#9 Your environment shapes your life

Podcast transcript:

I just spent a week relaxing (and being sick with the flu) in the Norwegian Fjords and it lifted my spirits. I’m super chill right now, and not stressed at all. It’s wonderful what a week with friends and family can do. When I was reading a book on the sofa under a warm blanket by the fireplace, I looked around and realized I was in the most positive and calming environment. Everyone around me was reading a book, watching TV, talking, just being together. and then it dawned on me, the reason why I was so peaceful, positive and calm was because I was here. Of course, the fact that I wasn't working certainly helped. I'm not going to deny that, but even without working had I been in a different environment I would probably not have felt the same. This is what I want to talk about today:  that our environment influences our emotions, our emotions influence our thinking, our thinking influences our actions and our actions shape our life.

This made me think of Elsa, a bubbly 27-year-old who came to me feeling stuck about everything in her life - and I mean everything. We’d been working together for a while, and Elsa was starting to put a plan together to start to become a freelance copywriter. She wanted to work for herself for many years but didn't know no how to get started. she was also afraid to disappoint her parents who were paying for a college education, and who wanted her to start working at building a successful career as a doctor or a lawyer. It must have been her fourth or fifth session when she arrived in my virtual office with a big smile and a little bit of cheekiness in her eyes. "Murielle," she said as she settled into our time together and greeted me, "I've had a realization this week, and I still can't believe it." I looked at Elsa with gentle joy. "You know," she continued, "the process you've taught me, the way we're working on my goals and projects, I think I've figured out how it works. I think I can use it for everything in my life." The mental shift Elsa had made was the transition from looking at her life and what happened to her from the outside, waiting for someone to make things better for her, to seeing her life from the inside out and realizing that she was the one in charge and able to make all the changes that she wanted. At that moment, she realized she was in the driver's seat and that, as Henri Berson says so well, "the future is not what's going to happen, but what we're going to do."

Many people experience this honey moon phase when they start to get unstuck. It's normal. All of a sudden, everything starts to change, and you have a say in it. When before, you would have been thinking about all of the things you wanted to do but never really doing them karma now all of a sudden you're taking action and things are changing for you. People usually get pretty excited about that, and of course they do because it's the most exciting thing ever!

The same was true for Elsa. But, a little later, when the firework dust had settled in that same session, Elsa understood the full extent of what she'd just uncovered. First, she let out a big sigh of relief. Quickly, that sigh was followed by something that sounded more like a giant exclamation mark or frustration. I asked Elsa to describe what she was thinking and feeling. "Well," she said, "up until now, I've been so happy realizing that I have control; I have the power to change my life the way I want to." I nodded in agreement. "But now, I don't know; there's so much to do. I feel like I’ve made all the wrong decisions. And my parents will never understand!"   

I've become used to certain ideas showing up at specific turning points in the change process people go through when they get unstuck. This is one of those ideas at one of those particular times. Elsa was right on time with her realizations because, yes, when we finally understand that being stuck is a feeling - AND not a fact - and that we're the ones keeping ourselves feeling this way, excitement makes room for stress and anxiety again, although with a different focus. We don't stress or feel anxious over not having any say in our lives. Instead, we get stressed and feel anxious because we understand we have every say in it! Although this newfound knowledge is liberating and exciting, it also makes us realize how often we give that power away and let others rule our lives. This often feels like a lot of time has been wasted. Or that we’re not in the right place.

One thing that was difficult for Elsa to keep going was the lack of support from her immediate family and environment. None of her friends understood what she meant when she said she wanted to become a freelance copywriter, while her well-meaning parents were pressuring her to finish College and become a doctor or a lawyer like her two older siblings. It’s not that they didn’t accept her choices; it’s just that they didn’t understand them, so it was hard for them to support her. They were letting her do her thing, so she could take it out of her system, waiting for the day she would see it didn’t work, come to her senses, and go back to College. Not an ideal environment for Elsa to thrive in.  

Here’s a universal truth that is so often overlooked: Be mindful of who you spend your time with, who you share your dreams with, and who you look to for support in your efforts to change and get unstuck. Your environment holds your identity together. Your environment will often be closed to the changes you want to make. The people in your life don’t have the same dreams you have; perhaps they’re happy with how things are or not conscious enough to see that things could or should be different. It’s not their fault; it’s just how things are. That’s why it often feels like you have to change everything when you want to change something about your life or work. And in a way you have to.

Just recently, I was talking with a friend about how she had made some massive changes in her life this year, and how it’s hard to get her husband and her husband's family to understand. She’s been a people-pleaser her entire life, someone who would agree to anything someone else offered to do, but now that she was changing and becoming more assertive, more conflict arose. She didn't agree any more to the things she used to agree to. She decided, for instance, that she wasn't going to drink anymore, but her husband and her husband's family have a habit of bonding over a glass of wine at dinner. Even though she told them many times that she didn't drink anymore, at the last Christmas dinner they kept on asking her if she wanted a glass of wine. Every time she said no, they wanted to know why, even though she’s told them many times. They mean no harm, but those people and that environment aren’t very healthy for my friend. 

