The New Bedspread Effect: Start Small and Change Your Life

You may have a life that looks successful on paper, and still you feel like your life isn't working out how you want it.

Too many meetings. Too many commitments. A workspace you dislike. A home that does not feel like you. When everything feels off, the hardest part is often knowing where to begin.

Enter 'the new bedspread effect': improve one small part of your environment, protect the feeling it creates, and let that become the reference point for what you change next.

In this episode, Justin shares how buying one decent bedspread helped him begin transforming an apartment that still looked like a college student lived there. He then explains how the same principle helped him create better boundaries, protect his lunch hour, choose work more carefully, and become more reliable without working sixteen-hour days.

Key Ideas and Takeaways

• Why one small improvement can reveal what you want the rest of your life to feel like
• How to use a positive part of your environment as an anchor instead of focusing on everything that is wrong
• Why doing more work does not necessarily make someone more valuable or dependable
• How overcommitting creates emotional baggage, psychological overhead, and disappointed coworkers
• Why consistently doing what you said you would do can matter more than taking on the most tasks
• How protecting one meaningful part of your day can influence your projects, boundaries, team, and career

Why Listen

This episode is for developers, engineers, leaders, and anyone who feels overwhelmed by their work or discouraged by their surroundings. You do not need to redesign your entire life today. You may only need to find one small thing that feels good—and start building from there.

