There are two things you need to change if you want to be successful in building better health habits, behaviours, or any type of transformative change in your life.
Those two things are:
1. People
2. Environment
I challenge you to think about any big change you’ve made in your life. You will probably notice that the people in your life and your environment changed along with it.
On the flipside, I challenge you to think about any big change you’ve struggled to make in your life. It might even be a change that you’re struggling to make at the moment. You will notice that the people and environment were / are fairly static and not changing much.
You can’t expect a new result if the people you surround yourself with, or your environment doesn’t change much. Your determination and will power won’t be enough to overcome people and the environment not changing.
Now, I know that making changes to the people in your life or your environment sounds big and scary. But, it doesn’t mean you have to do everything at once. You don’t need to up sticks and move to a new town. You don’t have to start ghosting friends and family. It usually happens much more subtly and piecemeal than that.
The best way to illustrate this is to share some examples in my own life, and some from my friends. I think this will help you connect the dots between how transformative changes are made, alongside changes to people and environment.
Let’s start with people.
1. People.
I used to really struggle with my fitness and my health. I found it very hard to adopt the behaviors and health habits that I wanted to have in my life.
I wasn’t able to stick to foundational health habits like moderating my alcohol and drinking enough water. I couldn’t get my act together and train consistently. I also had an incredibly bad relationship with food, which led to a lot of binge eating foods that were bad for me.
Today, I stick to seven foundational health habits extremely consistently. I’m training five to six times a week, and am active almost every single day. I now have a much better relationship with food, and my whole foods percentage is usually above 70%.
Those are gigantic changes to have made over only a couple of years. And what I notice is that the people in my life also changed throughout the journey.
When I was struggling to train consistently, I trained at a CrossFit gym. There was a great coach there called Jamie, who led the morning sessions. Where possible, he would give me some 121 pieces of advice – but ultimately, most of our time together was in the group sessions.
Today, Jamie is my personal trainer. He does all of my programming, and also helps me more broadly with lifestyle, mindset and health. I talk to him weekly and now consider him a close friend. Bringing Jamie closer has been instrumental in how I’m now able to consistently stick to a training program, and also lead the lifestyle I have today.
Here’s another good example. I have two good friends in my life called Rich and Barry. We share many of the same health goals and we’re going through a similar journey with our health and fitness. There isn’t a day that goes by where I’m not sending voice notes, exchanging whatsapp messages and talking to each of them. We’re much closer and they play a much bigger part of my life now, vs. two or three years ago. This has made it alot easier for me to make changes in my life when it comes to my health, fitness and my habits.
There are also a bunch of other like minded people, who whilst not as close as Jamie, Rich and Barry, are on the periphery. These people have become a bit closer to me because we naturally share the same goals and are going through a similar journey.
Even as I write this, it’s become so much clearer to me how the people in my life have changed as I’ve made my own big changes in my life. Jamie, Rich, Barry and some other friends are now much closer. We share ideas, inspire each other and there’s a sense of accountability that exists between us. I also naturally happen to see slightly less of some other friends too.
Here’s one more example of how people in your life will change when you successfully make big changes in your life – this one is with my friend Barry again.
Like me, Barry struggled with his relationship with alcohol for quite a long time. And, like me, he failed to moderate alcohol, or give it up for quite a long time – before becoming sober.
Barry is now a year and a half sober. And it’s interesting to notice that the people in his life have changed significantly over this time.
Firstly I hope that he would agree with me that he and I have become closer during this time. I was slightly ahead of him in giving up alcohol, and we became closer as he made this big change in his life.
Barry also became friends with a guy called Manolis he met at the boxing gym (a new environment he manifested for himself – are you starting to better see the connection between environment and people?).
Manolis ended up moving into Barry’s family house for the best part of a year. Manolis is a pretty fit guy. He boxes, trains a lot and doesn’t drink alcohol. Even though perhaps Barry didn’t realise this at the time, he was bringing a really good influence close into his life, and this almost certainly made giving up alcohol easier.
In the last year, Barry has invested in, and has helped build the yoga retreat Mana and Wak. He’s gone on to build a strong relationship with the person who founded and runs that retreat.
It’s been impressive to see him help build a whole new community of people around him. People that like to do yoga, cold swims, sauna, train jiu-jitsu, drink coffee and eat good food. And wouldn’t you know it? The people that are part of this type of community either tend to not drink, or they’re certainly not drinking when they’re doing those types of things.
Notice how the people in Barry’s life over the last couple of years have changed significantly. Not only did he manifest a lot of new people. I’m closer to him. He’s good friends with Manolis. He has a whole community of like minded people around him at the Yoga retreat. And I know for a fact that he spends less time with some of the people he gravitated towards when he drank alcohol.
And I know for a fact that this made a massive difference to him being able to give up alcohol, vs. really struggling to give it up many times before that.