When working with people to help them get unstuck, I tend to return to what Jim Rohn, an American entrepreneur, author, and motivational speaker, famously said: “we’re the average of the five people we spent the most time with.” From personal experience, I believe that statement to be true. When I look back on the environments I was in at specific periods of my life and what I was doing, I see a direct correlation between the people in my life and the decisions I was making or the dreams I was having. Growing up in a poor lower middle-class family, all I heard my father say was that money was bad, that you had to suffer to get it, and that someone was always looking to steal it away from you. “There’s only a fine line between being able to pay your bills and ending up in a gutter somewhere,” he would often say. My father had many problems in his life, which had a lasting effect on my family and me, not just his money mindset. But none of those issues and ingrained beliefs were genuinely apparent to me as long as I lived at home. For the longest time, I had negative beliefs about money and thought they were the truth. 

Because of this, it became a self-fulfilling prophecy. Unconsciously, through my behavior, I allowed it to come true that money is something other people take away from you or that you must work hard for. I worked hard and made good money in my early entrepreneurial days. I was also giving my hard-earned cash away to the romantic partners I had at the time, to my family, and even to people I hardly knew. They didn’t share my work ethic, but I assure you they enjoyed buying expensive things because of my hard labor. Nobody forced me to give it away; I did it all alone. I gave it to romantic partners, people in need, family members, to underqualified people I still decided to employ… simply because I believed I didn’t deserve money. It was what I’d always known, what had been imprinted on me. Long after I’d left my parent’s house and lived on my own, the echo of those beliefs about money still rang true. 

Your environment is like soup. As long as you, like a piece of carrot, are swirling around in it with the potatoes, the onions, and the celery, you won’t escape their flavors rubbing off on you. To change your life, you must choose a different soup. I’m not the greatest at coming up with good metaphors - ahaha - but you get the point.

Following Hegelian philosophy, I believe other people hold your identity partly together. You, the self, are aware of your self because you’re separate; you’re a distinct identity from someone else - another self - and because you’re seen through their eyes. Being someone is created through the process of separation but also of recognizing in yourself the humanity that you see in front of you in the other. In that sense, you not only become the people you surround yourself with, but those people also profoundly shape you. People always affect our identity and who we are; our interactions with those people partly shape us. 

Nobody in your (inner) circles is neutral to you. You can be stuck because of the people in your life. Some of them, like Glenn, my therapist, says, are positive sponsors, and some are negative sponsors. The positive ones are the ones that help shape a strong and whole identity; the negative ones are the ones that encourage or enable you into bad habits and thoughts. Or they're the ones that don't believe in you, that question your choices, that will warn you for everyone and everything, that will make assumptions about other people in your life for you. All of those things will influence you without you knowing it.

Because our environment profoundly affects us, it’s crucial to control it as much as possible. One thing you can do is surround yourself with people who show you who you can become instead of reminding you of the person you don’t want to be. There’s this quote by Confusius that I love: “If you're the smartest person in the room, you are in the wrong room.” I think it's so true that's why I always seek out new mentors, new knowledge, new rooms to be able to grow and learn. But the same is true of rooms where you might not be the smartest but where the people around you aren't very nice or they don't share your values or they don't have your best interest at heart. When you find yourself  in rooms like that it's time to find a different room. 

Another powerful thing to know about your environment is what James Clear talks about in Atomic Habits: Even though we all think we have complete control over what we do every day and the choices that we make, he argues (and, with him, a plethora of scientific research) that a lot of the choices we think we make are made for us by our environment. 

We respond to the cues that surround us. That’s why coffee shop counters are filled with sweets and cookies, why grocery stores have grabbable stuff throughout the check-out isles, and why it’s hard to resist something at the beauty shop when you only went in to try some perfume. What is available around you is your default number one option. Without realizing it, everything you gather around you influences your decisions, your habits, your identity, and your life.      

Although this may sound impossible to address, it’s a good thing. It means you have another type of agency over your life that can help you get unstuck and achieve your goals. As James Clear says: “by changing your surroundings, you can place a hurdle in the way of bad behaviors and remove the barriers to good ones.” He refers to this strategy as environmental design. What this means is that your environment can make it automatic to make better choices for yourself and create new and better habits, so you won’t have to use willpower (which, as I mention in my new Get Unstuck! book - that is finally finished! - doesn’t exist anyway) or control your behavior to get there. 

So, if you’re feeling stuck, it might be time to take a look at your environment. To identify what in your surrounding could be contributing to the problem and how changing it could help you get unstuck and make progress towards your goals.
That's it for this episode! But before I go, here's this week's "f*ck it, let's do it" experiment: This week I want you to consider your environment. What needs to change for you to get unstuck, become happier, achieve your goals? Start with small changes. Remember that everything is connected - even the tiniest change can have big effects in the long run. For instance, focus on one thing in your environment that needs to be changed first and then build up from there. I’m going to reorganize my desk. I’ve noticed that I get distracted easily when there’s too much on it, books especially, but I keep on piling them on there. Time for a big cleanup!

Here’s this week's little act of daily rebellion for you: go all in on being kind and compassionate with yourself. Love on yourself. Do it with passion and conviction. Whenever you feel like you’re failing, that something is not going right, that you’re not good enough, remind yourself that you are worthy and capable of greatness. Because you are!

If you feel like sharing your experiment or want to let me know what loving on yourself is doing for you, or if you're not sure what a good experiment might be for you, don't hesitate to send me a message or DM in Instagram @muriellemarie. Thanks for listening, have fun and talk to you next week!

Just a heads up: I am not a therapist or doctor! If you’re not feeling your best mentally or physically, and you need some help, please make sure to consult with a medical professional or a therapist.