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Jim Cassio offers a series of free resource guides, including a Green Career Resource Guide. It’s somewhat technical and dry, and seems to draw much of its information from government sources, but if you’re looking for more information in the green sector, you may consider checking it out.

The beautiful thing about living more sustainably in your life is that it can start small. Once a new habit gains traction, you can add something to it. It’s like working out: Once you start building the muscle, your workout becomes that much easier. You can find several interesting examples of a youthful effort at creating new habits in today’s New York Times. At Oberlin’s SEED house — Students Experiment in Ecological Design — those taking a shower time themselves in an effort to reduce water use. Middlebury College is building a wood-chip powered plant in an effort to be carbon neutral by 2016.

In fact, universities across the country are coming up with green initiatives — providing abundant volunteer and, in some cases, paid opportunities for students and alumni to get hands-on experience pioneering new ways to live sustainably.

If you want to learn more, check out Grist on 15 Green Colleges and Universities and the Worldwatch Institute’s list of Campus Greening Initiatives. And if you’re a student, find out what’s going on at your campus and get involved. The skills and experience you gain will come in handy on your job search after you graduate.

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?