Module 3 - Self-Reflection in Life Choices

Attention to environmental sustainability is certainly one of the most important issues and challenges of recent years, as discussed in the previous module. As a youth worker, you will have come across it very often with youth groups, and have noticed that climate change is also playing an increasingly important role in the life decisions of the next generation. In fact, Gen Z and Millennials have a great desire to prioritise environmental sustainability but face complex difficulties in doing so. The questions we will try to answer, therefore, are: why is it that, although Gen Zs and Millennials have a great focus on green and sustainable values, they struggle so much to introduce them into their lives in general, and their careers specifically? What factors are holding them back? How can they be supported in harmonising life, work, and sustainability?

If we focus instead on the impact climate change has on young people's lives, we will see that 6 out of 10 young people say they have experienced anxious feelings about climate change in the last month and that it is also impacting their careers and lifestyle decisions. We won't go into the growing phenomenon of eco-anxiety - which we already addressed in Module 1 - but this data helps us contextualise the feelings of today's young people who, despite the difficulties, try to act. For example, 73% of Millennials report that they try daily to reduce their impact on the environment and more than 50% of young people would be willing to pay more for more eco-friendly products, despite low salaries. However, many believe that this will be very difficult if economic conditions do not improve. Today young people, on average, earn less money compared to their parents and grandparents, emphasised by the fact that more than 60% of young people have a second job. It must, therefore, be recognised that there are structural and social factors that make it difficult for workers and companies themselves to behave sustainably. Still, many young people are willing to align their jobs with their green values. As reported in the table: one in six young people say they have already changed or plan to change jobs because of their concern for the environment; around 46% of young people reported that they are encouraging their employer to consider environmental issues, with many believing that they can influence their organisation’s sustainability efforts.

To sum up, it appears therefore, that whilst young people have a great sensibility for environmental issues, and would wish for their places of work to improve in this area, precarious economic conditions and social factors hinder progress in this area. They believe in what they are doing and we, as youth workers, need to be on their side in this change.

Most people will have had to answer the question, “What line of work are you in?” several times in their life, and the answer we give already tells a lot about ourselves and our personality. Work is certainly a very important part of each of our lives because not only does it take up a lot of our time, but the path we took to get to our chosen profession is part of us and who we are.

Our perception of ‘work’ can be discussed through the following question: is work a means to achieve something (a certain lifestyle, an economic condition or a chance to sustain yourself so that you can then devote yourself to something else) or is it a means to convey something about yourself, such as what you believe in and your values? Of course, there is no right or wrong answer, nor is there a single point of view regarding work and values. However, we often do not stop long enough to think: “What is work for me?”

That is why we have prepared a tool in this chapter that will guide us on a path of self-reflection to better understand the values we believe in and what we want to pass on to the young people we meet. We will proceed in steps, reconstructing the timeline of our lives, putting different experiences on the scale to understand which ones were personally fulfilling and allowed us to express ourselves, and finally seek to know fully the values that move us. Once we have discovered our core values through the self-reflection tool, we will understand if we are really putting them into practice in our daily lives.

This course is not meant to make judgements, but it is meant to offer a chance to discover one more piece of ourselves; to understand if and how we really put into action what we believe in, in every aspect of our life, including employment.

As youth workers, doing this exercise ourselves will aid you in asking the same of the young people you meet.

HOW TO?

Try the self-reflection tool now as this will help you to better understand the topics of this module but also to facilitate an exercise with young people.

Thank you for putting yourself out there. It is not always easy to look inside yourself but hopefully this tool has allowed you to be clearer about your values’ boundaries and about how you can implement those values you haven’t yet put in practice in life and work.

Let’s continue with the module activities!

REMEMBER
"To work for a living": this is often how young people perceive the world of work. A phrase that seems in stark contrast to the beliefs of the previous generation, which was more accustomed to the concept of "live to work". What has changed? The focus has shifted from work as an all-encompassing view of life, to work as a means to afford a better life, and thus obtain money to improve one's quality of life. Despite this ambition, the picture that emerges of young people who are already in the world of work is quite different. It is not difficult to find youngsters with a second job in order to make ends meet; others are precarious, and although they make a narrative of freedom and independence, many young people under 35, especially from southern Europe, still live with their parents because they are unable to be financially independent.

