How to Find Your Sustainability Identity

Most career advice looks at what to do but to answer that we first need to reflect on who we are. In this article, we’ll share exercises you can complete to help define and progress your sustainability identity.

Sustainability action is often defined by a simplified to-do list featuring limited actions we should take focused on individual carbon footprints. This list can be useful, but it can hold us back. Imagine a fully sustainable future: that’s not solely nurtured by people tweaking their carbon footprint. It’s a society-wide change of all scales. It’s everyone participating across every sector, every role, every format, in so many ways that it becomes wonderfully hard to imagine it all.

That’s where our sustainability identity comes in.

Because the best way for anyone to have a sustainability impact is to identify their unique role and contribution. Not someone else’s story they’re trying to mimic: their own.

What creates a sustainability identity?

Depiction of a personal sustainability journey and the factors that help progress it.

At Change Agents UK, we talk a lot about how we each walk our own ‘sustainability journey’. On the graphic above, you can see what we gather on that journey:

1.       Interests: what do we truly care about and love?

2.       Values: how do we want to be? What culture will we align with?

3.       Experience: which parts of our personal experience have shaped us?

4.       Skills: what strengths do we have to offer?

5.       Knowledge: what do we wish to learn?

All of which then helps form our sustainability identity. In this article, we’ll go through each element and share exercises you can complete to help define, progress, and own your sustainability identity.

1.     Interests: what do we truly care about and love?

This is our ‘why’ - the fuel that carries us forward and is arguably the most important part of our sustainability identity. A desire to care for the planet is a great starting place but here, we want specifics that can help us to define our own route.

Exercise: what change do you want?

With this exercise it’s important to remove judgement: your answers may not be aligned with ‘classic’ sustainability terminology or a specific job title. They are more important and expansive. We’ve heard answers vary from wanting deep sea mining to stop encroaching on indigenous communities, through to wishing adults had more scope to be imaginative and playful. Allow what comes out.

Spend a minute reflecting on and writing answers to the questions below:

1. If you could change any one thing in the world, without risk of failure, what would it be? Remember, be as specific as possible with this answer.

2. Now imagine: if that thing has changed, what would that future look and feel like? What is different? Again, be specific. You may want to draw this one out.

3. What role would you love to play both in that future and in the path towards it?

4. Reflect on your answers. What are the signposts that come from them?

2.     Values: how do we want to be? What culture will align for us?

Personal values are our deepest core beliefs and principles that guide our decisions, our goals, and even our relationships. Values rarely show up in a job title, or a CV (though they should!), but they’re kind of a personal guidebook towards action living aligned to what is most important and meaningful to us.

Exercise: Identify your values

Consider your ideal self. What would your principles be? What would you prioritise and stand for? This may be equality, health, authenticity, adventure, ethics, family, silliness. Let whatever words come to you arise. Then narrow it down to the 3-5 values that are most important.

Reflect on your answers. How can you reflect these values in your life and behaviour? Identify one way you can practise each value over the next week.

If you want more clarity, try this Human Values Test by the IDR Lab, based on Schwartz’ Theory of Universal Values.

3.     Experience: which parts of our life have shaped us?

A career focus sometimes result in our dismissing of important personal experiences, which could be significant in your identity and impact. If a part of your life has stuck with you, there’s a reason for it. We’re not saying they’ll all be relevant in a job application, but they are part of your identity more broadly, so deserve a consideration in your sustainability identity too.

Exercise: Your Defining Experiences

Identify two experiences for each of these questions below. Note, they do not need to be flashy or movie-worthy: sometimes the smallest things matter most.

1. What was it that made you passionate about sustainability? If possible, describe the specific moment and why it mattered to you.

2. What experiences have most shaped who you are? These could be moments, encounters, good or bad. How have they equipped you?

3. In what moments have you felt the most joyful, excited or purposeful? Try to pinpoint what factors made them so impactful.

Reflect on your answers. What can you learn from your journey so far, to shape how to move into the future? What experiences do you wish to seek?

4.     Skills: what strengths do we have to offer?

Now we get to the more classic focus of identity, especially professional identity: skills. Technical skills are important however in sustainability, employability and our overall impact, our transferrable skills can be most useful and defining.

Transferrable skills can be harder to identify, rarely attached to a qualification – but common ones include creativity, clear communication, self-awareness, organisation. Knowing your skillset knows where you should be contributing.

Exercise: Inner Development Goals

The Inner Development Goals are an interdisciplinary, international guide highlighting 25 abilities, qualities or skills we need to foster among individuals, groups and organisations to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals. We love them for this because they highlight valuable but often overlooked skills.

This exercise is simple: look at the 25 skills on the framework below and identify the 3-5 that you are best at.

Reflect on your answer. Where are your skills best directed to? What environment can you use them?

The Inner Development Goals guide.

5.     Knowledge: what do we wish to learn?

We saved knowledge for last. It’s often the first thing we define ourselves by, but gaining knowledge should be targeted: to support our growth, sate our curiosity or progress a goal we have. Any learning can be valuable, but so is our time, so it’s best to focus.

Exercise: Curiosity Mapping

Curiosity maps are great visual tools to map your learning interests and pathways. Rather than being restricted to one subject, it holistically includes learning of all sizes and topics. To make a curiosity map, follow these steps:

1. On a (large) piece of paper, write down anything you’re interested in or curious about. Don’t be restrictive – hobbies, professional questions, existential ponders or random facts are all welcome.

2. Translate the topics into open questions that allow space for longer-term exploration. Open questions often start with “why”, “what if”, or “how”.

3. Highlight the ones that feel relevant to your sustainability journey. Again, don’t censor – they may be surprising links.

Reflect on your map. Prioritise one or two of those areas linked to sustainability. What knowledge do you already have? What is one step you can take to learn more?

Daily steps aligned to your identity

One useful metaphor for the sustainability journey is the idea is that we may meet other people on the path, but we’ve all come from different routes, and we will in turn all take different turns in the future to shape our own impact. No route is better or worse than another, and following someone else’s route could get us lost, so we need to know and hold strong to the path we are forging and the destination (impact) we’re trying to reach. Knowing our sustainability helps us in holding strong while directing the route, and giving us a stronger sense of purpose and fulfilment each day that we walk forward.

Sustainability identities help us to see and communicate the unique contributions we have to offer and be part of the holistic future we want to nurture. We hope these exercises have helped you to clarify some of the key aspects that define your sustainability identity and give you a stronger compass for living by it.