3 Tips to Change Your Environment

Posted 7 months, 2 weeks ago at 11:00 am. 1 comment

In the last post, we went over how your environment shapes and molds who you are. First, it reinforces your social class; second, it reinforces your job; third, it reinforces what and and how you think about yourself. That’s a lot of control it has over you! The great thing is that you are in total, full control over the environments you interact with. You may not be able to take heed of how all those places look, feel, and the impressions they give to you, but you can decide where you want to spend your time at. And more importantly, you can decide to change your personal environments to be more congruent with a productive, successful person - the kind of person you aspire to be.

Here are some tips on how to change your environment, in case you need a few ideas to get you started.

1. Change the places you frequent the most.

Different places produce different feelings. For an extreme example, you get a vastly different feeling witnessing a head on collision than you do looking out at the Atlantic Ocean on a moonlit, starry night. Why? Because the environment is different - different scenery, scents, “feelings”, people, everything.

Think for a moment about the places that you like to go to the most. Certain restaurants, people’s homes, perhaps church or a study group? If you take the time to to think about what attracts you to those places, you’ll wind up finding out that those places reinforce your belief about who you are and where your values lie. Like always attracts like in real life, regardless of what you’ve been taught! People of the same social class, job status, and values normally always congregate in the same places.

Of course, this has two sides to it. On one hand, if you’re going to places where the people are proactive, successful, and have high values placed on honesty and integrity, those are almost always going to be values you are personally going to own. Not so much a problem in those places, right? But if you spend most of your time at people’s houses who like to get drunk, have no life goals, and are pretty apathetic about what happens in the world, those ideals are probably going to be a part of you. Whoops! Not a good thing.

What kind of feelings would you get when you try to work on a major project in a public library? What kind of feelings would you get if you tried to work on that same project in Starbucks? What kind of feelings would you get if you tried to work on that same project on the beach, overlooking the ocean? Would you be more productive, less productive, more inclined to do a great job, less inclined?

2. Dress for success!

You’ve heard it time and time again - dress for the job you want to have, not the job you currently have. Why? Because it’s totally true!

When you put on clothes go do springtime yard work in - old jeans, oversized sweater, dirty sneakers - how do you feel about yourself when you look into the mirror? Your reaction probably falls along the lines of “Oh my goodness! Who is that person staring back at me?!” Now imagine yourself getting dressed up for a wedding and looking into the mirror. (I know some of you probably loathe dressing formally, but keeping following me here!) How do you feel now?

You can have a vastly different attitude on life depending on what clothes you’re throwing on your back. Going grocery shopping in pajama pants and a potato sack of a sweater will make you feel differently than if you dressed up and went to the store in a casually nice, professional look. Why? Because we attribute meaning to clothes - certain clothes automatically give us certain impressions because it’s what we expect them to do to us. Pajama pants are for bedtime, so when we put them on we automatically give ourselves a “lazy” mindset. But dressing up to where you look stunning every day, we give ourselves a “polished, successful” mindset.

You probably don’t have a huge budget for clothes. I highly recommend buying higher quality, but fewer pieces that look amazing on you, and slowly building up your wardrobe so you dress the part of a successful, smart person who knows what he or she is after. You’ll immediately see a difference when you look into the mirror!

3. Switch around what’s in your home.

When you walk into your bedroom, you get cues that it’s a place for sleep. For one, just going into the bed makes you tired. Second, it has more of a sedated atmosphere compared to your living room or kitchen. Walk into a drab, dark room, you’ll feel lifeless and aimless. Walk into a gorgeous, bright room, you’ll feel driven and motivated. Why are stores often times decked out in bright lights, decorations, and music? It’s to promote an image of a brand, of course, but those things also make you feel good.

You can apply the same type of logic to your home. Do you have objects in there that remind you of your old self? (For example, if you’re trying to quit smoking and are going at it cold turkey, do you still have ashtrays lying around?) If you do, those objects are reinforcing your old self image and social role. Best get rid of them. On the flip side, is there anything you would like to add to your home that you currently don’t have, to make it more motivating? Perhaps some new lights, decorations, or photos are in order. If you want to have a major self change, you need to shed the “old you” and get in step with the “new you”. The fastest way to do this? Completely revamp your home environment to be in step with how you want to be, not how you are now. It’d be hard at first, but within a week you’ll feel a complete difference as your current self will become a match for the new person you aligned yourself to become. Try it! It really works.

None of the tips I listed here are especially hard to implement. Test them out and see what works. Some improvement is better than no improvement; each little step you take adds to the bigger picture of moving towards your destiny.