Transcript
Hi, Alegre from Ember Living here today to talk about how to motivate your family to go green. The best step to ensure that you and your family make good choices in terms of green living and then sustain them is to choose things that you’re interested in. If you choose something just because I suggest it but you’re not actually interested in it, guess what? You’re not going to see it through. So, what are you interested in? Are you interested in saving money, saving water, saving electricity, eating healthier?
Find something you’re interested in and check out our videos on those subjects, and that’s a great way to make a first step on your adventure of green living. Secondly, get your family involved. So whatever it is that you pick, say it’s we’re going to lower our energy consumption, can you turn it into a game. Personally, I’m so motivated by seeing “how low can I go”? How low can I get my energy consumption or my water consumption? How much money am I saving? If you have kids, it’s a great way to teach them about numbers and about money. Maybe you’re even giving them some of the cash or saying to the kids: Okay well, we saved $20 this month. Where is that going? Maybe we’re donating it to someone or maybe we’re going to go to a movie or maybe we’ll go to the zoo or something like that.
There’s a lot of great ways that you can motivate children. I also think charts are a great way to keep you and your family engaged in any process. So for instance, say you’re trying to lower your energy consumption. Map it out on a graph and watch it go up or down. That’s something that is really interesting and keeps it front-of-mind for you and also teaches children about how things change. Maybe you compare how much energy you use during the summer, during the winter and you talk about why that is. It’s a great learning opportunity and it keeps you engaged and motivated in going green. And finally, the final tip in motivating you and your family is to just do one step at a time. If you bite off more than you can chew, you’re going to get discouraged and you’re going to give up. I didn’t get this way over night. I made lots of changes along the way over many years. So do a little bit at a time and once you’ve incorporated it into your lifestyle, pick something else. Great change comes from lots of us making little changes. So every little change you make is an important change. For more tips on things like these, please visit my website emberliving.com.
