What about Personal Sustainability?

Sustainability is one of the buzz words of our time. Save the planet… sustainable resources… environmental awareness… social responsibility… renewable energy… carbon footprint… these are all words that have become part of our daily vocabulary and thank goodness, very much a part of our children’s too.

But what about personal sustainability?

Why aren’t we talking about that more? We are not a limitless resource. The negative effects of stress have been spoken about for years, but we don’t discuss personal sustainability nearly enough.

Stress is never going to go away completely, but we can renew ourselves by taking care and by managing our stress. We speak about work-life balance, but how many of us are actively ensuring that? We need to be more responsible about personal sustainability.

Our personal sustainability, like environmental sustainability, relies on us making sure that we’re acting with our long-term wellbeing in mind and not settling for short-term trade-offs. No one ever got to their death bed and wished they had worked longer hours, and yet, being busy seems to be something to aspire to. Telling people you’re ‘so busy!’ seems to be a badge of success that we wear with pride and a status people admire. But we are busy getting ready to live, getting ready to be happy, and often so caught up in the busyness, that we are not living at all.

Somewhere along the line we have developed a goal setting mindset that makes us feel we are eternally seeking that holy grail and so we kill ourselves for a destination instead of appreciating the journey that life is all about. We always seem to be delaying happiness – we are not thin yet, not financially stable enough to have children yet. We are not ready to live yet because we are in a perpetual state of getting ready to be happy. The cemetery of squandered potential is filled with people who just had to do something first, before they could live. We could live now but instead we choose to wait until tomorrow.

But what if there is no tomorrow?

We need to consciously focus on our personal sustainability by finding meaning and purpose in our daily lives, and enjoying our journey. Being present and mindful are critical components of personal sustainability and we need to ensure we are conscious about it.

Cut back on our work hours, say no when you really need to say no, carve out time for things that make you happy and are good for you, eat properly, stop and smell the roses, spend time with the people who matter, stop waiting and saying, ‘not yet’. Be present.

When we can get those things right, we are taking responsibility for our personal sustainability and suddenly the journey becomes the more important part of our lives and allows us to have a more fulfilling, present, satisfying, joyful, and sustainable existence.