frankwork

I was in Boise this past weekend for a wedding, and noticed signs all over town for the Idaho Green Expo. It reminded me, yet again, of the breadth of opportunities in the green sector. Let’s start with the list of 150 Exhibitors, divided into nine categories, from greening your home and garden to arts and culture. Carpet cleaners, solar-powered lawn care, energy efficiency building materials companies, investment companies, and advocacy organizations are all attending. Some 80 Seminars cover everything from business recycling and sustainable investing to chlorine-free swimming pools and water conservation.

If you’re looking for a green career, events like these bring together an optimum combination of experts and small and large businesses. You can learn about what’s happening locally, network with experts, see new models of green businesses that may fuel your own entrepreneurial brainstorming, and meet people who, very possibly, are doing the job they one day would like to do (or can connect them with somebody who is). They are great places to do informal informational interviews, as well as meet people you can follow up with for more in-depth information interviewing once the event has ended. Here’s a quick list of three ways to make the most of a green expo:

1. Study the program before you attend. Figure out what booths you want to stop in at and what seminars you want to see. If there’s somebody at one of these booths, or leading a session, who you’d like to get to know, carefully think of a couple of questions to help get information you want and start a conversation.

2. Expos tend to be exhausting for those who attend, so when you talk to people, get a card and ask if you can follow up with questions after the event ends. Often, people will say sure, and you’ll be able to leave the event with a dozen or more people to follow up with for future informational interviewing.

3. Get involved. Green Expos, including the Green Festivals (which are the largest), tend to offer abundant opportunities for people to volunteer. By getting involved, you’ll have a chance to get to know others who are similarly committed to sustainability, build your resume, and get a deeper education about what’s going on in the sustainability arena locally than you might simply be attending.

Every so I often I read something and a great “a-ha” goes off in my head as it did this morning at this passage, from a New York Times article Can You Become a Creature of New Habits:

“Whenever we initiate change, even a positive one, we activate fear in our emotional brain,” Ms. Ryan notes in her book. “If the fear is big enough, the fight-or-flight response will go off and we’ll run from what we’re trying to do. The small steps in kaizen don’t set off fight or flight, but rather keep us in the thinking brain, where we have access to our creativity and playfulness.”

I often find myself trying to achieve huge new goals. After a promising start, I come up against something, and I seem to shrink from the task, afraid to continue — it’s a kind of black out of activity. Now I’m curious about what kind of continuous improvement (kaizen) regimen might be right for me. Have others out there tried this?

I don’t often hear people talking about integration in the workplace. Instead it’s something that comes up frequently in conversations about personal work. With new insight about who you are, you need time to integrate those lessons. You may backslide — two steps forward, one step back — but the consistent effort to observe yourself, to understand the source of your behaviors, provides an enhanced awareness that can help you reach a more satisfying, less anxious experience in your everyday life, such as in communication with loved ones, bosses, friends, and strangers.

But there’s also an integration that goes on at both a micro and macro level in the world of professional work. Individually, we develop new skills and areas of expertise over time, growing more competent as our career progresses — gaining promotions, new levels of responsibility, greater confidence in our ability to achieve results.

A level up, though, organizations and indeed entire industries take time to integrate new ideas, whether they relate to social marketing, green behavior, the Internet, or any other business trend. The integration happens over time, through reading industry publications, attending conferences, watching competitors. We start to spot new opportunities, new ways of dealing with old challenges.

Recognizing that we need time to integrate, individually, departmentally, organizationally is a way to acknowledge that growth occurs in stages. In a fast-paced organization or career, stepping back to recognize, observe, and have patience with this process can give us a sense of comfort and alleviate some of the anxiety that comes with the constant effort to adapt to and deal with the inevitability of change.

Is this the way that you wanted to pay
Won’t you show me, please show me the way

Whether intended or not, the beautiful ambiguity to the lyrics of New Order’s 1981 single “Everything’s Gone Green” sure seem to speak to the challenge we face today: Do we pay with ever-increasing amounts of toxic byproduct, pollution, and ecosystem degradation or will somebody come along and show us a different — a greener — way?

