In this episode we discuss how your environment plays a tremendous role in shaping who you are, look at how personality develops and what underscores it, talk about how to engineering your own environment to make yourself more productive and effective, examine at how to battle self sabotage and much more with our guest Benjamin Hardy.

 

 Benjamin is a PhD candidate at Clemson University in Industrial and Organizational Psychology and is currently the #1 Writer for Medium.com with over 50 million page views recorded. He is the author of the upcoming book Willpower Doesn’t Work and his research and writing has been featured in Psychology Today, Business Insider, The Huffington Post, and more!

 

Success is about growth, never plateauing

Always be a student, always be growing

Living according to a value system that you believe in / a cause you believe in / serving people who you love

The difference between security and freedom. Many people base their security in something external to themselves. 

Develop your own worldview / beliefs / values / goals to help form a more independent

Transformational learning experiences” helps transform your world view and perception of yourself

Stretch your mind, push your body - to start to open up your world view

If you do not create and control your environment, your environment controls you 

The western belief that we exist independent of our context, what psychological research shows is that your environment has a tremendous impact. Your environment shapes who you are.

Mindfulness is awareness of your surrounding and how those surroundings influence you

You can also shape your environment, and this creates the possibility for radical change

Epigenetics shows that your environment has a huge impact on your personality

Personality is more of an adaptation to situations and unresolved trauma 

The false belief of western culture is that we think personality is a fixed trait - science shows that it’s not

Suppressed trauma can “freeze” your personality 

“You are a sick as your secrets” - the things you keep isolated are the things that keep your personality frozen, your personality changes and continues to grow, you are stuck as a child in some aspects of your personality 

Will Durant - most people believe that history was shaped by heroes, “It’s not heroes that shape history, its demanding situations that create heroes - the average person could have double their ability or more if the situation demanded it of them”

How to “up the stakes” of your environment to create external situation to force you into the behaviors you want to create 

The two kinds of “enriched environments” you need in order to maximize your performance

Only 16% of creative ideas happen when you’re at your desk (when the mind is in a rested state)

The concept of “psychological detachment” - letting go of work for a few days - really helps you fully engage when you come back to it

The vital importance of recovery as a key component of being both happier and more productive

How do you stop from self sabotaging? Put yourself in situations where its a self fulfilling prophecy. Create the environmental components necessary for you to succeed and thrive.

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