Change Your Context, Change Your Outcome

Posted 9 months, 4 weeks ago at 10:00 am. 0 comments

So we talked a little bit about context in last week’s post, and we talked a lot about social roles and how they dictate your behavior a few days ago. But… exactly how do contexts influence your behavior? How do they fit into everything?

Your context is your environment you are a part of and the people you communicate with. Along with social roles, contexts have shaped you into the person you are right now. The person who is reading this have been molded by the environments to be a totally unique individual. It’s that simple!

Let’s go a little bit deeper into the roles that environments and people have on you:

Environments

Ah, environments! Simply put, environments are the places you run into on a daily basis. Home, work, a park, a restaurant, the gym, a library - these are all examples of various environments you may run into in your life. You can choose if you want to be in a certain environment (such as a party), or you may not have a choice (showing up for a class on Tuesday evenings at university).

Environments have this way of constantly reminding you of who you are. They continuously reinforce your identity about who you are, regardless of if you like that identity or not. For example, think of the restaurants you frequent, and the patrons that walk in the door. What kind of people are they? What kinds of jobs do you suppose they hold? What can you gather about their social class and personalities by the way they dress? Now, how closely do those traits fit you? If you’re like most people, the traits you named off probably match up to you fairly similarly, maybe 70% to 80%. That begs the question, if you want to move “up” in life, why do you keep going to those places that reinforce your current status?

Environments can also affect your feelings. When you walk into a doctor’s office or a hospital, you immediately have a spacey, relaxing feeling. The foyer and rooms are bright, pristine, and they “feel” clean. Those environmental characteristics (bright, pristine, clean) feed into how you feel when you wander in the building (relaxed). You can also apply this to your home. Think of a cluttered living room - it’s not dusted, there is debris and clutter everywhere, and it’s dimly lit. Now imagine the same room in a different context - the room is cleaned to the nines, nothing is out of place, there’s fantastic furniture, and it’s brightly lit. The first scene feels cramped and restricting; the second scene feels warm and inviting. Different environments, different feelings. Change your context, change your outcome.

You can also apply this to your job as well. If you’re working 40 hours a week as a schoolteacher, but what you really want to be is a best selling novelist, what job is your environment reinforcing? Throw away certain contexts, get new ones. You’ll get totally different outcomes.

Just remember: sometimes, in order to achieve a major life shift and become a greater, more successful person, you need to get a new environment. Move to a different city. Change jobs. Get a new house. Join different clubs. Do something if you can’t make leeway in your current career and you’re not happy.

People

People… well, what can you say? They’re everywhere! And depending on what friends you have, you could have a totally different life.

Steve Pavlina wrote a great article on the types of friends you may have. Do your friends help you grow, encouraging you to break the glass ceiling and succeeding at whatever you put your mind to? Or do they spit on your accomplishments, make you feel bad when you’re doing better than they are, and try to convince you to stick to the status quo? (If you have the time, read that post!)

The people who accomplish the most always, always have a strong group of friends who are just as tenacious and forward as they are. They all help each other to succeed and go for the gold, and often times they get exactly what they want. Changing who you hang around with might consist of dumping friendships that are stagnating and getting you nowhere, and finding new friends who are just as driven and have a vision for success like you do.

Remember, context creates outcome. If you hang around people who are negative, you’re going to take that characteristic and put it into your “friendship” social role, and become a sad, lonely person. (Why do you think people who are constantly around positive people are happy-go-lucky themselves?) If you hang around people who stagnant and have no live plans or ways of bettering themselves, you’re going to take the “stagnation in my life is okay” trait and plug it into your “friendship” social role. But the same holds true with any characteristic and trait, from procrastination to proactivity to drive. You can change your entire life just by switching up the people you communicate with.

How much does context create your outcomes?

I’ll throw myself out there and say “quite a bit”. You can be the world’s most productive office worker in the company you are in, but if you’re thrown into a miserable company with no vision, no goals, and apathetic workers, what is your view on work going to change into? Are you still going to be fantastically productive, or is that context going to mold you into what everybody else is?

Do you really choose to be happy? Or is it just a natural reflex preprogrammed in you via social roles and contexts? When most people get hit with an event in their life - such as a family member dying - the first emotion they feel is something innate; it’s how they’re taught to react. You don’t come across bad (or good) news, think about it, take a moment to assess your emotions, and then respond! It’s a completely reflexive, instantaneous process.

I see a lot of people posting around on forums that say strange things… at least, strange to me.

“I don’t believe in [insert in any characteristic]! I trained myself not to become a [characteristic] person. I work through blood, sweat, and tears at what I do and I scale to dazzling heights. Those people who are [characteristic] can train themselves to snap out of it. They’re going to have to if they’re going to get anywhere in life!”

There are a number of things wrong with this sort of assessment about people:

• The person assumes characteristics are solid, innate parts of you that can be leveled higher or lower;
• The person assumes that you are in total control of your social environment and people they are in contact with;
• And that… *you* have the power to change!

I don’t believe people appear on earth with a set of inborn traits about them - are babies outgoing or shy? Do they procrastinate? Are they lazy? (Don’t think in terms of how babies act, think of them as how adults act.) Of course not! Babies are babies. They don’t do much of anything except eat, sleep, and grow. It’s not until they’re a toddler that they begin to assess the world around them… which is when they begin to learn social roles and become shaped by their context.

Find out what your contexts are. Who do you spend the most time with? What places are you at the most? After assessing all of that information, think about how you can switch it up for the better. Can you try to spend more time at environments that boost your self-esteem and make you driven? Can you dump your no good friends who are only dragging you down, and replace them with supportive, proactive people? You probably can. And the sooner you do, the sooner you can reap the rewards.