A friend of mine recently said to me she wanted to start a gym called Resolutions—for the first two weeks of the year it’s a gym; the rest of the year it’s a bar.

Yes, it’s that time of year again; the holiday trimmings are coming down, we’re make resolutions, creating goals, and promising ourselves that this time it will be different…this time we’re really going to make change stick. But like Resolutions, the workout-bar, within two weeks we’ve fallen back into old, familiar habits—habits that are as comfortable as a tattered t-shirt and as disappointing as coal in your stocking Christmas morning.

A very similar occurrence happens at our workshops. We show up as the people we’ve known and experienced for most of our life, yet after several days of looking within and looking at what we truly want out of our lives, we leave feeling the revitalizing energy of possibility. We feel alive, motivated, and hopeful—all byproducts of spending a weekend in a learning environment with people who share a collective vision; transformation and the greatest ideal of ourselves.

For the first two weeks we’re on fire. Every day we’re meditating or working out, eating right or putting a certain amount of hours towards our goals. Things are going great, unexpected breakthroughs occur in once soured relationships, and we start to think maybe—just maybe—we’re making matter conform to our will. And then...

 

Does this sound familiar?

At the start of week three we’re bellied up to Resolutions, ordering mozzarella sticks and a double margarita. Meanwhile we’re looking through the glass behind the bartender at all the people working out. We find ourselves wondering, what is it they possess within them that allows them to commit so deeply to their health and wellness? Perhaps this something is not only within, but also without.

With only lime and ice in your cup and the faintest hints of breadcrumbs and marinara sauce left on your plate, the easy thing to do at this point would be to give up—to let the old self make us feel guilt and shame, telling us we’re no good and unworthy. The fact of the matter is it’s not that we don’t have the will or desire—it’s that we haven’t mastered becoming greater than our environments.

Most people try to use willpower to change their life, yet in one study of nearly 10,000 participants, only 4% of this population could employ the facilities of will power, drive, and force to change their behavior. 96% went through ups and down, and when looking at weight gain within this population, most people not only returned to their equilibrium after losing weight, but many put on more weight. Care to take a guess as to what the dominant factor is in the 96% of participants whose behavior didn’t change?

Environment.

Why?

Because most of the time environments are going to win over will power. Will power is only present when we’re thinking about it. Our environments are working on us 24-hours, 7-days a week. That’s why we meditate every day—to unplug from our surroundings and plug into the Field.

 

So what is an environment?

Everything we see, hear, taste, touch, and smell is an environment. The music on your phone, the interior of your car, your social and business networks, each room of your house, the places you visit, every person in your life…your mind, body, feelings, and emotions—these are all environments that are working on us, whether we’re paying attention to them or not.

Many of us feel victims of our environments and thus use it as an excuse to give up on change. But what if instead of using willpower to change our behavior we designed our environments in such a way that they naturally caused us to be pulled towards the highest ideal of ourselves? This is creating our life by design, not by default.

To design not only the exterior, but also the interior of our lives, our environments need to reflect our values and beliefs. As we all know, values are the things that are consciously and subconsciously motivating us. Beliefs are feelings of certainty that we’ve acquired through past experiences—which we’ve proven ourselves to be true—that drive our behavior. If we don’t know our values and beliefs, and are thus not in tune with them, even the strongest among us will return to our old behaviors within six months.

By looking at our beliefs and values, we can decide how we want to live, and thus design our environments within these accords. Designing the exterior of our lives to mirror the interior will help pull us into the person we strive to be. To accomplish this we need to look at our homes, yards, networks, jobs, and many of the other peripheral corners of our lives. When looking at these environments, ask yourself, are these environments inspiring me or expiring me? Increasing my energy or decreasing my energy? Pulling me up or pulling me down?

When you start upgrading and redesigning your environments, you’re going to find that everything changes. By the mere fact that we’re aligning our environments to our values and beliefs, we are tuning into the frequency of the goals and outcomes we want to achieve. This is the difference between reminding ourselves of our predictable past and alerting (and entraining) ourselves to the possibility of a new future. It’s bringing some thing from the immaterial world of thought and possibilities to the physical world of senses.

Here’s to creating some thing from no thing in 2016, and being the best possible expression of you.

Stay tuned for the next blog where we’ll share some practical tips and tricks as to how you can align your external environment with your internal environment.