To do so means we need leaders, and the good news is we have a growing number, people like Prince Charles with his vision for eco-towns or Julio Cusurichi Palacios, working for indigenous rights in the Amazon, or the Pachamama Alliance’s effort to make Ecuador into an environmental state. The job of such leaders is to pioneer new ways of imaging the world, develop new models for shaping our society, new ways to organize ourselves, new institutions for solving our problems.

As people have woken up to the urgency of problems like global warming, green has entered the mainstream big time, with every major magazine seeming to produce an annual green issue, newspapers covering the topic with regularity, even NBC celebrating Earth Week. With so much press, it’s no surprise some people are talking about a backlash, worried if not outright complaining about green fatigue. Such complaints are fossil-fueled with the amount of greenwashing going on now — witness TerraChoice’s evaluation of 1,018 environmental claims, with only 7 not committing at least one greenwashing sin. No wonder there’s so much doubt and suspicion.

But my contention is that green is here to stay. We are rapidly moving toward a point where the whole issue of green is part of our operating system, something we take for granted the way we take Windows or Mac OS X. In this sense, it’s also like the Internet, which had its memorable coming out part from 1997 to 2000 or so, then crashed — but stuck around, integrated into our lives. The press on green today shows that green, too, is enjoying its time in the spotlight, but even once it’s out of the spotlight, it won’t go away. Just like the coming generation can’t imagine living without ATMs, iPods, or text messaging, green is becoming one of the ways we interact with the world, and in time it will be more fully integrated into everything we do, into who we are.

So has everything gone green? Maybe not yet, but it will, and we won’t need a color to recognize it.

Three quick self-promotional announcements. If you’re in the San Francisco Bay Area and want to learn about how to make your career green, check out my Green Your Career workshop, scheduled for May 27th.

Second, WetFeet’s guide to Green Careers is out, and you can buy your copy here. And third, for a preview of information in the Green Careers guide, check out my feature article in Pepperdine’s Career Network newsletter.

One of my working challenges, if not my primary working challenge, is how to reproduce the energy I feel when I’m in an office when I’m working for myself at a coffee shop or at home. The freedom of working for myself is satisfying, but I find myself often unable to shake a sense that, in the absence of a deadline, my urgency is less than it could be. Do others face this issue? How do you resolve it?

If you’re like me — confused by what exactly clean tech includes, who it serves, and how it’s defined — then check out this 2008 Greentech Market Taxonomy from Greentech Media. The chart displays a vast array of product and service solutions that includes water, energy storage, power generation, transportation, and more targeting individual, residential, industrial, government, utility, and commercial customers.

From a job seeker perspective, it shows that the range of companies you could work for is vast. And if you are looking for work in this sector, you might start by checking out the companies in Greentech Media’s list to the Top Ten Startups (the article includes quite a few other companies as well).

Everything starts somewhere, but those first phases – the nurturing the seed so that it sprouts, and then nurturing the vulnerable sprout so that it is rooted and strong – have always challenged me. I have no problem coming up with ideas, recognizing the seeds of some possible business venture, book, or career path, but it’s nurturing those seeds so that they sprout where I run up against a set of personal challenges.

In some respects I see these challenges as demons, haunting my efforts toward meaningful, personally satisfying action. But I realize their role is subtle, more complicated. The demons reflect my own internal neediness, for love, support, appreciation, recognition, and security. They are teachers as much as demons, because they are feeding on feelings such as doubt, confusion, and fear. In my inability, unwillingness, or stubborn refusal to address the fact of my insecurity and vulnerability, I am confronted, over and over again, by their phantoms.

Seeds knowingly come in multitudes, as if anticipating the problem of nurturance. Think of the 50 million sperm that seek the egg in the magic dance of conception. Their abundance would seem to confirm the natural world’s attitude toward starting anything: It’s not easy or, perhaps: Of multitudes, one.

