How Your Environment is Impacting Your Behavior
Your environment consists of the sights, sounds, geography, weather, and people that surround you. This is obvious. What’s not so obvious is that the biggest part of your environment is how you perceive each of those things.
Your perception of your environment is unique to you and may be completely different than someone else’s perception. For example, some people perceive quite environments that are warm and dimly lit as the perfect work environment. While others need to draw from the energy of their environment and therefore prefer colder, louder, and brighter spaces for working.
Environmental factors have a significant impact on each of us as we age. So much so that over time we all become immensely aware of what we like and don’t like in our surroundings. When it comes to self-awareness, environmental preferences are unquestionably one of the first things humans learn about themselves.
This self-awareness is a double-edge sword. If one is not careful, environmental preferences can become a crutch. I like to refer to this as Goldilocks anxiety. So, when the environment is not just right then you have an excuse to not be 100% at your best. You also have an excuse to behave badly. Complaining, procrastination, and giving up too soon are just a few of the bad behaviors that are possible.
Of course, when you have control over your environment you do what you must to shape if for your preferences. However, when you don’t have control over your environment you must learn how to use mental skills to prevent Goldilocks anxiety from causing one of the three negative achievement behaviors.
The Mental Skill You Need to Control Any Environment – Good or Bad
With that said, the best thing you can do when you have no control over your environment is to neutralize your environmental preferences by using the mental skill of creating an environment within an environment. This concept sounds complex to understand at first. However, once you break down the idea of what it means to create an environment within an environment you see that it’s a rather simple concept to grasp.
An environment within an environment is a “mental environment”. This mental environment is something within your mind, which in turn makes it under your control. To do this start by accepting every environmental factor you dislike as something not within your control. I suggest visualizing these environmental factors you dislike as your competitors in an event.
Just like you can’t control what a competitor does, you can’t control these environmental factors. The only thing you can control is your offense and / or defense. Next, focus on your strategy to beat your competition. But remember, you won’t beat your environmental competition by out complaining it and wishing it away. Instead, you beat it by rising to the occasion and challenging yourself to be at your best.
To execute this process effectively, you must use your imagination. For example, if you are in a colder environment than you like, visualize yourself surviving a severe winter storm. Moreover, how you perform dictates your success in surviving. Or, if you are surrounded by loud people and loud noises when you are seeking serenity, you could view it as a test on your mental toughness and challenge yourself to break an endurance record.
In short, when it comes to your environment, the only thing you can always control is your perception of that environment. Therefore, if you are a person with many environmental preferences that often shape your performance, the best thing you can do is to learn how to effectively apply this mental skill.