Two Functions Of An Environment

I’m a huge believer in environmental design. I agree with people like Benjamin Hardy (who wrote “Willpower Doesn’t Work” and Darren Hardy (who wrote “The Compound Effect”) and the way they attribute behavior to the influencing forces around you. As adaptive beings, we were designed to be highly responsive to the things around us because it maximized our ability to survive changing times and manage threats to our safety.

Environmental design is the concept where you can change the forces that influence you such that they support the life you want to live. By default, our environment creates resistance and aims to keep secure in the comforts of how things are now. But if we want to achieve and experience beyond our present level, we need to take new actions, and environmental design supports that.

When it comes to following through on an action there are two things to keep in mind, which also serve as the two functions of your environment. The first is that it makes taking action easier. Rather than facing opposition, you can adjust your environment so that it does some of the work for you. Getting a membership for a gym that’s closer to home reduces friction toward working out. Business development gets way more consistent when you have an accountability partner. The action becomes easier to do when your environment favors doing it more than it used to.

The second function of an environment is to prompt your awareness to take action. If these things were going to happen automatically, then they already would by now. It’s critical you leverage your environment to remind you of what’s important and what you plan to do. Having a to-do list or daily schedule is a system of awareness where when you reference it, you remember what you need to do. You can move objects into obvious places so that they disrupt your unconscious pattern, you perceive them, and can choose to act. Awareness is consciousness, and you can use your environment to cue you to pay attention to things.

Because environmental design is so effective, when it comes to changing my life it’s the first place I go. When I have a new intention to be a better husband or eat healthier or more consistently follow up with people in my network… I default to thinking about how I can change my environment or build systems that make doing it more consistent. It makes the action easier and reminds me to do it in the first place, which are two very important criteria to follow through. New actions create new realities. Change your environment and you’ll change your life!

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