This year the German ethical bank GLS Bank organised the sustainability blog awards to honour sustainability bloggers for their efforts to tackle climate change in Germany. Anna and me - co- directors of FindingSustainia- found ourselves nominated in this league of ambitious and inspiring sustainability bloggers. You may imagine how thrilled we are to be awarded the title "Best Sustainability Bloggers in Germany" for our Think & Action Lab, a journey that has started in 2010 and has ever since filled our lives with purpose, and also quite a bit of complexity.
We were blissfully unaware of what we were comitting ourselves to when we started our self-challenge journey and documented our progress on the blog. Very soon, with people starting to follow and co-challenge themselves alongside of us, we realised that we were not just doing this for us but that we had become part of a community - a community that started to rely on us for guidance, inspiration and solutions. As a lawyer and political scientist we had been used to applying a bird's perspective in our work - it was "them", and suddenly it was "us".
The same, with differences
What still strikes us is that we didn't really know each other when starting this project. We share a surname and a professional and personal interest in sustainability - and yet we managed that all that differentiates us from each other enriches our project. Just because we want it this way.
We believe a big part of what pulled us so close together is that we both committed ourselves to leave our comfort zones and explore possibilities TOGETHER. We chose to give our best to be the change we'd like to see in the world - but that didn't mean it was always easy. Going through this journey together, only the other could really understand the complexity of undergoing a different challenge every month and organising our lives around these challenges alongside our private and professional lives. The strenght of "us" as part of a community helped us surpass ourselves, overcome ego moments/ urges of our reptilian brain to stay in its comfort zone, and activated our creativity, intrinsic motivation and the joys of living with a purpose.
