Environment Is Stronger Than Willpower

Ever feel like you’re trapped in a constant battle with your own willpower? 

In this episode of This Is Nothing New, Michelle breaks down a simple, timeless truth that the shiny self-help industry loves to ignore: your environment will always be stronger than your willpower.

When your willpower inevitably runs out, it's your environment that will dictate your habits. Michelle shares a funny, grounded look at how a simple furniture shift completely transformed her marriage's dinner routine, and how keeping a phone in a separate room is sometimes the only "hack" you actually need. Whether you are dealing with a cluttered desk, a chaotic digital inbox, or a distracting corporate workspace, this episode is a call to take ownership of what you can control.

This Week’s Challenge: Audit your primary space, identify one small environmental friction point, and change it. Remember, the biggest results come from the smallest shifts. 

Pull up a chair and let's get back to the basics.

Connect with Michelle:

Website: michellegruening.com
Instagram: @michellegruening
LinkedIn: Michelle Gruening

Transcript

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SPEAKER_00 0:05

Hey y'all, and welcome to This Is Nothing New, the podcast where we drop the trends and get back to the basics. My name is Michelle Bruning, and I'm gonna be your host. Today we are talking about willpower and how specifically willpower doesn't cut it. Willpower will never be stronger than the environment that you create for yourself. And so the whole concept of today's conversation and podcast is your environment is stronger than your willpower. Now, some of you might be thinking, Michelle doesn't know me. I've got the strongest willpower of anyone I've ever met. I'm disciplined. I am focused. You know what? Good for you, girl. I love that journey for you. For most people, willpower will never be enough. When we think about the environments that we set ourselves up in, our environment is always, always going to win out over our willpower. When that willpower runs out, it's our environments that are creating the structure for us to either achieve our goals, live the life we say we want to live, level up, succeed in whatever way we say we want to. So if we're thinking about how to set ourselves up for success, it starts with your environment. Now we're talking a little bit about physical environments specifically first. So if we think about creating an environment that is going to set you up for success, that is going to make achieving your goals easier. About making the about establishing your habits faster and more successfully. We're going to talk about environment. Now, again, this is nothing new. You do not need the brand new $100 planner. You do not need the new habit tracker app. You need to change your environment. And most of the time, that's free. And it's something you have control over. For the longest time, my husband and I had our couch facing the television in our living room with a coffee table in between. So most often you found us on the couch eating our dinner over the coffee table while we were watching one of the many shows that are out there. Now, I'm not saying there's a problem with that. If that's how you live your life, I love that. But for us, we kept telling ourselves, we need to be eating dinner at the dining table more often. We really should be eating dinner at our table more often. It just, you know, it's not good for your lower back, like leaning over like that. And it was cutting down on our face-to-face connection time. You know, even though my husband and I both work from home full time, there are some days where we literally don't see each other. We can hear each other kind of, you know, bopping around in the kitchen or something. But there will be days where both of our calendars have meetings at different times and we just don't see each other. And so we wanted to encourage ourselves to eat at the dining room table more often. But willpower to do that was not enough. I mean, we would set these goals of like two times a week, we have to eat at our dining table. Or every weekday, we have to eat at our dining table. And that would work for like a week, maybe two, when our willpower was still kind of strong. But at the end of the day, the environment won out because your environment is always stronger than your willpower. And so earlier this year, we were hosting some friends over for brunch. And we have a pretty small house. And so we had to do some rearranging of furniture to be able to fit the amount of people we were hosting. And so, in this rearranging, our couch, instead of facing the TV, we put it against a wall so that the TV was to your side. It was no longer facing it. And we had our brunch. And after we, after we hosted our friends, we decided, you know what, let's just, let's just leave the couch as it is. It kind of makes the room feel a bit more open, makes it feel a bit more flowy, you know, feng shui, if you will. But a really interesting byproduct came out of that simple furniture shift. Do you know what it was? Ever since that day, which I'm pretty sure was in January. February? I don't know. It was months ago. We have not eaten dinner at our couch a single time. Our willpower didn't change. Our goal to eat at the table didn't change. It was our environment. That one shift, it made it uncomfortable to want to eat dinner in the living room because you don't want to sit and you crane your neck to the left to watch TV while you eat. So the default best option became sitting at the dining room table and eating our dinner, which was the ultimate goal after all. So a lot of times when people are talking about establishing new habits and building new routines, they will tell you to reduce the friction between the effort you have to put in and the actual habit that you want to do. And that's true. That's totally true. A lot of those things you want to reduce the friction, and we'll we'll talk about that here in a minute. But with this specific example of wanting to eat at our dining room table instead of sitting in the living room, we needed to increase the friction. We needed to make it less convenient and a bit more difficult to eat in the dining room, or excuse me, to eat in the living room, which is exactly what we did when we rearranged the furniture. And that's just one example of how your environment is always stronger than your willpower. We shifted one thing. We literally shifted a couch. And it put us on a path to success to eat dinner at our dining room table every single night. And sometimes, y'all, the biggest result is going to come from the smallest change. So if we think