Ep. 2 Your Home Shapes Who You Are

In this episode of Mandy Designed Life, we explore the profound connection between space and self, emphasizing that design isn't just a luxury but a vital aspect of creating a fulfilling life. Through personal anecdotes and insightful analogies, we uncover how our surroundings shape our identity and well-being. From blending history with modernity to empowering ourselves to design spaces that nurture growth, we learn to harness the transformative power of our environment. Tune in to unlock the magic of design in your life with Mandy Straight!

Transcript

Hello messy life livers.
This is Mandy Straight.
Welcome to Mandy Designed Life, the show that combines design, life, and reality so you
can create magic in all three.
I am your host Mandy Straight.
And in today's episode, we are going to talk about the connection between space and self.
This is a home decorating basic.
We're going to talk about how your space affects you, why it's important to pay attention to
that, and just what the hell you are supposed to do about it.
It's really easy to write off design as something that doesn't matter and something that is
superfluous and non important and to really relocate it into the realm of being a luxury,
which I think is where it's so often put.
The message that I want you to leave with today is that it is not a luxury.
It is deeply, deeply essential to who you are and how your everyday life experience
plays out.
And the only way you can really create a positive relationship with your home is to be intentional
about it.
And that intention doesn't have to look a certain way.
It doesn't mean that you have to be changing your home for all the style trends and figure
out what the color of the year is.
That's really not what it's based off of, but having a home that feels inviting to you,
that's safe, that reflects who you are is essential.
I'm sure you've heard the quote by Jim Rohn.
You are the five people you spend the most time with.
And that is so true.
The reason that this quote keeps being used and you have probably heard it many times
is because the people you surround yourself with are shaping what you see as normal in
the world.
They're shaping your perception of the world and who you can be and what's worth trying
for, what's worth putting an effort for.
It shapes all of that because the people you're spending time with, if they are spending
all their time doing nothing or if they're spending all their time doing, running around
and rushing and doing so much, then you feel guilty doing a little more nothing and being
responsive to the fact that maybe rushing around every minute of the day isn't healthy.
But if the people that you're surrounding yourself with value that and that's the only
way that you're seeing that people can offer value to the world, then you're probably going
to hold yourself to that same standard.
It is just as true that you are the five rooms you spend the most time in.
In the same way, these rooms are showing you who you are.
They're showing you what's normal, what's acceptable.
They're telling you how you fit into the world and anything.
What do you have permission to do?
What do you have space to do?
Literally and figuratively.
The five rooms you spend the most time in are shaping your self-reflection, your self-awareness,
your sense of self.
If you come home to your house at the end of a work day, if you work outside of the home,
or you come home from your house after going grocery shopping and as you pull in, parts
of your brain, even really quiet ones are saying, someday there will be a better house.
You really haven't made it a drudgery of life.
Man, I really need to paint that fence or I really need to sweep off the front porch.
Likewise, when you walk in the front door or the back door from the garage, what is that
space telling you?
Who is it telling you that you are?
Is it telling you that you are overwhelmed?
Is it telling you that you're trying to fit into somebody else's expectation for how and
who you will be?
Does it feel dark?
Does it feel trapped?
Does it feel like it's been created for someone else?
What is that message when you walk into your home?
Because that is the message that you're telling yourself you are worthy of.
It's important for us to remind ourselves that we're worthy when we're living in a world
that day to day doesn't necessarily tell us that.
When marketing is telling us you need this, buy that, cover up these wrinkles, don't show
people that you aren't perfect.
When the world says that, how can your home say the opposite?
How can you walk into your house and have it tell you, girl, you are beautiful, just
the way you are.
Maybe you're tired.
Maybe you're still in your sweatpants and you're killing it.
You're killing being you and the world is your oyster.
I want to give a specific example of how our surroundings affect us and I'm actually going
to go through a few layers of it.
I live in Colorado.
You'll probably hear me saying that a lot.
It does affect my life experience.
I think that's probably why I mention it.
I do love Colorado.
It's a fabulous place to live.
I grew up here.
I have moved away multiple times because growing up here, it wasn't the way I wanted
it to be.
Coming back, I realized it was just that I needed to be in the right city.
I love Denver and I love the mentality of Denver.
I do understand part of my identity as being from Colorado and having this be my sort of
spiritual home base.
I do feel like it is.
I resonate with the mountains, with the sky.
The sky here is unlike I have experienced anywhere.
