Environmental Interventions

Ask any thought leader for their recommendation on how to change your life and their response will be some version of you needing to change your environment. A healthy internal environment gives you the energy to follow through on bigger and bolder actions in your business, or to be more patient with a family member. Joining a community of ambitious leaders will pull you to hold yourself to a higher standard. Both of these decisions, to get into better health or change your social circle, are tactical examples of Environmental Interventions. 

An Environmental Intervention is an action you take that disrupts the way that the forces of the world nudge you to take action. It changes the dynamic you live within so that at rest, your equilibrium settles at a new and better setpoint. The more intentional you are about how we design your environment, the less effort needed to take higher leverage actions that generate better results. Your environment does the work for you.

The key to changing your life is to change your environment, so here’s a 4 step process to figuring out what to tangibly do to improve your environment and its influence on you. At each step you ask yourself a specific question:

‍1) What’s the real problem I’m facing? Write it out in detail so that you know you’re addressing the right thing. This can come explicitly from data or implicitly based on your own impressions. Having data is better.

‍2) What is the main constraint of this problem? You answer this question by getting to the heart of what’s actually getting in the way. You figure out the core, recurring bottleneck that’s most responsible for you not following through and taking action to the extent that you want to.

‍3) What are some ways I could intervene to address the core constraint? This is an open brainstorm to come up with some good ideas around what might be good ways to disrupt the pattern.

‍4) Which idea am I going to try first? Pick the one that you think will be most effective or influential in changing your environment. Also think about where it integrates into your personal systems and processes so that you’re clear on where to tactically implement the change.

What I’ve described is all about diagnosing and improving the likelihood of taking action. The more consistently you take high-leveraged actions, the more likely you are to generate corresponding results.

Let me show you how I put this into practice. The real problem I was facing is my coaching business  wasn’t growing like I wanted it to. The core constraint is I was afraid to ask people directly to work with me and I didn’t have a system for reaching out about it consistently. I brainstormed a few ways to intervene, but the best idea I had was to create a daily commitment of reaching out to one person a day, and I started tracking it on my Self Improvement Scorecard to hold myself accountable to doing it.

Now I have the clarity, accountability, and time allocated in my schedule to follow through on it. And I’ve been way more consistent with it for a month and have a few new clients. It’s remarkable how that works!

If you want to start taking the bigger and bolder action you need to actually change your life, or do the things you know you should be doing to improve your health or grow your business, this is for you. 

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