 

Let's take a look at the expectations towards work. Here too, compared to the narrative of previous generations much has changed. The young person is a worker who does not want to be selected but wants to select. What does this mean? It means that fewer and fewer young people do not look exclusively at wages but feel that the values of the companies they work for are important. As we also noted in the self-reflection process, values are the qualities and virtues that are most significant to us; the compass that guides us in our behaviour and life choices. The value of 'work' for today's young people is clear - the right job counts more than the fixed job. There is a need to feel that work has a value. This is why more and more young people are making a point of choosing organisations that integrate the principles of diversity, equity and inclusion, and looking for a company that pays attention to sustainability in their mission, then translating it into concrete policies and actions.

After a personal reflection moment, we will now try to understand how you can find a balance between life, values and work. In this part, we will better understand what work-life balance, work-life integration and work-life harmony are and how these strategies can help you and the young people you meet to better integrate the values you believe in.

We start here:
“labour is not a commodity and all human beings, regardless of race, creed or gender, have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, economic security and equal opportunities”

This statement is part of the Philadelphia Declaration of the International Labour Organization (ILO) and underlines the fact that paid work is much more than just satisfying the material needs of workers. Work should also provide the opportunity to satisfy personal life, thus ensuring a healthy balance among work and private life that has positive effects on psychological, spiritual and physical health. In fact, if you feel you have room, at work or in your private life, to nurture and respect the values you believe in, your satisfaction and happiness will certainly increase and this will also allow you to have a better balance.

Let us therefore better understand what strategies to implement to achieve this, whilst introducing some examples related to the world of sustainability.

Work-life balance

What is work-life balance?
The expression refers to the need to find a balance between time for one's private life and time for work, between productivity and relaxation, between professional growth and nutrition of the soul. As we often see in our work and that of the people around us, finding a balance is not easy. Mainly because there is no ‘one-size-fits-all’ formula. The right balance is different for each of us: for some, it may mean flexible hours to attend family events, while for others, it may involve mindfulness practices to relieve stress. We must also consider that balance is not necessarily about dividing time equally.

Why do we struggle to find balance?
The difficulty in finding a balance is often associated with two main aspects: on the one hand, the lack of time and scheduling conflicts; and on the other, the feeling of being overwhelmed, overloaded or stressed by the pressure of multiple roles. We therefore fail to have a good work-life balance because it may happen that the overall demands of the work role and the personal role are somehow incompatible.

Examples are role overload, when the demands on time and energy associated with the activities of multiple roles are too high to perform adequately. Or work-family interference, when the demands and responsibilities of work make it more difficult to fulfil the responsibilities of the family role, or vice versa. Another example, increasingly common in our society, is caregiver stress - the need to provide care or assistance to someone else who needs it - thus preventing a good work-life balance.

So, what is the ultimate goal?
The ultimate goal of this strategy is to feel fulfilled and satisfied with both aspects of one's life. The balance between work and private life is the key to a sustainable and satisfying career: it is therefore not a matter of separating work from life, but of harmoniously merging the two to create a symphony of success and happiness.

The green example
Within the work-life balance strategy, some examples for putting the value of sustainability into practice could be: engaging in volunteer actions for the environment; participating in ecological walks organised in our territories; becoming active in one's community by attending the different associations that fight for climate change, or even participating in climate events that are organised in our cities. These examples have varying degrees of intensity, precisely because, in the work-life balance strategy, time does not have to be divided equally and engagements happen outside the workplace. By adopting this strategy, each of us can act in the way and time that we see fit.

Work-life integration

The continued growth of smart-working has largely erased the boundary between work and private life. So, the debate on work-life balance has been rekindled and in the course of discussions, new concepts have arisen, including ‘work-life integration’.

What is work-life integration?
Work-life integration is a holistic approach that, differently from work-life balance, seeks to merge personal and professional needs. Instead of treating work and life as separate entities to be balanced, risking conflict between the two worlds, the work-life integration approach aims to find areas of compromise and synergy with the ultimate goal of increasing worker satisfaction to be fulfilled both at work and in our wider lives.

