Take Action To Disrupt The Environment

I’m sure you know this by now… But the most influential element to the actions we take on a daily basis is our environment. Like sitting in a canoe in a river, we unconsciously go downstream wherever the environment is taking us. That means, if we want to go somewhere else we need to redesign our environment so that we naturally get pulled in a more favorable direction.

The thing about our environment is it’s much more complex, interconnected, and nuanced than you might think. Its influence is constantly evolving given the way small things change. It is dynamic, fragile, and vulnerable - which means we’re actually more capable of restructuring it than we even realize.

It doesn’t take much to disrupt the environment, and last week I did just that.

I was in Mexico for a housebuild impact project and after a long day working in the sun we had a group meeting to go over stories from the day, and logistics for the next. After that we usually play a few games and enjoy each other’s company. 

At the end of one of the games I could sense that some of the group wanted to play again, but some of us wanted to get some rest to prepare for a big day - myself included. There was a brief moment of tension, of uncertainty about what comes next, and given my people-pleasing nature, if someone voiced that they wanted to play another game I probably would have reluctantly accepted.

But rather than letting the tension resolve on its own, I took the first action and simply stood up. 

It was an action that disrupted the environment. It changed the energetic landscape as I subtly communicated my intention to say “goodnight” and get to bed. My action took over the frame of the environment, reshaped it in a way that was more favorable for what I wanted, and  quietly gave other people permission to do the same and skip the next game if they wanted to. And I got right to bed, on time, mission accomplished.

A visual that often comes to mind is shaking a snowglobe. When all the snow goes flying through the globe, things are turbulent. You don’t know exactly how it’ll settle. These are inflection points where the influence of the environment is being negotiated and restructured. Sometimes all it takes is a little shake to disrupt the previous pattern and design a new one.

It requires consciousness to take that action, but the action itself isn’t that effortful. It’s high leverage and strategic. And I encourage you to do something like this the next time you’re noticing that you’re being pulled the wrong direction and you want to make a correction.

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