Setting: Change Your Surroundings, Change Yourself

A setting or backdrop is the time and location within a narrative. In the literary sense, it initiates the mood and context of a story. Including culture, historical period, geography, and time of day. Broadly speaking, the setting you choose dictates the action you take. You can engineer your environment for success or failure. Put differently, you can “set yourself up” to win or lose. A setting is the entire social milieu in which events occur. Can you picture yourself doing the same thing in a tranquil forest, a bustling city, a distracting office, a chattering school, a comfortable tavern, or a growling gym?

Since you know the answer to last paragraph’s question, you intuitively understand how the environment dictates your actions. Where you are dictates what you do. What you do dictates where you get. Where you get is your future environment, which spurs your actions thereafter. This is why so many people freeze in their lives. They forget that their environment plays a large part in how they act. With a pantry full of junk food, its tempting to have some. When your home is a mess, its hard to keep your head clear. If your relationships are unstable, you’ll struggle to find any emotional security.

Settings that make you fail are abundant and easy to fall for. They can be traps set by others. This happens in the workplace when tasks are given to a person that are so difficult or resource-heavy that they have no chance of succeeding. When somebody is overloaded with work and they lack the authority to deny tasks, they are set up to fail. Another form of sabotage is withholding information necessary for somebody to succeed. Unfortunately, this isn’t exclusive to workplace bullying. Minorities in society are in part set up for failure as they face racial and sexual discrimination. Parents that have excessive expectations for their children set them up for failure because they hope they’ll be the perfect versions they couldn’t be.

What’s of interest to us is setting yourself up. You can easily set yourself up for failure. And the process will be seamless. It might even go unnoticed, which is the scary part. By fearing failure, unrealistically assessing your abilities, or by naively regarding the abilities necessary to succeed, you set yourself up to fail. The opposite of this is designing your environment in a way that it serves you and enables your potential. Compare a cluttered, noisy workspace versus a well-organized, serene setting for creativity and productivity. Or a vibrant, stimulating community that inspires you versus a static, mundane environment that results in complacency. Change your setting, change yourself.

Real-world examples of setting:

• Workplace Productivity: an employee struggles to focus in a noisy, disorganized office. By moving to a quieter workspace with a structured layout, they experience improved focus and output. A change in setting dramatically impacts performance and well-being.

• Urban and Rural Living: a person from a bustling, stressful urban environment finds it impossible to unwind after work. Moving to a serene, more nature-oriented area results in reduced stress and a balanced lifestyle. Different settings profoundly influence lifestyle and mental health.

• Educational Environment: a student finds the traditional classroom setting demotivating and engaging with the material is a challenge. Switching to a learning environment that incorporates interactive and hands-on activities enhances engagement and retention. How you design your learning space can stifle or stimulate curiosity.

• Culture: an individual seeking growth in creativity moves to a culturally rich city. Exposure to diverse art, music, and ideas in the new setting broadens their perspective and allows their creativity to bloom.

• Health and Lifestyle: someone accustomed to an unhealthy lifestyle, surrounded by fast food and a sedentary culture, finds it a nuisance to adopt healthier habits. Moving to an area with readily accessible fresh foods, recreational facilities, and a health-conscious community pushes them toward a healthier way of living. Environment shapes behavior.

How you can use the setting as a mental model: (1) what the hell are you doing there — assess your current surroundings and how they might be shaping your behavior, mood, and performance, situating them into the positive and negative cues that impact daily living; (2) where you should be — clearly articulate what changes in your behavior, mind, or productivity you want to know what about your current setting is conducive to achieving these goals and where change is needed; (3) move fast — if your setting is limiting your potential, alter your environment (e.g. relocate physically, redesign your home office, hang out with different people, organize your desk, take breaks elsewhere); (4) live by design — surround yourself with things that inspire and motivate you, with communities, resources, and spaces that align with your values; (5) keep what works, eliminate what doesn’t — evaluate how your setting affects your behavior thereafter and keep adjusting.