Notice that both of the changes Barry and myself have made to our friends group, didn’t happen all at once. They happened over a number of years, and they happened a step at a time. We didn’t even necessarily know the people to bring into our life, or who to be more distant with at any one point in time. It happened much more piecemeal and organically.
So, you don’t need to decide all of these things at once. You just need to start being more conscious of the people that you might want to be spending less time around, and who you might want to be spending more time around. If you do that, you will find yourself being able to make big changes to habits and behaviors much more easily.
2. Environment
Environment is the second thing you need to change if you want to be successful in building better health habits and behaviors.
The examples I want to share for environment are smaller, but I think they will help illustrate how a change in environment can help you make a transformative change in your life a lot easier.
I’ve always struggled with my relationship with food. I have a huge sweet tooth and am prone to binge eating on bad foods. This tends to happen mostly in my the house, which is where I spend most of
my time.
I ended up making one tweak to my environment, which made a huge difference to my challenges with eating bad foods. I took every type of bad food that I was tempted by (chocolate, sweets, biscuits etc.) and I put them in a big black box that has two combination lock padlocks on it. The only people that know the combination is my wife and daughter.
This means that the types of foods that tempt me and are bad for me, are no longer around me or accessible. When I open my cupboard, all I see is either foods that aren’t great for me, which I am not tempted by (bars, cereals, crisps etc.) or healthy foods I am better off eating.
I literally don’t have access to the bad foods that I am tempted to graze on when I’m at home. This has made a gigantic difference to the quality of my diet – it’s been night and day.
Want to hear something hilarious? Recently I’ve realised that the combination padlocks don’t properly secure the black box. I thought that would ruin the whole thing for me. Yet, I still don’t find myself hardly ever tempted to go into that box. It’s just enough friction to keep me on the right side of things. Plus, breaking into a black box to eat chocolates just isn’t a good look at all!
Another good example when it comes to a change of environment is with my training. When I was training at the CrossFit gym, I found it very hard to be consistent with my training.
I would fairly regularly miss sessions that I signed up to do. The gym is only a five minute drive from my house. However, in the winter it’s a hassle to get up, get dressed, scrape ice from the car and then make the drive. It’s basically twenty minutes of faffing either side of being in the gym.
Over the last couple of years I’ve been training in my converted garage home gym. I love training much more now. I only have to walk fifteen or so steps and I’m in my own space that I have curated exactly
how I want it. I also realised I prefer to train by myself. Making that change to my training environment means I’m now able to train five to six times a week consistently. I usually look forward to it and the
friction is so much less having it on my doorstep.
Another example – My Yeti water bottle. I struggled to be consistent with drinking enough water and staying hydrated for a long time. However, now it’s probably one of my easiest health habits to stick to.
Before I used to drink my water in random bottles or glasses. I know it sounds silly, but my Yeti water bottle is an expensive, beautiful bottle. It’s nice to fill up, hold and drink. And because it’s one liter, I know I just need to drink three of them a day.
This change has just made it easier and nicer to drink more water. It has helped me go from struggling to drink even a liter per day, to now being able to drink 3 liters as almost second nature.
I’ll give you one last example of changes to an environment. For that, we’ll go back to my friend Barry.
When Barry was giving up alcohol, one of the first changes he made was to no longer step foot into the pub. Now, I know you’re probably thinking, that’s a pretty obvious one right?
Sure, but you have to remember that at the time, Barry had quite a few friends that he still wanted to spend time with. He even tried for a while to go to the pub and stick to soft drinks and zero beers – which wasn’t a very successful strategy.
Only when he pulled himself out of the pub environment did he start to have a better chance of finally giving up alcohol. And that environment change, led to another. He replaced time in the pub with going to a boxing gym. And then being at a boxing gym, eventually led to the retreat and a new community altogether. Today he spends a lot of his time when not at work and with the family, doing cold plunges, sauna, yoga etc.
Now, he didn’t necessarily know he was going to make those drastic changes to his environment at the beginning. It started with just a first decision to no longer go into the pub – and then one environmental change naturally led to another. And with each change, the more he felt he was able to change about himself. He’s literally a different person today vs. a few years ago.
Wrap up
I hope this has given you a good example of how you have to make changes to the people in your
life and your environment if you want to bring new behaviors and habits – or if you want to make any type of transformative change in your life.
When you’re trying to build new habits and behaviors, I would encourage you to think about a tweak that you can make to the people around you and your environment.
Remember, you don’t have to make a lot of changes all at once. Start with making a small change. Bring someone in closer. Distance yourself from that one person who is making it harder for you to make a change. Make a tweak here or there to your environment.
These small changes will naturally lead to other changes with people and environment – perhaps ones you’re not even able to see presently. And before you know it, your life will start to look quite different – both in terms of the positive changes you’re able to make, but also for how the people in your life and environment shifts around you.
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