Your physical environment often goes unnoticed, mostly because you adapt to it quickly. Yet you don’t realise the impact on you until your environment changes – which is why travelling changes so many of us.
What we see, hear, touch and experience at any given moment impacts how we feel, work, eat, interact and make decisions. It’s hard to overstate the impact.
But what does this mean for you?
It means you can use your own sense of agency to change either where you are or the things in your physical environment to fulfil you, make life more enjoyable and live more energy – efficiently. I don’t mean light a candle or put the TV remote closer – that’s responding to options already on offer. I mean looking inward. But how?
You need to uncover what you really want. The way to do this is:
⚫️ stop, close your eyes and notice what thoughts surface. Thoughts that surface are signals: ‘I wish I could try hiking’; or ‘I want sun’.
⚫️ reflect on your life experiences. These help you define what you do and don’t want more of. I look over my calendar over the past year every year and highlight the top 20% of my experiences, and keep building on this.
Experience and awareness help you uncover what you really want. But you also need courage to change the things in your physical environment.
A good example is if you notice a thought like ‘I wish I didn’t have to be around this person in this place’. It requires courage to change relationships that no longer serve you in places that no longer serve you.
But it’s the trade off you need to make to engage in a more fulfilling and joyous human experience. And life is a series of trade offs.
Trade off until you find yourself in the environments you want to be in most.
Life is too short.
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