“Don’t try to change your willpower, change your environment.  Discipline is really a carefully crafted environment encouraging certain behavior.  It’s not the goals we set up, it’s the cues in our environment.  Growth doesn’t happen by chance, we need an environment of growth,” Dritan Hodo. We have a theme, friends. What’s around us is instrumental in determining our outlook and results in life.  The environment of our lives, those around us, and of our mind.  I love the idea behind this that willpower isn’t necessarily what works to create change or to create momentum toward a goal. Even I tend to fall under the impression that it takes sheer force of will to create a result.  Maintain focus at all times, only do what’s “right”.  But it doesn’t work like that.  It isn’t about power and control in regards to perfecting our behavior, it’s about letting what doesn’t support us fall away.  It’s about removing negative influences and adopting new habits.  The discipline comes into play when it’s about creating a new habit, sticking with it because we know it will yield the result we need.  When we set ourselves up for success, we limit our options to those that will make us successful.

These things don’t happen overnight, not by any means.  Creating new habits and new thoughts takes time.  But that’s also why it’s key to create a space that fosters new patterns and behaviors, those that align with what we hope to be or achieve.  It requires a lot of letting go.  A release of what we know and the understanding that we need to dive into the unknown. Sometimes doing things that are good for us can feel uncomfortable, especially when we haven’t really considered that an option before.  Sometimes we are used to a struggle and we don’t even know.  We choose the behaviors that keep us in struggle because it’s familiar.  The same reason is how we end up choosing environments that keep us in struggle—it’s because we know what to expect of it.  There’s a saying something like we will choose a familiar hell over an unfamiliar heaven simply because we know it.  We need to get comfortable learning new things, things that keep us healthy and move us toward our goals.  We always have the choice of our hard: the difficulty of not changing and letting things slip by, or the difficulty of doing the work.  We set up our choices through our actions—creating an environment that supports that makes it easier.