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Transcript

Justin Wenck: 0:04

To those developers, engineers, leaders, and anyone else who feels like their work is overwhelming or the world around them is just too depressing, this is going to be for you. We're going to be talking about what I like to call the new bedspread effect, and how it might be the answer you've been looking for. Let's get started. Are you ready to live a life with enough time, money, and energy? Have relationships and connections that delight you? Are you ready for the extraordinary life you know you've been missing? If so, then this is the place for you. I'm a best-selling author, coach, consultant, and speaker who's worked in technology for over two decades. I'm a leader at transforming people and organizations from operating in fear, obligation, and guilt to running off joy, ease, and love. It's time for engineering emotions and energy with me, Justin Wenck, PhD. So, the new bedspread effect. So, this is going to be great for those of you that are in environments, whether it's your physical environment or maybe it's just sort of like your work, the amount of stuff you have, where it just seems like you're just living in it. You're stuck in it. You're overwhelmed, and it doesn't seem like you don't even know where to begin. But it's just it sucks. It's overwhelming. You don't like it. So this could be the amount of meetings you have, the amount of tasks you have to complete, or it might just be the quality of what's surrounding you, like your furniture or your your desk. Life just is not how you want it, and part of you is just like frustrated and disappointed. Like, what's what's this? I'm I'm doing great things. Like things are supposed to be great. I should be happy. I should be enjoying my life. I've got great skills. I've got on paper a great job, and I've got yeah a good place to live. Yet I'm surrounded by by garbage. It feels like it just feels like it's it's garbage upon garbage, and it's so hard to find the the little gems. And this is something that I experienced, especially earlier on in my career. So I you know got my doctorate in electrical engineering, and then I started working for for Intel. And since I did undergraduate graduate school, I was living like a college student for over 10 years, basically, and it was okay for for a couple years while I was working, and then at some point after after having enough, I think okay, I had I had one one date that we became friends, and she told me, like, dude, your your home sucks. Like, what's what's the deal? You live like a college student. Like, I think I still actually had an end table that was a a cardboard box just with a sheet over it. I I like to think that maybe I got rid of that a couple years ago, but that could still have been one parts of my furniture in my apartment a couple years after starting work, and I was like, "Oh my gosh, she's right! I'm I'm living like a college student, and I'm I'm working an adult job, and I'm adult. How do I have adult places to live? If some of you are like, this is not this is not my problem, but this is gonna this is gonna get to solving, you know, you're you're having too many tasks or too many meetings or just too much for your work environment because I got something for you too, we got to get into, and so I went and I asked a friend of mine, his his girlfriend, because I was like, maybe she has some ideas of what I what I can do, because I still wasn't ready to spend all new furniture money just yet. So I asked her. I was like, "What can I do? Apparently, my place sucks. She's like, "Oh, here's what you do. The easiest way to make your place feel so much better is you get you get a new bedspread, get get one of those bed in a bag sets. So just go to go to Target, go to Walmart, wherever you know, get something, and it'll just immediately make the room feel better. So I did. I went and I found one that it's like, okay, this is okay. Let's let's not get the the flowers and the pink and the that. Like, no, thank you. And then okay, I don't I don't want that. But okay, this this color, this fabric. This feels good. And okay, all right, it's only eight pillows, not 85 pillows. This is great. So you know, do do the whole thing up. The new bedspread, the the the bed, the the the covers, whatever you call them. For yeah, just so so now my bed's got you know eight pillows on it, and they're all decorative, and it looked incredible. It was amazing. I was like, "This feels good. This feels really good. And then I look around the rest of my room and I'm like, "Boy, the rest of this really, I really don't like. I like the bed, but the furniture, you know, the desk I had in there and the dressers and the other stuff. I'm like." The rest of this is this is this now almost looks even worse. This is where I'm going to caution you, because I was not cautioned. The key is to focus on the thing that makes you feel good, and be grateful for that, and go like, yes, I've got my one little piece of paradise here. I've got my one little piece of paradise here. So you're probably wondering, like, okay, maybe this helps to you know the environment that I that I surround myself with, because I'm going to show you how this ends up being the start to changing your entire environment, your entire life, the entire way you work. So let's let's jump let's jump to the work side of things, right? So I always amazed when I was working a corporate job, the number of people that they would maybe you know start start between seven and eight a.m. They would work through lunch and they'd work through to like 6p.m. Go home, then jump on and still be working at night. Like they're basically like I don't know working 16 hours, 16 hours a day. And there's one of those where it's like, oh my gosh! I got to keep up. You know. Yet, let me tell you, most of these people-they are working a lot. Yet they are not effective. They are not producing much value. Had the fortune of noticing that many, many, many, many of the most high-performing workers were often the most disappointing when it came to how much they actually came through on what they promised to deliver, they would sign up and go like, "I'll do that. I'll do this. I'll do this. I'll do that. Do the other thing, and they would, yes, in fact, get a lot of stuff done. But they just about never got done everything they said they would get done when they said they would do it. Maybe they were lucky if they got half of it done. So why is this why is this important? Because if you just only sign up for half of the things and you do all of those things, people are amazed with you. Because the thing is, these high performers that only follow through half of the time, they have double the amount of emotional baggage and psychological overhead, thinking and juggling all of these things, they have all of that burden. Yet, they're only getting half the time. They're getting people that are happy with their work, and the other half they're disappointed. And we know that disappointment actually has more impact than how much you benefit. Because think about it. What is the saying? It's like it takes a lifetime to build a reputation, and only one mistake to ruin it. So the thing is, is if you are superstar, you do everything you say. People are going to wait that much better than the person that maybe they maybe even actually do a little bit more than you do, but they're also disappointing way way way more often. So it really isn't necessarily about how much you do; it's how much value you're perceived as offering and how easy it is to work with you. So where does this come in with what is the bedspread