If you are questioning if your environment is the reason you feel like you are being held back, then your emotions are already impacting your future success. Whether you realize it or not, your environment greatly impacts your ability to achieve your goals. Being aware of how you feel in certain environments can be critical to your success if you are in a managerial position, a non-managerial employee, a student, or an entrepreneur.
If you are not aware of how you are feeling then your emotions can be volatile leading to a rollercoaster of positive and negative thoughts that can decrease confidence and create unpredictable progress toward your goals. This article will give you ways to take your power back and control your environment to keep your emotions in check to ultimately have confidence in a predictable route to achieve your goals.
Why a bad environment is a problem
A flower can not grow in the dark. It needs light and room to expand. Humans are the same way. Being in dark or dim enclosed places and surrounded by people who don’t uplift you can stunt your growth. This could be the office that you work in, the company culture that you are a part of, the learning space, or your own home. Your office can be filled with people who are critical of one another causing you to be apprehensive and walk on eggshells, in a classroom with other students complaining about how hard the exams may be, or you can be an entrepreneur working from home by yourself questioning your every move with negative self-talk.
Consuming detrimental noise from the people you are surrounded by or yourself, can lower self-esteem, increase irritability, cause anxiety, contribute to depression, and even foster conditions like PTSD. This in turn lowers your motivation to achieve your goals and contributes to the feeling of hopelessness.
The key to controlling your environment is monitoring the noise you consume and being present in the moment to keep your emotions in check. This will lead to greater focus on the goals you set for yourself.
Ways to control your emotions in your environment
Pause in the moment
Pausing allows you to have time to yourself to recognize and understand how you are feeling in the environment that you are in. Being aware of your emotions is the first step in choosing your next one. Understand emotions are temporary based on the seasons in your life, and they do not define who you are. What you choose to do with the emotions you are having define who you are.
Take a quick moment to speed-date your emotions. Quickly assess what emotions you are feeling. Figure out what emotions you want to feel. Understand what emotions do more harm than good. Choose to do tasks that elicit the emotions you want to feel. This builds your self-esteem and gives you the confidence to move forward.
Write down what you want
If you could create the perfect working or learning environment, what would it look like? Who would you surround yourself with? How would you like to interact with people you can’t avoid? What beliefs would you have about yourself? How will you react when something doesn’t go as planned?
Answer these questions and write them down. Writing turns thoughts into tangible actions. You can create a roadmap of success for yourself to get to your goals by acting according to your wants. This puts you in complete control. You won’t be able to control what happens around you. However, you will be able to control how you react based on the outcomes that you want.
Remove yourself
No, I do not mean quit… unless your ability to perform is impacted and you feel like you have to. Again, this decision would be up to you.
Sometimes your environment is what it is, and you have to push through for the goal that you have in mind. In this case, you have to control what you can control. That can look like having conversations with the employees you manage about boundaries and avoiding what’s not expected, removing yourself from rooms where coworkers are critical and gossiping, staying away from people who distract you from learning, or getting out of your house to do work elsewhere.
Creating an environment of peace for yourself will uplift your mood, remove the fog on the road to your goals, and create positive emotions conducive to forward progress on your journey.
