Eight years ago, I was standing on a dancefloor in the middle of the night, hoping the drinking would somehow make me feel differently.
I had been living in a crisis of meaning for months. Feeling depressed and low, I was constantly circling questions in my mind. What is my life about? Is there a meaning to it? Why am I feeling so bad? Am I just a pleasure-seeking program? Why is no one else caring about this?
Who am I?
My mood had dropped. I didn’t experience joy, even when I was with my friends or doing things I normally enjoyed; I couldn’t enjoy them because I was preoccupied with how I felt and the questions in my mind.
I had read somewhere that new research suggested the environment can trigger gene activation. Like, I could have a predisposition for cancer, but it would only break out when I was in an environment that triggered it. I remember finding this interesting as the person spoke, sharing that, for example, high-stress environments can trigger genes that cause disease…
Now, as I was in the midst of my crisis, this thought came back to me. Standing there on the dancefloor, I experienced a sudden change in environment.
Not outwardly.
In me.
A series of thoughts flashed through my mind, somehow connected to the research I had read.
The first realization I had was that I did not experience the dance floor and the people on it, but rather my thinking about them.
When I had that thought, I suddenly realized that I had not experienced my life, but rather my internal narrative about it. The questions I was circling shaped how I felt, and my relationship to those thoughts shaped the feeling I was living in.
“Change your thoughts to change your life” has a very different meaning for me.
I had just realized the power of my inner environment.
It was this sudden change that led me to coaching.
In part one, we looked at the external environment and its influence. As you live in an environment surrounding your body, you are always cultivating an environment we can’t physically see; only you can.
Your internal environment.
This environment is so powerful that you could be on a beach, with an ice cream in your hand, your kids playing, your partner next to you, and still feel absolutely empty and depressed. Or you could be in the middle of a meeting with your board, everyone scared to death for the crisis hitting your company, but feel calm and trusting because you have cultivated a different way of looking at things.
If you read the book Man’s Search for Meaning, you read how the author lived through concentration camps and, in the most horrific circumstances, still found meaning and even joy.
The power of the human mind is limitless.
Yet, as the law of environmental gravity states, the environment you are in has a pull and continually works to protect itself.
When you have a habit of worrying, thinking of bad things to come (which is a default function of the human brain), it takes energy to change that and build a different environment.
And the environment will work to protect itself.
Without active cognitive energy, the human brain naturally defaults to a low-energy, survival-driven state and to whatever the default of your narrative is. If you think you are not worth anything, this is what your mind, unattended, will default to.
The powerful thing about your inner environment is that you can change it.
It is moldable, changeable, transformable.
You have a say about what you grow and water in your inner environment by what you deem meaningful and worth keeping around.
And you can shape the inputs in your environment by choosing your outer environment (including the books you read, the people around you, the conversations you engage in, and the media you consume).
What environment have you cultivated in your mind?
Is it helping your direction?
What ideas, thoughts, and beliefs are worth keeping around, and which ones can you stop watering?
P.S. If you want to work on both your inner and outer environments with a coach who understands both, write to moritz@lembertstudio.com.