effect when it comes to working and doing things for me, for me it was about the lunch hour because it was one of those that I think I had a manager that wants to like you know lunch lunch is important you got to have your break you see here see stream my calendar and he had he literally had meetings from like seven seven a.m. till like you know 5p.m. and then sometimes evening ones because he had to work with a team in India, and but he's like, but you see this one, you see this one here, 1230 to one. That's mine. That's my time for lunch. That's my special sacred time. And I was like, boy, this guy's this guy's successful. He's my manager. I'm sure he knows what he's talking about. And so I made lunchtime a sacred time where I would I would do an hour lunch. So noon to one. That's that's you know for the most part. If somebody tried to set a meeting, I'd do my best to reschedule it. But sometimes somebody's like, oh no no, it's the only time. And so would do it, but then if I could, it's like okay, I'm gonna now have 12:30 to 1:30 as my lunch, or I'm gonna carve out some time, at least a half hour, where I go and I have that time where I eat my lunch, and I would love to just go outside and do it. And so this was outside of Sacramento, and so short of monsoon rains or 110 degree heat. I would be outside there enjoying some sunshine or the outdoors to be around the plants and the trees, as few as there might have been, because I just really valued that and I felt like that was the the one thing. I was like, oh, it's a good day because I'm doing this. And what the bedspread effect is, both with the literal bedspread and this metaphorical bedspread of of lunch, is that it starts to show where the attention is required for the rest of the improvements, and so in my home, slowly but surely, it was you know. Replace the furniture in the bedroom. Then the the bedroom's great. Then ooh, how's it? How's the bathroom feeling? Like okay, let's maybe you know get a nice shower curtain. Let's maybe get some get some rugs there. That's feeling good. Then ooh, oh, what's going on in the living room? Like oh boy, okay let's let's maybe go and get some stuff that matches and maybe get a new couch and things like that that goes together and and then you know yeah did it happen overnight no but in about a year to two years I had a a really respectable looking apartment and then you're like okay how does that how does this happen at at work in the workspace, because it's like okay, I've got this one area that feels good, and then it's like, ooh, other parts of work don't feel so good. Hmm. So maybe it's a little bit about like being disciplined about what projects I take on, right? Because I've got that, I've got the sacred time I want to defend, and so I got to be careful with managing my time and how I communicate, or maybe it starts to be, oh well, how how am I gonna? Maybe it's time to. Well, it's a little bit physical. It's like, okay, I'm gonna clean clean out my desk and have a clean work environment, right? So that's good too. Or sometimes it just ends up being that, like, oh, I don't like I don't like this project, or so I'm going to get better at choosing projects that I actually want to be on. You actually have a lot more power than you think you do, by the way. And then at some point, there would just be like, I don't think I like being on this team anymore, and I want to do something completely different because this just isn't feeling as good as I feel when I'm when I'm having lunch and talking about the things that I want to be talking about, and so then I would look for other other roles within the company. So these this the bedspread effect is the solution to changing your entire way of working, your entire environment, because it's an area that is that shining light that shows you how your life, your environment can be, and that is going to spread and radiate and allow you to see what needs the effort, what needs your attention to make the changes, the shifts that you know you want to make, so that you can feel that way that the bedspread effect gives you in that little moment, right? So at home it might just be in the morning and in the evening, or just at lunchtime if you're talking about taking that that time out at lunch. But you're going to be like, oh, I want more of this. And the key thing here is to focus that you're having that little bit of goodness, and you want to expand that because one of the things that slowed me down early on was a little bit of that. Like, oh God, just everything else sucks. Everything like this one thing is good, but everything else is garbage and awful, and ugh, and letting that almost make it feel like it's even worse. That's not how you want to go. You want to you want to go? This is good, and ooh, now I see how things could get even better. You want to be building, building, building better. So whether you're a developer, whether you're an engineer, a leader, or just somebody else who has a life that feels like, oh my gosh, I'm surrounded by by shittiness. I'm surrounded by too much to do. The bedspread, the new bedspread effect, is the way to start because it's something small. It's something you can do, and maybe you're like, I don't care about my bedspread. I don't care about that. Pick something for you that uplifts you. That's something that can anchor you and feeling good about your environment, about your work, whatever that is, you know, maybe it is like just oh, there's some there's a coworker I really enjoy, and I'm gonna just make it a point to meet with them at least once a week or every other week, however often, and I'll come up with the reason of why that's that's necessary for work, but I just I just enjoy this person, the feedback they give me. I like how they listen to me, whatever it is, and then recognize that like okay, part of my life is this way. I can make the rest of my life. I can start working on how do I get the rest of my life to feel like this because it's the in the inner feeling. It's like how do you feel, and that's what you want to bring to more and more of your work, more and more of your environment, more and more of your entire life. So, I'm curious, what's what's landing with you? Let me know down in the comments, or send me a send me a message or an email through the socials or the whatnot. Let me know. Like, do you think this could work for you? And if so, what's what's your bedspread gonna be? And I know for some of you, maybe in other other parts of the world, you're like, what's a bedspread? It's a comforter. It's the blank top blanket. It's the duvet. Something like that. So what? Is going to be your your bedspread effect that you're gonna gonna gonna try? Is it gonna be like just maybe cleaning up a space in your home or at work? Is it gonna be setting out a little you know special special time? Maybe it's like you you go to the the gym or something like that. Whatever it is, I'd love to hear what it is, and love to hear how that then expands into more of your work, more of your environment, more of your life, just being that much more enjoyable, pleasurable, uplifting, and impactful for for those around you in the best of ways. So with that, thank you so much and good day. Thanks for tuning in to Engineering emotions and energy with Justin Wenck, PhD. Today's episode resonated with you. Please subscribe and leave a five-star review. Your feedback not only supports the show but also helps others find us and start their journey of emotional and energetic mastery. You can also help by sharing this podcast with someone you think will love it just as much as you do. Together, we're engineering more amazing lives.