Structuring Your Environment For Success

I love a good quote. As I'm digging into some research or just floating about in the vast information available on the internet, I'll come across an idea caught in a quote that gets me thinking much deeper about the subject I'm exploring. Here's one of my favourites.

“My freedom will be so much the greater and more meaningful the more narrowly I limit my field of action and the more I surround myself with obstacles. Whatever diminishes constraint diminishes strength. The more constraints one imposes, the more one frees oneself of the chains that shackle the spirit.” – Igor Stravinsky from Poetics of Music

Today let's get into how to limit your environment by giving yourself some constraints.

Hey there. It's me, Kore. And you're listening to Exercising Self-Control: From Fitness To Flourishing.

Consider the environment through which you move. Often you'll interact with the environment as it presents itself. You'll have no choice as to how most environments are organized. But when it comes to your own structures, your own personal environment, you do have a choice. You can set up your environments to much better align with the life you want to live. This gives you an external means to make better choices.

Some structures that you can definitely rearrange are your home, or at least a room or some space within it, your vehicle, maybe your garage if you have one, your desk or office at work, your locker at the gym or at school. Basically anything that you can call your own.

By designing your environment you influence your choices. Your choices can then be limited to the parameters that you set for yourself. For example, by removing junk food from your home you make it easier to choose healthier food when you're hungry. For that matter, if you actually write a shopping list with the healthy food that you want, that helps you focus on bringing home bags of groceries that don't contain any junk food in the first place.

Some other examples of structures:

* an alarm clock that you set to wake up at a certain time in the morning

* a training partner who you schedule to meet at the gym to help you commit to your workout

* a workout journal to track your numbers, sets, reps, that kind of thing. So you provide a record of your progress for feedback so then in the future you can make better choices as to when to lift heavier, lift lighter, change exercises.

* a calendar with scheduled tasks so that you can organize your time better to be more productive.

All of these are examples of structures that you can use that will then make you more effective.

Structure, when it's set up properly, triggers self-control and discipline. It creates a circumstance in which you make a choice once and you free yourself from having to go through the machinations of making that choice again because you simply are hemmed in by the structure that you've already set in place.

Another benefit of structures is that they enable you to face your relevant current reality, how you’re doing in the moment. You can answer the question, “Am I making progress toward my goal? Am I living my highest values?” With appropriate structures in place, you become aware very quickly whether you're making progress or losing ground. And you are either doing on of those. You’re either making progress or you are losing ground. There's really no maintaining the status quo because time is always at play and nothing stays the same. A good structure makes these considerations much clearer.

When the alarm sounds in the morning, for example, you either get up as you planned or you don't. You immediately get feedback as to your integrity and whether the first step in your day is the one that you wanted.

Structure, paradoxically, increases your freedom and makes you more creative, with reference to that quote that I opened this episode with. It introduces constraints within which you will find you experience a reassuring ease. Your choices will be limited by the parameters you've set for yourself. You'll be free to put more energy, more effort, toward the process that you have considered will give you the biggest payoff in terms of your preferred outcomes.

Structures limit options, creating a laser focus and an increased ability to stay consistent with the person that you want to be and the life that you want to live.

That's it for today. Catch you next time.

This is a public episode. If you would like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit stoicstrength.substack.com