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.
Posted 7 months, 2 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.