I'm sure you have and for most of us, it makes a fair bit of sense. If you eat junk food, you're more likely to be unfit and at risk of illness compared to if you eat healthy food. It's a pretty simple concept to understand.
But what about the idea that 'You are where you live', Does this statement have any truth to it?
The answer is in a lot of ways, yes and yes.
Now before I go any further, I want to make clear that every person can change their circumstance no matter where they are. If you really want to make something different, you can do it.
Why I'm saying yes though is because for the most part, unless you really make a conscientious effort to avoid them, the influences around you will play a large role in who you are.
When I was on the road the last few years, one of the things we use to tell young people at the end of the day was that if they wanted to keep their faith growing strong, they needed to surround themselves with friends who were on that same faith journey. It's like when you want to get good at football, you don't go and hang out with table tennis players, you go hang out with footballers.
The thing that I'm starting to realise though is that it's not just the things we want to become or the goals that we aim for that are affected by where we spend the moments of our day. Even our thoughts on just the simplest of things or our choice of reactions to particular situations are affected by our environment.
For me, one of my weaknesses is that I am highly competitive and I don't just mean in sports. I will aim to win on all fronts of my life and it's only in the last few years that I've started to realise that it is one of the main reasons for me being discontent in life. Just yesterday something happened where I had a reaction and then minutes later realised that was just my competitive side kicking in.
While it is easy for me to say that the solution to this would be to just stop being competitive and to get out of situations that are competitive, the truth is that it just wouldn't work and I wouldn't be me if I wasn't in this environment.
I know that might sound like a cop out, but hear me out because it is true. You see, It might not help my life to be highly competitive when it comes to say relationships, but it is important to me when it comes to keeping me striving to do the things I do to the best of my ability, and in having the passion to keep doing what God's called me to do.
I get lazy if I'm not being challenged and a lot of the time, my challenges come from wanting to be better. Along with this, if I was to pull out from situations that are competitive, I'd have to lose doing things that are my passion, like watching sports and that would never happen, especially not on AFL Grand Final Day!
We all have weaknesses in our environment, whether they be our love of food, our passion for reading or our need to lead. But then again, these are also our greatest strengths. As a person once said, our strengths are our greatest weaknesses.
The key to ensuring that we keep on striving towards success and don't fall into the pit is that we make sure we are always aware of the environment we are in, so that when we see that there's a hazard ahead, we can take the steps to go around it.
Let me explain. Say for example one of the key elements of your environment is a passion for food. You aren't ever going to not be around food, but if you are aware of your environment, you'll know when you are eating too much, when you're eating way too much unhealthy food or when you might need to stay away from an food event and detox.
Awareness of your environment allows you to know when things within it are either business as usual or when there's an alarm that needs to be addressed.
In the coming weeks, I will be giving some of the tools that will help you to make the right decisions when you discover hazards in your environment but for now, the key is to become aware of the way you are living and start focusing on the areas of your life where perhaps things aren't going to plan, and then see what it is in our life that may be causing it.
By doing this, you will be able to start taking greater control of where your life is headed and you will also be able to start to see what it is that really matters in life and what is just a distraction.
No matter where you are in your life at the moment, you can always be more aware of the environment you live in, and trust me, once you start being more aware, the doors will open and you will discover things about your life that you never thought you would.
The things is though, awareness doesn't just happen, we have to take the step to focus and get in the zone. Now is the time to stop just living life and start living it with purpose so that you can be the person you and God knows you can be.
Till next time...
No comments:
Post a Comment