What are the basic principles of work-life integration?
Organisations play a big role in this strategy: the idea is to build capacity by providing supportive and empathetic leadership, grant workers more flexibility, provide more opportunities for learning and growth, and work internally to develop a sense of community. A workplace that is more open and attentive to all aspects of life ensures that workers feel more fulfilled and do not necessarily have to draw a line between personal life and work. This approach also ensures that the values one believes in can be reflected in the place where one works, providing even more incentive to put them into practice.

The green example
In contrast to the green example of work-life balance, where we are mainly concerned with what the individual can do in favour of environmental sustainability, in the work-life integration approach the organisation or company one works for plays an important role.

• choosing to use recyclable coffee cups or washable cutlery: the employee can bring the ‘good practice’ of using his or her own coffee cup into the company, or the organisation can make it available;
• eliminating the use of unnecessary plastic: this can be done by motivating individual workers, but also through specific company directives;
• involving workers in training moments in which to raise awareness on the subject in order to spread green values: this can start with the individual during informal moments such as lunch breaks, or it can be “institutionalised” in real moments of the year dedicated to this issue.

Work-life harmony

The concept of work-life integration also has its limitations. At the individual and leader level, one must constantly start, stop, reconsider and move forward, and this is only possible if we focus on something other than balance or integration. This is why the model has been updated in recent years with the idea of work-life harmony

This strategy, compared to the previous ones, is much more about the personal - what energy we have and how it is invested. The focus of the thinking is that time is limited and cannot be recovered. On the contrary, the energy we have is a force that can be raised or lowered. Therefore, by identifying how much time is available and how much energy we need to devote to a given topic, we can perform the different tasks in a way that does not feel overloaded. Therefore, thanks to this calculation between energy and time, we will feel stronger because we will be able to harmonise our energy with our goals. If work-life balance and work-life integration are more focused on investigating the what, the how, and the extent, the work-life harmony approach investigates the why - Why do I do what I do for a living? For whom do I do it? And with whom do I do it? By starting with these questions, which we have also seen to be important in the self-reflection tool, we better understand the concept of harmony: aligning who I am as a person with my values and ideas, with the choice of job, rather than having to draw a line between personal and professional life. In summary, we could say that the more our personal values and the values the organisation we work for overlap, the better our life and work will be harmonised.

The green example
Examples of work-life harmony in the green sphere might include: working at associations, organisations or NGOs that have sustainability as one of their goals or working at companies that promote the use of natural light, renewable energy or green solutions for mobility to the workplace.

All jobs can include some aspect of sustainability; you don't necessarily have to work in renewable energy companies or be a transition worker. We believe that everyone, at least to some extent, can bring the values of sustainability within their place of work.

Here we bring you a concrete example, an inspirational story, that can guide us to promote the vision of sustainability and pass on the idea that we can bring change to our daily realities.

Progetto QUID produces ethical ‘Made in Italy’ fashion from end-of-series fabrics, offering professional and training opportunities to people at risk of social and labour exclusion, with a migratory background and/or in fragile conditions, with particular attention to women. The objective of re-employment is achieved by employing people in the production and design of ethical clothing. To learn more about this reality, watch this video:

PROGETTO QUID: A CONCRETE EXAMPLE

The module emphasises the importance of self-reflection in life choices, both professional and private, encouraging one to respect one's values. A self-reflection tool is proposed to analyse past experiences, identify guiding values, and understand whether they are reflected in one's work. In particular, environmental sustainability emerges as a core value for younger generations, but they struggle to fully integrate it into their careers, often due to economic and structural obstacles. However, many young people seek to influence their employers in favour of more sustainable practices.

This module explores three key strategies for reconciling life, work, and values: work-life balance, work-life integration, and work-life harmony. These approaches offer different ways to harmonise personal and professional aspects while aiming for overall well-being. Concrete examples are also presented on how to promote sustainability, both personally and within organisations. An inspiring case is that of Progetto QUID, which combines ethics, fashion, and social inclusion, demonstrating that even small actions can generate a positive and sustainable impact in the world of work.