Personal
It can be challenging to bring about lasting personal behavior change.
Following are strategies that leaders can use to strengthen their personal efforts to model sustainable behavior:
Make a personal commitment. Making and keeping sustainability commitments to oneself is the basis of making and keeping such commitments to others. The process of making a personal sustainability commitment includes some of the same steps that Green Team leaders, members, and partners take in establishing their team.
Steps to assist in making a personal commitment include:
- Clarify your personal purpose in pursuing a more sustainable life.
Ensure that your purpose is well-aligned with sustainable objectives.
- Understand your own sustainability values.
Identify the perspective you bring to work and your community every day.
The following is a sample of questions that you can ask yourself to uncover your own motivations for change:
- How are your personal interests connected with environmental, social, and economic sustainability issues? For example, someone passionately interested in economic prosperity may want to obtain a deeper understanding of how saving resources equates to saving money. Those passionately interested in personal health may want to obtain a deeper understanding of how sustainable food systems, access to healthy outdoor environments, and clean air affects their personal health and those around them. Those who are concerned about social equity may want to obtain a deeper understanding of how climate change or water quality can impact resource conflicts and major populations.
- What is your personal sustainability impact? For example, you might want to calculate your personal carbon or water footprint (or both). You might also want to quantify the cost of personal expenses related to sustainability, such as home utilities or commuting costs, and note how these costs have changed over time.
- Set personal sustainability goals.
Ensure that the goals align with your personal purpose and context. Use the information gathered in earlier steps to identify areas where your purpose, interests, and constraints can enable and motivate you to make a positive contribution in addressing big sustainability challenges.
Change personal habits. Other people cannot know our intentions; they can only interpret how we behave. In order to influence their colleagues, Green Team members must first model desired behavior. Using your personal commitment, identify some simple sustainability habits that you can easily adopt. Once you’ve mastered these new habits, identify new, more challenging habits. Create and build momentum and ultimately your mastery of personal behavior change can allow you to lead by example and inspire others to do the same.
Gain knowledge. The body of sustainability knowledge is expanding daily, so continuing sustainability education and knowing the facts are essential strategies for a sustainability leader and behavior change agent. This education may include information in one of two general topic areas: raising awareness and developing skills.
Following are some suggestions specifically related to sustainability education:
- Organize or participate in lunch-and-learn sessions at site. These could be designed to develop new technical skills for small groups of post staff or to raise awareness about new sustainability challenges for larger groups.
- Consider offering a variety of brief sustainability education sessions in conjunction with new employee orientation. These sessions could help new staff identify specific sustainability challenges and opportunities presented at post, as well as raise awareness about how they can help address them. Separate sessions could be offered to site staff families to help them adjust to local sustainability issues in their homes.
- Take advantage of online professional education through organizations such as the International Facility Management Association (IFMA). Online training from reputable organizations is a high-quality and low-carbon alternative to classroom training.
- Encourage partnerships that support shared training. Don’t overlook the value of training for suppliers and vendors, who may be interested in learning about such resources.
- Investigate formal education. Universities and colleges around the world are now offering courses remotely that address sustainability through social, environmental, and economic lenses. These resources can be valuable both for raising awareness and for skill development by all members of the post community.
According to Climate Outreach and Information Network: A Practitioners guide to the psychology of sustainable behavior, a person has to identify a goal (e.g. drive less), a behavior in pursuit of that goal (e.g. get the bus to work on Fridays) and the situation that will trigger the behavior (e.g. having enough time to catch the bus)