As babies in the womb, we live in a perfect environment. Food on demand. Climate control. All our needs are instantaneously met. Once we come into this world, we begin an almost immediate search for perfect environments. In the beginning, those environments are created for us. Our rooms, what stories we are read, what and when we are fed, who we go on playdates with, what we learn in school. Eventually we begin to design our own environments, choosing items for our rooms, picking our own books, selecting our own friends, choosing a major in college. As our world continues to change, we adapt to the new environments. We have only to observe the aged who have not kept up with technology to see how the failure to adapt constrains us.
Along the way, we create environments that support us in the lives we live, and those environments become familiar and comfortable. Those environments….our relationships to people, possessions, surroundings, ideas and more can either hold us in place, or support us to grow.
Consciously or unconsciously, we design our environments to reflect how we think and feel. All of these are part of our personal environments which we create to support us in the life we are living. Many people have discussed environments as a way of choosing how you plan to live, including Julia Cameron and Thomas Leonard. Our environments include:
- Your surroundings (or Physical Environment): This includes your home, your car, your office, and nature.
- Your Relationships: Family and Friends, Colleagues and Superiors, Clients and Customers
- Your Network: Acquaintances, larger circle of work relationships, people within organizations you belong to
- Your Environment of Ideas (or Memetic Environment):
- Your Spiritual Environment:
- Your Financial Environment
- Your Body and Health Environment:
- Your (inner) Self Environment:
- Your Career Environment
- Your Creativity Environment
- Your Leisure Environment
- Your Environment of Possessions
- Your Resource Environment
When you want to make a change in your life, you need to change at least some of our environments to support and nourish that change.Well designed (inner and outer) environments can naturally increase happiness, performance, and effectiveness and more, in effect, pulling us forward into the change we want to create. Changing environments can support the vision and goals you have and changes you want to make.
The first step is to become aware of all your environments, determine which are and which are not working for you, and then design them to support the you that you want to become.
And that’s what the Personal Environments Project is about.