-scale issues- biting off far more than we could ever chew! We’ve used a truckload of bananas as a visual, sure you might manage to eat a truckload of bananas in a lifetime. However, the reality is that this is way too much for one person to eat within the shelf life of the bananas. 

Great scale things are still large (think about the Great Wall of China), however they are a step down from grandiose scale ideas. Some of us will achieve great things, but many of these great things require the commitment of resources (i.e., time, money, knowledge). Which is why you might have heard the idea of ‘a lifetime of greatness’. You may work towards great things on your life-long sustainability mission, you might even have accomplishments at the grandiose scale. This is something we might identify when viewing Attenborough’s lifetime of great accomplishments in its totality, we also see Greta Thunberg’s trajectory headed towards grandiose scale. However, we need to remember that while occasionally one person can make great or grandiose changes within a short timeframe, most life or world-changing accomplishments take time and effort. Which is why we need to mindfully consider how much we can offer from our social, economic, and environmental resources without losing balance of Sustainable Self.  Our ‘great’ scale is represented by a fridge full of bananas. Eating a refrigerators worth of banana’s is a potentially achievable feat however it’s not likely to be done within the shelf-life of the bananas. If you did eat a fridge full of bananas within their shelf-lifespan you might feel physically unwell, be craving more variety and balance, and your family and friends might be sick of sharing in or hearing about your banana diet. It’s fantastic to aim for this greatness but take it slow and do it in a way that’s balanced and enjoyable.    

The good scale is the place where good ideas live on the path to achieving greatness. The word ‘good’ evokes a sense of being comfortable. We don’t feel overwhelmed by it and it’s not going to put us out. In fact, many of us aspire to living a good life and would happily work towards things we deem to be ‘good’ within the week, month, quarter or year. We know that the day-to-day is more nuanced than things being blanketed in ‘good’. There are highs and lows that sit outside the comfort of the term good, and this is what makes life enjoyable and challenging. On your sustainability journey your good ideas or aspirations are the ones you can work towards within a time frame. They sit comfortably with your available resources, don’t result in eco-overwhelm and contribute to achieving great things. In this example, our bananas are in a beautiful bowl on the countertop in a quantity that reflects what a general household might eat during a regular week. 

The go-for-it scale are the simple steps and acts you can take on the day-to-day to work towards ideas at the good and great scale, feeding into large scale (grandiose) world-wide sustainability accomplishments. These steps might seem simple or tiny, but when selected with scale-up purpose and founded areas that you REALLY care about based on your Values Motivators they speak volumes over time! The go-for-it scale is as simple as going to that bowl of bananas on the counter and picking up what you can eat in a day. 

It’s as simple as taking a large-scale idea, assessing it based on your values and your available time, space, commitments and resources, and breaking it down into manageable steps.

YOUR FREE WORKSHEET

You can download your free worksheet with our 4G’s framework. It was shared as part of our New Year New ConsYOUmer Take Action theme

OUR FREE MAGAZINE

Have you seen our monthly magazine ‘Live Life in Sustainable Style’?

It’s the comprehensive monthly highlight of the suite of tools we have designed to help simplify sustainability so you can take action on the things you care about (minus the eco-overwhelm). The content ties together our ‘Take Action’ focus theme. In a fast-paced media-saturated landscape, we hope that this way of sharing will provide you access to all our useful tools, without feeling lost or overwhelmed. Each month the latest copy of the magazine and our most recent resources are sent to your inbox (you will only receive one email a month from us). You will get reminders via our social media channels of what content we’re championing throughout the month.

We hope that you enjoy getting your Sustainable Style fix in this easy-to-read format and that it gives you a break from the abundance of social media updates and overflowing inboxes we now navigate daily

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