Maybe at Montana.
I went to Montana for a wedding one time and I, there's no doubt why it is called big
sky and it is just beautiful.
There is something in me that responds very deeply to just a massive, expansive sky and
some mountains in the distance.
I don't even necessarily need to go to the mountains.
I have friends that laugh at me about it.
I live so close.
But it's not about going there.
It's about a foundation and a solidity and almost a security that I feel like they give
that's important to me.
As a contrast, I have a friend that lived here, did not grow up here and just recently
moved to Florida and she is so happy there.
She said her skin is better.
She loves the moisture in the air.
She loves being by the ocean.
She wants to go every day and kind of dip her toes in the ocean, walk along it, interact
with the ocean and I'm here to tell you.
I mean, I'm a cancer and if you look at my astrological chart, which, you know, okay,
just call me one of those people that's like, that might be true.
And then also I learn about it and I'm like, well, that's very true for me.
So call me like a believer with doubts, maybe an astrology or a cautious believer, maybe.
But my astrological signs, you know, you have your sun sign, your moon sign and your
rising sign and my son and my moon are both in cancer.
My rising is in aries.
So having my son and my moon in cancer tends to be, for those of you who don't know, it
means there's a lot of volatility happening inside me on a regular basis.
And cancers are very ocean based.
There's a cyclical nature to it and an up and a down and they need a home, you know, because
we're crabs.
We need a home to be able to retreat to, which is very true for me.
And I like to joke that even though I'm a cancer, the reason I don't like the ocean
is because I already have too much of it inside of me.
And so Colorado is my dry, airy, rocky way to balance my own inner water.
But that's a really good example to just say here are two different people.
My friend who is really thriving with more moisture, with the ocean, it's helping her
to remember parts of herself that she feels like she lost because she had lived in California
a while ago.
And living near the ocean in Florida, she gets to reclaim those parts.
And likewise, for me, I would feel like I had lost something.
If I didn't get to live with the sky, I did.
I moved away a few times and when I came back, I realized how much I value that sky.
I mentioned Denver.
I really love living in Denver.
Which place has its own memory of what's gone on there and it affects us.
That memory affects the culture of what is there now.
If it's not healed, it will still be a wound.
If there was positivity, that still remains.
And in Colorado, the beautiful history of Colorado, there is some pain.
There is a lot of pain in the history of Colorado.
The part of the beauty of it is in this mentality of exploration and this mentality that says,
I don't really know what's going to happen, but I'm going to give it a shot.
Because that's what people thought when they came out here.
When they came from the East, they weren't coming knowing what they were arriving to.
They came with a dream.
They came wanting something different.
And then getting here, knowing that they got to create it for themselves.
And I will tell you firsthand that is definitely the mentality in Denver.
That's why there are so many startups here.
People walk around the streets and they interact with one another.
They smile at each other and that's normal.
And they're all trying to figure out what their horizon consists of.
Because the people who came out here, they were going for the horizon.
They were like, what else?
What else is out there that I can work for?
And so living in that environment all of the time, it absolutely has an effect on my mentality
being an entrepreneur and even just in general.
So as I think about how living in Denver affects me, I feel more free.
I feel more free to make my own decisions.
I feel more free to not be limited by who my family is or where I went to school or where
my family went to school or what my last name is.
None of that matters here.
And I like living in that mentality and having that be the tone of the life that I get to
lead here.
As I think about different examples of how our environment affects us, I like to think
about trees.
And the reason I like to do this is I think as humans, we can explain away a lot of things
for ourselves.
We can say, oh, well, I decided this and I wanted that so I did something different.
But when we look at something that doesn't have the agency, is a much more pure way to
observe cause and effect, I like to think of trees.
In Colorado, you can go up to the top of a mountain and there's something called a tree
line and above the tree line trees don't grow because of the altitude.
I actually, I actually looked it up because I sort of know this having grown up here,
but I didn't have maybe the specifics about it.
So the general gist of it is trees don't grow up the trees don't grow above the timber
line because of high winds, low moisture and cold temperatures.
And apparently, well, I know this from from experience as well trees at timber line start
to look more like bushes than trees.
All trees and the bushes need less moisture and less oxygen.
So they're being responsive to their environment and they can't grow very tall.
If they can't grow to actually be a tree, if you're above tree line, you're just going
to be a bush.
And you know, if you came down to a place with a lot more oxygen, less wind, more moisture,
then trees have a lot more options to grow in a way that they can't grow at tree line.
