When You Need To
There is an old adage, “You are an average of five people you spend the most time with.”
It is true. But there are few more aspects to this truth. You are an average of everything you surround yourself with. Our environment is not about people only but it is about everything that can capture our senses. It is about people, designs, things and even about expectations we have. Our immediate surroundings – one’s own personal ecosystem – do impact the quality of life and work we produce.
Our work surely gets dictated by the environment we are in and the expectations of the people we were with. Whether we are aware of it or not, prolonged immersion to a certain type of environment and expectations build an internal library of references – a library of bodily knowledge that no amount of book-learning can provide us.
You need to organize your workspace and living space in order to become a high performer.
Your environment must tell a story about who you are and where you are heading in life.
Instill your home with a sense of purpose. Each and every part of your environment must serve the purpose. Anything in your sensory space without a purpose can disrupt your performance badly.
Each and every detail in your surrounding matter. The chair you use, people you interact with on social media, your close friends, topics and trends you choose to be part of, the way you organize your files, whom you call ‘best friend’, wallpaper on your computer or mobile home screen, books you read, color of paint on the walls, dust on the table, and hundreds of other details you might consider inconsequential until now. All of this matters.
You need to use these things to your advantage instead of against you.
Yes you cannot control everything in your environment but you can at least design one room where you can set up things in a way that can feed your performance in a highly optimized way.
Just like French Culinary experts use the term “Mise En Place” to organize and order everything in their kitchen purposefully which makes them expert of their domain. You need to build a mise en place -an ordered and familiar environment – where you perform without any constraint.
You can start as small as you can. Just change the way you start your day. Or change the way you organize your things. Or make sure there is no unnecessary item in your surroundings.
Start small and then make sure you take this venture of controlling your environment absolutely seriously. Because all of this is impacting you and your results.