Life crafting

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Have you ever been in the position of trying to achieve a goal, but the external world around you is making it much harder to achieve it? It might be temptation getting in the way – you’re trying to diet, but that pack of chocolate biscuits in the cupboard is calling out to you. Or, it might be distractions – you’re trying to look at your phone less, but your notifications keep going off, and you have to check each time just to see what’s happening. It might be other pressures acting against you – you’re trying to run your first half-marathon, but the wind is blowing against you, making it harder to keep going and making you even more exhausted.

In these situations, we often either blame ourselves for being weak in succumbing to these external pressures or use the external pressures as an excuse to let us off the hook and to avoid continuing to try. But there is another approach – to realise the power of our external surroundings to influence our behaviour, and to take action to set up the environment around us in a way that promotes the behaviours we want to have.

We could call it ‘self-nudging’ based on the behavioural science book by Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein, but it goes way beyond this. It’s about making sure we each tailor the environment around us to enable us to flourish. How we do this will be different for each of us, depending on the lives we want to have and what flourishing represents for us.

Many self-help books talk about the changes we can make personally, such as dieting to lose weight or reducing our screen time, without considering how much our situation and context influence our thinking and behaviour. As a result, they put the burden (or blame) on us as individuals for our success or failure in meeting them. This approach completely ignores a fundamental aspect of human psychology – that our behaviour is guided to a significant extent by the situations and environments we find ourselves in. We can apply this knowledge to make it much easier for us to live the lives we really want.

  • First, we can remove some external factors that encourage the behaviours we don’t want. For example, if you’re looking to consume fewer calories, you could make environmental changes such as removing any junk food from your cupboards at home, and only going down the supermarket aisles that contain healthy foods (this will also save time, as there aren’t many of them!).
  • We can also build in external factors that promote the behaviours we do want. For example, if you’re looking to be more productive when working from home, you could create an office space that gives you comfort and focus rather than just being functional, as well as physically removing your smartphone from the room, and installing a productivity tool like LeechBlock on your web browser that enables you to limit your own access to websites within certain time periods.

Life Crafting

We could call this idea ‘Life Crafting’ – tailoring your external environment to help you flourish. It can be applied to many areas of your life – from work to physical exercise to friendships, and could potentially involve you considering how you could adjust almost every external factor around you as an individual, such as the locations, situations, relationships, routines, habits, physical objects and sensations you choose to exist in and surround yourself with.

There are of course, endless aspects of your external environment that you could seek to evaluate in this way, and many areas of your life that you could apply this life crafting idea to. I’m not suggesting you do this for every minute detail of your life as this could lead to a bland, anxious and unadventurous existence.

Instead, I suggest that we prioritise the areas of our lives that we want to apply life crafting to – those where it could make the most difference to our overall flourishing – and this will differ for everyone. For some people, it may be trying to live in a more environmentally friendly way, and for others, it might be trying to build more nourishing relationships with other people.

We should also recognise that there are many external things that we can’t control in life, and one of the secrets to a more satisfied life is to be at peace with these. I suggest instead that we focus on the things that we do have some control over – such as the friends we choose rather than the strangers we bump into – but even with these things, we need to be comfortable with the fact that, ultimately, we don’t have complete control over them, and this is OK.

A more holistic approach

To give us some credit, we sometimes do try to change our external surroundings to fit our needs, but this is often in a piecemeal way and in a limited range of situations when it feels urgent to change our external surroundings, such as turning up the heating when we’re cold.

Each of us could, however, bring many more benefits to our lives by thinking in a more holistic, intentional and planned way about how we can tailor many aspects of our external environment to help us flourish, including the lifestyles, relationships, routines and situations we choose for ourselves. This would be based on our own self-awareness of our behaviours and our own views of the things that enable us to flourish.

Contact me now if you’d like to book some sessions to review how you can optimise your own personal environment to enable you to flourish – or how you can review this for your organisation.

How to stop worrying

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I had a conversation with a client recently that brought an insight about worry that I thought was very powerful, and could apply to a lot of other people and situations.

The client was looking to push forward with new career choices based on what they actually wanted to do and were passionate about, rather than trying to mould themselves to fit into jobs and other work that felt like ‘safer’ options but didn’t give them the motivation, meaning, or other benefits of following their own path.

This client was telling me how excited they were about the prospect of moving forward with this values-led approach, when they mentioned a possible concern, which is a common worry that many people feel when looking to pursue their own path – ‘what if it doesn’t work out, or if I’m not good enough?’. To help them overcome these doubts, we could have explored these questions and challenged the assumptions behind them to help set the client’s mind at rest, but we came up with a quicker and, what I thought was very effective, response to these worries.

This was to see the worrying simply as a response to the path they had chosen, not a valid alternative to it. The path the client had chosen was thought out, consistent with their values, and aligned to their skills. Their worry was not. It didn’t offer an alternative, considered path for the future – it wasn’t even a path – it was just a reaction of ‘what if that doesn’t work?’. We often, however, allow our desired paths for the future to be derailed by our worries, by somehow seeing them as comparable, equally valid, alternative paths forward for the future. As the client identified, however, they are not. The worries are simply a distraction from the chosen path to the future, not a valid alternative, as they don’t offer us a path forward.

So, in the absence of an alternative path, the client felt motivated and confident again to push forward with the future they actually wanted. Perhaps the rest of us could do the same!