This recognition doesn’t keep me from at times obsessive self-criticism regarding my failures to nurture so many promising possibilities – the real estate investment I didn’t make that would have paid off handsomely, the novel I didn’t write that would have been handbook to these times we’re in, the journalism career I didn’t follow because of some unreasonable opposition to the nature of newspaper storytelling. These are not exactly regrets, because the choice I made felt right at the time or (with regards to the novel) I simply didn’t have the discipline to carry the idea through. But I can also see that the demons played no small role: Fear, self-doubt, confusion crippling my ability to make a choice other than the one I made.

And they build on their successes. A fresh failure provides fresh ground for a new round of self-criticism, self-recrimination, or straight up self-flagellation. These are mental acts, done in total silence, automatic. The mind simply replays the script, reinforcing a belief that has, inside it, confidence only in failure. It is a false but powerful belief, a kind of mental demagogue.

What’s harder to fathom is that the failures are okay, essential to any creative act. It’s the most natural thing in the universe for seeds not to sprout. It’s a miracle when they do. The obstacles are, in fact, real, even when they are merely phantoms; that they are intangible has no bearing on their force.

Watching the demons work – which is easily enough done by listening to the ever-present, silent-to-the-world-but-endless stream of chattering going on inside my head – I gain some measure of power. I can acknowledge they exist. I can recognize them, be patient with them, be kind, as I would be to any child. I can watch them with a wider awareness. And by doing this it’s my hope I can more effectively get started, nurture one of the trillion-gazillion seeds within me. I can override the most damaging messages of my demons, but perhaps more importantly start to offer them what they need, which is merely the emotional nourishment that I need, but am afraid to ask others for or too absorbed in the demons’ chatter to provide myself.

Yesterday I went to a day-long seminar with Tsultrim Allione, who presented about her new book Feeding Your Demons. The concept behind the book is that when we feed our demons, rather than fight them, they become our allies, and it strikes me as a highly useful skill in the world of work. On the way to the office this morning (aka the coffee shop), I found myself contemplating my specific workplace demons. There’s the demon of procrastination, the demon of self-doubt, the demon of fear-I-don’t-know-enough, the demon of confusion-about-what-to-do, the demon of fear-of-calling-people, the demon of annoyance-at-coworkers. Then there are the yet-to-be-identified demons behind all of these.

The practice for feeding the demons draws on ancient Buddhist practice. When we resist a demon, we give it power over us, stoking our fear of it (and its power over us). Yet this is often what we do. Allione used Hercules second labor as a metaphor for what happens when we fight or go to war with our demons. In this labor, Hercules fought the hydra, but each time he sliced off this multi-headed created, two more heads emerged. Finally he used a flaming branch to close the heads before new ones popped out but the main head was immortal, impossible to kill, so this one — after slaying the body — he covered under a rock. Her point in using this story is that even if we do manage to defeat a demon in battle, the best we can do is hide it under a rock. Push the rock and it pops up ready to fight again.

But if you feed the demon — give the demon what it wants, which is often love, respect, attention — then you help it meet its needs, and its reason to fight you dissolves. In its place, you may find an ally

A few days ago I wrote a post about big consulting firms, most of whom are starting to elbow themselves into the sustainability consulting market. If you’re looking for a job in sustainability consulting, places like Boston Consulting Group, A.T. Kearney, Accenture, and McKinsey all have growing practices. However, I think much of the innovative work in the sustainability consulting market is likely to be work performed by boutique firms over the next couple of years. Blu Skye Consulting in San Francisco, for example, is doing particularly interesting, deep work with Wal-Mart. There are a host of other firms that are positioning themselves to be players in the carbon trading market. And many of the people who are best educated on sustainability work for themselves or in small, boutique groups — such as Hunter Lovins at Natural Capitalism, Inc., Amory Lovins at the Rocky Mountain Institute, and William McDonough and Michael Braungart at McDonough Braungart Design Chemistry (which is now hiring a chemist and a project manager.) Then you’ve got all kinds of other boutiques, around the country: Strategic Sustainability Consulting in Maryland; Domani in New York, Chicago, and Denver; YRG Sustainability Consultants in New York and Denver; Natural Logic in the SF Bay Area, and many, many more. If you want a career in sustainability consulting, check out the boutiques — in a new market like sustainability, many of these have the equivalent, if not deeper, experience than the major firms.