The other thing I like to think about is, you know, when you're driving on the highway
and you see trees that sort of wrap themselves around a power line and you know that they
didn't have to be trimmed that way because they can't, they won't grow close to the
power line.
It's not, it's not a conducive, it's not an environment conducive to their growth.
So they'll grow around it.
I've literally seen a tree that circled fully in a, in a big circle around the power line.
And you know that that tree would not have grown in that shape were the power line not
there.
So its environment is essential in the way that it grew over time, just like your environment
is essential in the way you grow.
I'll give you one more tree example just because I like it and it seems so applicable.
When you're walking along the sidewalk, I like to walk my, I liked to walk my dog when
I, when he was still with us and I would walk on this one stretch where with a lot of flag
stone sidewalks here and you can see tree roots coming up through the cracks in the
flag stone.
And then there's this other place too, there's a park that I used to like to go to that's
not near me anymore that has brick in the, in the ground.
They're sort of set in a herringbone pattern.
So so pretty.
I love it.
And you can see that there's this one tree and the roots had grown into the cracks of
the herringbone pattern.
And it just like right into the mortar of where the brick was between the bricks.
And you know that that is not, that's not the natural root pattern for that tree to grow
in.
But because it's in that environment, it was encouraged to grow in that way in that shape
over time.
So in all of, in all of these examples, the growth is affected by the environment.
And I'm sure you can think of a lot more examples like that with more than just trees, with
animals, with people, even though it gets more complex.
My question to you is if you're the tree, what type of growth is your environment limiting
and what type of growth is it supporting?
If you live at your own metaphorical tree line, is your environment trying to make you
a bush?
And what I mean by that is maybe it's not feeding you to be yourself.
As I mentioned with Denver, it's not just about your physical environment.
It's also about the mental one.
What kind of mentality are you encouraging for yourself?
So that's a geographical setting, but let's get even a little closer to home, like literally
your house.
If you listened to my first episode recording, you know that my house is really old.
We ended up buying an 1891 Victorian.
So I mean, we're what 130 years old now, this house.
And there is a different energy, if you want to call it that.
There's a different vibe.
There's a different feel spending time in a house that's 130 years old than there is
in a new build.
I also talked about this in the first episode.
I mean, I kind of like to think of my house as a grandma, which it's not even, grandma's
not even quite right.
It's almost like Nana.
Like it's something more familiar.
It's something old that has some creeks and also just wants to love on you and like
be there and be solid for those that come after just like a just like a Nana.
And that grounding, that feeling of love and history even that I feel in my house serves
something for me.
I thrive and feed off of that.
It nourishes a part of me.
I walk into my house and it has little whispers, has little whispers from the past.
Things that say we're still here or you're doing a good job or it feels like a grandma,
the things that it whispers to me.
And also, it also reminds me that time passes.
Nothing is temporary.
I'm sorry, that time passes.
Everything is temporary.
And also, if you zoom out 130 years, in some ways it's all kind of the same.
So I don't need to get worked up about little things because this house will still be here.
Things will still be moving along.
My day will still be going even if I've got stressors in the middle of it.
And to me, an old house carries some of that mentality with it.
Now, because it's my house and I don't want to live 130 years ago, I also intentionally,
as a designer, am balancing that with my interior design.
So I have some mid-century modern chairs and I make sure that I incorporate clean lines
to go along with the grandma quality of the house.
And of course, I like to speak to the grandma quality of the house too.
I have some, I've laced drapes and I have a Victorian sofa with the carving and the
wood and all of that.
But after those two things, I start to want to clean it up a little bit because if I'm
looking at how my house serves me and who it tells me I am, striking a balance allows
me to say I'm grounded in history and I'm safe and I also like new things and different
things and I also like travel and exploration and something different all the time and more
energy than maybe my nana would have.
So I like to balance both of those and get each side.
So does your environment, your home and all your other surroundings have an impact on
you?
Undoubtedly, yes.
And you can't always change those things though, right?
It's very common that we live where our family is because we like to have a family unit or
we live where the job is because that's the way that we're making our living at the moment.
So some things are fixed points that make more sense to then find the balance with rather
than saying, oh, I just have to, I have to move my house, I have to move where I'm living
and uproot the whole thing.
Maybe you don't need to.
How can that be balanced?
The question that I would have for you is who is your life telling you that you are?
What's the vibe of your city?
