Your Environment Impacts Everything

Surfside Beach, SCAre You Even Aware?

This week marked a significant new chapter in my life. Several “ingredients” changed overnight. I moved to the Myrtle Beach, SC area. I started a new job. Now I’m surrounding myself with new people. The foods I’ve been eating have not been my normal diet. The amount of exercise I have been accustomed too has been impacted, in a negative way, due to five straight weeks of travel and moving.

How to Handle A New Environment

Over the past 5 1/2 years I have made three VERY significant geographic and career moves and each time I’ve learned a lot of new things. And, in some cases, having to learn some lessons again. If you find yourself in the midst of an environmental change these things will help you.

  1. Dive in head first and go all in.
  2. Don’t second guess your decision.
  3. Don’t let the challenges of learning an abundance of new things overwhelm you. You will learn how to get around the new city. You’ll find a new dentist. You’ll figure out where Starbucks is. You will figure out your new job. You will find a new gym. Whatever you need to learn, you’ll find a way.
  4. Start new habits and create new mindsets. Just because you’re in a new environment doesn’t mean habits and mindsets change automatically. Use the new environment as a catalyst to making needed changes.
  5. Explore your environment and be adventurous.
  6. Be grateful for your previous chapter, from the place you came from but look forward to what’s ahead even more.

Don’t ignore your environment. Embrace and engage with those parts that add value to your life and walk or RUN away from the parts that don’t.

 

How Bad Do You Want Something New?

If You Want Something New

There are times in life when you have to make decisions, sometimes hard and at other times easy, to let things go. For your sake and the sake of others you have to say goodbye to a variety of things; people, relationships, a job, food or a hundred other things. You absolutely deserve to enjoy life and experience it to it’s fullest and the fact is, to do that, there are things you will have to say no too. You will have to put off things that might bring some quick satisfaction. You will have to do things that others don’t want too.

As Peter Drucker says, “If you want something new, you have to stop doing something old.”

This past week we said goodbye and so long to a van that had been a part of our family for seventeen years. That van had done everything from haul trailer loads of manure to transporting my wife to the hospital to give birth to our fifth baby. It carried our family 700 miles to the wedding of my oldest son. That old van not only had a lot of great memories associated with it but there were a number of bad memories that I’d rather not talk about. Our Old Van

As I thought about dropping off our van at the salvage yard it caused me to think about other things in my life that I have dropped off or need to drop off at the salvage yard of life. There are mindsets, perspectives and beliefs that I have had to let go of and stop doing so that I could go after new things.

A couple of years ago I decided to stop living a very unhealthy life so that I could start living better and a more physically healthy life. I stopped sleeping in so I could exercise early in the morning. I stopped eating garbage all of the time so I could feel better. I stopped focusing on being a fat guy so I could become a more fit guy.

What’s something new you would like to do? To answer that you need to answer the other question of; what do you need to stop doing?