about another example, uh, let's say you want to do some more reading. And I will talk about reading a lot on this podcast in different examples. One because I love to read. So let's say you want to read more, but you find yourself constantly picking up your phone almost every page you finish. It's just you're constantly interrupting your cycle. Maybe you're not even looking at your phone to do anything important. Maybe, maybe it's just a deep-seated kind of phone addiction, but that's a topic for another time. So here's one small environmental shift. Now, this is not rocket science here. This is not anything new, but a suggestion to shift your environment is to go into a room to read your book for 15 minutes and leave your phone in the other room. I know it sounds simple, and some of you are probably rolling your eyes at how dumb that sounds. But when you don't have your phone next to you, you can't pick it up. That's an environmental shift. Your environment has massive influence over your life. Now, some of you listening to this may be maybe you work for somebody else. You work at a company, you work in corporate, you don't necessarily have control over your work environment from like an office perspective. But hopefully you have control over your desk and what you can do with that. Because whenever we are in any type of environment, especially if it's one we spend a lot of time in, again, it has massive influence over your life, but your environment is also teaching your brain how to feel when you are in that space. So every time you step into an environment, every time you step into a room, a signal is being sent to your brain. So for example, if you step into a super cluttered, messy, chaotic space, how does that make your brain feel? Cluttered, messy, and probably chaotic. If you think, let's take this out of the physical world for a second, let's bring it into the digital realm. Now, I am somebody who I cannot stand notification bubbles, so I clear out my emails and all of my stuff pretty quickly. But I know there are plenty of y'all out there who let your email just climb into the tens of thousands. And every time you step into your email, you feel overwhelmed. And I know this for a fact because I've had plenty of clients tell me this exact example that they are living in their life consistently. Their email has grown so out of control that it's too overwhelming to even touch. So every time they step in it, it's immediate overwhelm. Now, if we come back to the workspace, if your work environment is full of distractions, your brain is just going to assume that distractions are normal. Your brain is never going to be able to get into like a flow state because it's constantly waiting for the next distraction. Again, I know some of you cannot control this because you're not the business owner. You're in a space where you're an employee. So maybe you're at a company who has a very strong culture of distractions. Maybe people are just firing off chats or Slack messages or Teams messages nonstop. Maybe you're in an office with people and it is literally a physical distraction. People come and tap on your shoulder and it totally pulls you out of flow. And it happens so often, your brain just is always waiting for the next distraction. So a couple of suggestions there. Now I know this isn't going to apply to everyone. So take it if you like it, leave it if you don't. Is can you put up a do not disturb on your chat for an hour to try to get into some deep work? Can you put a sign on your door that says focus mode? Please do not disturb for an hour. At some point, we have to be able to take ownership over the things we can control. And some of those things we can control is our effort into setting up our environment in a way that is going to help us succeed. Now, environments are especially important to those of you who are going through a process of personal development, of personal growth, and you are really leaning into that next version of yourself that you're becoming. Because when we think about our environments, we outgrow them. Hopefully, you're evolving, you're changing, you're growing. And when you do those things, the environment that supported you to a certain point isn't necessarily going to be the environment that will support you to your next level. And so when you're thinking about elevating yourself to your next level, how does your environment need to shift to take you to that next level? Because if you're trying to get on a new level and your environment is dragging you back down to old habits, to old patterns or old identities, either you have to bring your environment up or it's eventually going to drag you back down. Because remember, willpower is always going to lose out over environment. So let's say that you are stepping into, I don't know, you're stepping into a new business. Let's say you want to start a new venture. And that requires you to be on camera a lot. It requires you to be on a Zoom call or Google Meet, whatever. You want to show up polished, intentional, and like you got your shit together. But if the background behind you is piles of boxes, a trash can in the corner, mounds of clothes, an unmade bed, that may have been fine for an old version of you. But is that serving the next version that you're growing into? Is the environment that you are creating sending the same message that you are trying to give to the world? We had to set up our environments to be on our side. We want to set them up for success. So I I want you all to think about your environment. It could be your office space, it could be your bedroom, it can be your car, whatever. Just choose an environment. One that you spend a lot of time in. Is it set up for success? Is your environment crafted in a way that is going to put you on the path to your version of success? And if it's not, that's okay. If it's not, and you recognize that, now you can do something about it. And that's where your challenge comes in as we are wrapping up today's episode. Your challenge for this week is to do an audit of your environment. Identify that one area that you spend the most time in. And I challenge you to choose one thing in that space that can be improved. And then take the action to make it better. Remember, the biggest results can come from the smallest changes. So let me know in the comments. Send me a DM, send me an email. Let me know what small change you decided to make and how it has created a better, more successful environment. Thank y'all for listening to This Is Nothing New. Remember, everything I talked about today, it's not rocket science. We're just getting back to the basics. Thanks for listening, and I'll catch y'all next time.