How Our Environment Shapes Behavior

“Welcome back. For the next five minutes. I’d like you to take a look around your surroundings. What are some things that could negatively impact your ability to focus? Write your answers in the form. Once you’ve finished your list, click on submit button to continue. What do I mean when I say environment? Well, the purpose of that road rage exercise was to point out how even normal people, mild-mannered people, friendly people, happy people, can start getting crazy when we’re under high stress situations. That was the purpose of the exercise. When I say environment, I mean that entire ecosystem around us that’s impacting what we do. And we generally just grossly underestimate how our environment is impacting us. Now it may sound like I’m just making the environment, the protagonist in the drama of your life. Well, in a sense that’s true. The environment mostly pushes us away from becoming the person that we want to be, not pushes us toward becoming the person that we want to be. As we go through life, we have a journey. We have a path. We have a vision of who we want to be. We seldom think of that big world out there that’s throwing up roadblocks, obstacles, distractions, day after day, after day after day. By understanding the environment, we really can begin to see why change is hard, why we don’t become the person that we want to become, and we can start planning so we take the environment into consideration so we’re much more likely to actually become that…”