What does the outdoors, the natural environment of where you live tell you about life?
What does it remind you?
What is your workplace like the vibe, the visuals of it?
What does it feel like to walk into that workplace?
How does your family affect you as being those people, the five people you spend the most
time with?
Do you spend time with your family and how is that affecting you?
And then circle right back around to your home because it's so important to be aware
of what it's telling you.
One thing that I like to play around with is to be aware of the expectations and assumptions
about me that my home is reflecting back to me because if I created my home, it is created
in the nature of me and that means that the way that I feel when I walk into it are the
stories I'm telling myself, both in that way, specifically in my home, but also probably
in hundreds of other ways every minute of my life because those are beliefs I have about
myself and the world that then are being reflected in my home.
So you can even ask yourself, who does my home expect me to be?
What does it assume about me?
Who does it tell me I should be?
And check in with yourself.
Do you want to be that person?
What if you got to define who you are for yourself and your house wasn't limiting, but
it was actually encouraging, maybe even enabling you to be the very best version of you?
And here's a little secret.
You do get to define who you are for yourself.
We all get to.
It's a good question to ask to say, wow, I don't even, that's great.
I understand now that my space is having an effect on me, but where do I even begin to
try to notice what that is and shift it?
And I would say, look at the different layers.
Look at your city.
Look at your house.
Think of physically in your home.
What do you have space for?
You have space to do yoga.
Do you hate the dry air and not have a humidifier and something in that tells you that you just
can't get enough oxygen sometimes?
Do you want to entertain with friends and you don't really have a space to do it?
So you're telling your brain that you don't have a community that's welcome in your home.
Maybe it's something mental, spiritual and emotional.
Where are you encouraging yourself to be excited?
Where are you encouraging yourself to get rest when you need it?
Where are you inspiring yourself and allowing yourself to interact with those in your life
the way you want?
If you don't have a place for bedtime, storytime with your kids, then it's probably not happening.
But if you had a special place or a place that was perfectly conducive to that, wouldn't
you imagine that you would actually have that quality time that you crave to have with them?
And all you have to do is make space for it, literally.
And then when you have space for it, your brain believes that it's a part of your life.
There's such a strong, what is it, self-improvement way to say something that's act as if.
And it's controversial because part of it is make believe.
But what if you didn't have to act as if, what if you tell your spaces to act as if?
What if you say, here's the person I want to be and I am going to design a house for
it, them, because not designing your house, not being intentional about your interiors
doesn't mean that there's no design.
It doesn't mean it's there or it's not and it's there if you put it in.
It's there all the time.
And the question is, if you aren't shaping the message that it's telling you, what message
is it telling you?
What is it saying to you?
And whose message is it?
Because if you didn't shape it, it's not yours.
So this is not to say that you need to put a whole bunch of money into it, that it has
to be fancy or you have to go to all of the nice furniture places and paint it again in
the color of the year.
It's not about that.
But if you can get clear on the person you want to be and you can shape your space, design
your space, build your home for that person, how can you help but become it?
There's no choice because that's the person that you made the house for.
That's the person who lives in this house and surprise, that person is you.
You get to be that person and you're tricking your unconscious into thinking it's already
you and really remembering that all of those parts of you were in you all along.
Not only does then, not only can your house then give you what you need, but it can remind
you that you are this person even on days when you don't feel so great, even on days
when life is tough and you're going through some stuff.
I like to call it passive visual income.
You know, passive income is kind of you set up and you do some stuff at the beginning.
You work on it, you set up the systems and then it piques you over time and you don't
have to think about it.
So how do you set up passive visual income for yourself?
If the income is reminders of who you are, reminders of the you that you're creating
of the best parts of you and the core of your passion, your interest, your inspiration, what
if your home can remind you of all of those things and it happens the minute you walk
in the door because you've already set it up to do that.
You're living off of that passive visual income over and over and over again.
The other encouragement that I would like to give you is, and I said this, but I want
to say it clearly as we part from each other, which is instead of asking yourself what you
want your home to look like, ask yourself who you want to be in this home and in your
life, that helps you get specific about what you need to feed and nourish that version
of you.
So set up your power lines or your sidewalk bricks or whatever that looks like in your
home.
Paint, figure out colors that give you that feeling of you being you.
Make sure that your home encourages you to be the person you want to be.
That way you can't help but start to grow into that person.
Thanks for joining.
I'm Mandy Straight and I'll see you next time.