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Change Your Environment, Change Your Life

Image courtesy of mcmortygreen

Image courtesy of mcmortygreen

The Importance of Your Environment

To be successful, you need both the right skills and leverages to propel yourself to success. One of the leverages required is a ‘Mentor’.

And a mentor need not be a person. It can be an accident, an event, an experience, a book, a TV programme, etc. It can be anything that lets you learn a lesson.

Your environment can be a great mentor too. Research has shown that your environment can create a significant psychological impact on your moods, attitude, behaviour, and it has a great deal of influence over you.

Now imagine if you were in an environment where mistakes were not tolerated and creativity was suppressed, do you think there’s any chance you can grow as a person? Very unlikely.

To achieve success, we need a lot of positive energy to move us forward. Negative energy will only hold us back.

So, if you were to immerse yourself in an environment where there’s tremendous flow of positive energy, it’ll take you less time and energy to generate the same amount of work.

And human beings are creatures of emotions. Whenever our positive emotions are evoked, we tend to engage in positive actions, which will translate into positive results. However, the opposite is true as well.

Hence, it is imperative that you are constantly working in a positive environment so that you will only do what’s positive and get what’s positive.

Find Your Nurturing Environment

Although everyone should put himself or herself in a positive environment, different people require different environment so as to be nurtured correctly.

Your nurturing environment should be one that supports the development of your talent and/or expertise.

For example, a real estate agent should build his/her strengths being out there networking, negotiating, closing sales, etc. To a real estate agent, the office is not a nurturing environment.

One of the reasons why most people are not developing their potential to the fullest is because they are not working in a nurturing environment.

And the sad truth is, they choose to work in that environment. Why? Because it takes a lot of hard work to develop one’s talent and polish one’s expertise and they simply prefer to remain in their comfort zone.

They work because they need to pay their bills. They work because they want to buy the latest designer bag. They work because they want their parents to stop nagging. But they never work to develop themselves.

Besides your work environment, you should also seek out other environments that will help in nurturing your talents. That can be as simple as spending a quiet Sunday afternoon at home reading a good book.

One very nurturing environment I find is seminars. I like attending seminars not only because they provide very good education, but also because it is where there’s a lot of positive energy as every participant is there to learn, network, and have fun.

If you want to become successful, it is important that you continually seek out environments to develop your talents and/or expertise to grow yourself to become a better, wiser and richer person.

Find Your Inspiring Environment

Every one of us needs inspiration and motivation to keep our spirits up while we strive toward our goals. Therefore, it is enormously constructive to turn our workplace and our home into a hugely motivational and inspirational environments as they are where we spend the most of our time.

A practical way to do this is to decorate your office and home with all your academic and non-academic certificates, awards, tokens of appreciation from your employers or clients, pictures, and any other things that remind you of your past successes.

Doing this will not only motivate you, it will also programme your subconscious mind to see yourself as a winner, boosting your self-esteem as a result.

And not forgetting that you should put up your goals – those that you’ve written down on papers and ictures of your dream house and/or car, etc – on anywhere that’s prominent like the walls in your room, your desk, your computer, etc.

Being reminded of your goals visually will serve as a powerful stimulus to spur you on to keep taking actions to work toward your goals when you’re losing your discipline and not feel like working anymore.

Another thing you may want to consider displaying is the pictures or posters of your heroes. It could be your sports heroes, your bosses (though not very likely), famous people who are highly successful, and so on.

We all love success stories because they’re always incredibly inspiring. Your heroes will serve to be the symbols of these success stories. Pinning up these success symbols will help you to visualise yourself as a member of their league.

Also, if you want to be more successful, you have to hang out with more successful people. This is onte of the ways to hang out with immensely successful people, most of whom you may never have a chance to meet in real life.

In Summary

Mediocre and average people are people who tend not to pursue their personal growth. They want easy environments because they want an easy life.

Given a choice, they would rather knock off right the dot to hang out with their mates at a pub enjoying a few booze than stick around in the office working toward their goals.

They would rather slouch in their couch watching TV after dinner than read a book to learn new knowledge and widen their horizon.

These people fail to realise that if they do what is easy, life will be hard. But if they do what is hard, life will be easy.

It takes some degree of mental and physical toughness to achieve success. Putting yourself in a different, albeit more success-conducive environment, requires some getting used to. But once you get used to the new environment, you’d have greatly enhanced your chance of scaling new heights and living out your dreams.

Cheers~

P.S. What other suggestions do you have to create the kind of environment which will help to propel you to greater success? Please share them in the comment section.

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5 Comments on “Change Your Environment, Change Your Life”

  1. #1 Josten
    on Aug 21st, 2009 at 11:55 am

    Suggestions that i have for one creating their ideal enviroment is to first decide what kind of things they enjoy, motivate them, and etc. Then Find out what they have to do to put it alll together in a enviroment they enjoy.

  2. #2 Mark Foo
    on Aug 21st, 2009 at 2:40 pm

    Hi Josten,

    Welcome to The Big Dreamer! Thank you very much for visiting and leaving your thought. I really appreciate that. :)

    Cheers~

    Mark

  3. #3 Verena Fischer
    on Aug 21st, 2009 at 5:17 pm

    A very nice post! The environment has a very big impact on one’s growth!

    I think it’s quite harsh though to say that “average” people will always choose the easy things to do. Sometimes choosing the easy way is just something that people do to relax. The worse your job the more you need to relax and booze and mates might seem as one good way of doing that. It’s hard to break out of this vicious circle of not-growing because your life is horrible and your life being horrible because you’re not growing. Don’t expect too much!

  4. #4 Nadia - Happy Lotus
    on Aug 24th, 2009 at 1:41 am

    Hi Mark,

    Great post. I have a day job that is in one of the most negative environments I have ever encountered. However, in my spare time, I work on changing career paths from where I am now to what I know I would love to do.

    Since I know what I want to do, it makes dealing with the day job so much easier. When I am at work, I listen to lectures and books that inspire me in my passions.

    It is important to know what you love and to go after it. I would love to just quit my day job but the reality is that I have to pay bills and put food on the table. The problem is that many people do not want to do the work required to have a job that you love.

    Often many people have to work on their passions on the side until they can make a living to doing that all the time. Not many people are willing to do that.

    I think it truly boils down to perception and the determination of the person. Some people love to grow and learn and others just don’t. They want things easy and success is earned.

    I hope this comment makes sense…I apologize for rambling but so many things came to mind and I just wanted to share them all. :)

  5. #5 Mark Foo
    on Aug 24th, 2009 at 3:37 pm

    @Verena Fischer:

    Welcome to The Big Dreamer! I understand it’s only natural that people need to find ways to relax. We all need to take a break every now and then. But I don’t agree with “The worse your job the more you need to relax and booze.”

    In fact, I think you should do the exact opposite. The worse your job, the more you need to sacrifice your booze time to pick up another skill to upgrade and grow yourself so that you can get out of the rut! Like you said, it’s a vicious cycle. If you don’t make sacrifices, how would this cycle end?

    @Nadia:

    Of course your comment makes sense. I absolutely agree with everything you’ve said here. Like I mentioned in the above comment, people need to make sacrifices in order to learn and grow themselves so that they can get out of the rut.

    I think determination boils down to how much the person “wants it”. The stronger your desire burns, the more determined you’ll be. I reckon too many people just don’t “want it” enough, which is why they’re not willing to make sacrifices and do what’s hard.

    Cheers~

    Mark

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