I am sure you have heard it said that what you think about, you bring about.
But do you know that what surrounds you every day has a direct correlation to what you think about?
Stop where you are right now and look around you. This is an environment that you have allowed to be in your life. You could be in your office, your bedroom, your car, your kitchen. You could be out on your front porch or back deck.
Take a moment to look at what you see in this environment. Does it make you smile or furrow your brow? Does it lift you up or make you feel like an unorganized crazy person?
We basically have 8 environments that surround us:
- Physical – your house, office, car…
- Spiritual – your place of worship or devotion
- Body – your physical being
- Nature – your contact, both visually and physically with the earth
- Financial – your income, resources and debt
- Network – your associates or secondary friends
- Relationships – your primary family and friends
- Self – your emotions and knowledge
These environments are typically formed and most definitely nourished by our beliefs about ourselves.
What do I mean by that?
Our environments reflect our limiting and empowering beliefs.
Years ago, I sat at a training on this topic. I was pissed at life at the time and pretty much mad at everything.
The speaker looked at me and said that I can keep it all together as much as I want others to see, but there are certain environments that tell the true story.
He said, “I bet if I look inside your car it will tell me more that you are willing to.”
Boy howdy – if that didn’t add to my pissyness!
He was right. My van was trashed on the inside – as was my mental state.
So were my finances, and at this time of my life, so was my body.
I was buried under the limiting belief that I was a huge disappointment to everyone, and that thought was dictating my emotions and actions.
The good news is that if you surround yourself with enough people who believe in you and speak truth to the lies, then you can replace the limiting beliefs with empowering ones.
List out your environments and put an L (limiting) or an E (empowering) next to them. Do you have more L’s or more E’s?
This is a great place to start. If you find that you have more L’s than E’s, it’s time to make some changes to your environment.
You can have all the positive talk and affirmations you want, but an empowering belief cannot exist or thrive in a limiting environment.
Think of the parable of the sower in Matthew 13:3-8
“A farmer went out to sow his seed. As he was scattering the seed, some fell along the path, and the birds came and ate it up. Some fell on rocky places, where it did not have much soil. It sprang up quickly, because the soil was shallow. But when the sun came up, the plants were scorched, and they withered because they had no root. Other seed fell among thorns, which grew up and choked the plants. Still other seed fell on good soil, where it produced a crop—a hundred, sixty or thirty times what was sown.”
Jesus was showing us how our environment can either choke out a great life or help it flourish.
What is so cool about this is that even though an empowering belief cannot sustain itself in a limiting environment, the opposite is also true.
A limiting belief cannot thrive in an empowering environment!
That’s great news because living our lives in God’s peace and joy doesn’t mean we don’t ever have crappy days and destructive thoughts. It means we have set our environments up so that when these days and thoughts do come around, we have the people and resources to point us back to the truth of God’s love, purpose and plan.
If you want help setting up some new environments or shifting the ones you have, send me a message and let’s work through it together!