Introducing the #EnvironmentPillar and how to set up your “Work" Place

So you’ve seen that we’ve spent a lot of time focusing on your nutrition and mind pillars in our insights recently.  These are massive subjects and provide some of the biggest rapid change opportunities for our community.  We hope that you’ve made some serious gains by studying these lessons and applying them to develop awesome new and empowering habits.

Today we want to devote a little time to your Environment Pillar.  What’s it all about?  What are we going to focus on?  How can you start to become mindful of your Environment Pillar and make some progress towards developing your awareness of this area of your life and it’s significance in your overall feelings of wellness, peace, calm and happiness!

So when we talk about your Environment pillar we should explain a few definitions.  Many people say “oh yeh, that’s all about being green and saving the planet right?”  Well, yes it is to an extent, but that’s not really the main thrust of the subject as far as your Strength Temple is concerned.  The Environment pillar is centred around the following areas:

• Your immediate environment and surroundings and their impact on your state
• Seeking out Powerful and Vibrant new environments to feed your psyche
• Exercising in Nature and why it’s better for you than an indoor gym
• Creating a calm, empowering and structured place of work
• Creating a tranquil home
• Gardens and how they feed us emotionally and physically
• Temperatures and how to get balance in hot and cold
• Light and it’s importance for wellbeing
• Optimising your rest and sleep habits
• Our responsibility to the environment and the legacy we leave the next generations
• Use of Colours in your environment
• Art and it’s influence on the soul
• The importance of scent and it’s relation to anchors, moods and how you feel
• Decluttering and philosophies concerning order
• Music and it’s impact on your states
• AND SO MUCH MORE!

So there you go - it’s a significant subject and one that we will be considering in depth as part of our #7Pillars program.  For this insight though, we will talk about the “work” environment.

Let’s start with some background.  The way we run our company is kind of unique and we think it’s super cool.  We are trail blazing new ways of working, leveraging the current technologies available, supporting our tribe and creating an environment for creativity, flexibility and growth.

We are all virtual beings.  We don’t routinely commute to an “office” and actively encourage our contributors and staff to get variety in the places they decide to create and produce. We talk to each other by phone and internet, have face to face meetings and chat by messenger platforms and our customer relationship management platform (CRM).

Despite working remotely from each other, we do interact and encourage collaboration at a deep level.  We also highly value the work life balance and make it mandatory for our staff to attend their children’s sports days!

Including Art in your environment is crucial. This is "The Tree of Life" by Kerry Darlington, and looks over one of The Strength Temple office environments.

I personally have an office at home, which I love to visit and use.  I have a picture from my favourite artist on the wall, I’ve made a massive focus board to pin ideas and empowering imagery onto.  I have my piano handy to grab a quick break from my computer and I am always surrounded by books next to a comfy chair so I can feed my brain with literature the old fashioned way.  I also use incense which i’ve anchored in feelings of calm and creativity allowing me to feel great as soon as I step into the room.

Having said that I like to take my work to other places.  Variety and balance in your work environment prevents you from feeling stale, and allows a momentum to grow in your productivity.  If it’s a warm day I’ll take a chair to the local lake and sit and work from there.  I’m an on call Firefighter and I might work from the Fire Station sometimes.  I’m also regularly in the gym as well, so have a place there where I can take a moment and catch up with our community.

The other area of the work environment we have focused on is the suite of applications we use to make maximum use of our time, and increase our efficiency.  We are a cloud based company and are multi-platform meaning that we can work on our mobile smart phones, mac’s, PC’s, tablets, slates or internet cafes!  For those not familiar with cloud based working everything s stored in the internet and is securely “hosted” by third party companies. We partner with Google, Evernote, Insightly and use Skype.

We have users who love Macs and users who prefer PC.  We have iPhones, Samsung mobiles and windows smart phones as our devices.  We don’t discriminate on technology or platform and our only criteria is that our tribe love their tools, they are open architecture and allow access from all devices.  It’s part of our DNA.

The other thing we like to do is have meetings in strange places.  Recently our “Board Room” has ranged from my office, a hot tub, a sauna and England's Third Highest Mountain, Helvellyn in the Lake District.  We are so proud of the fact we DON’T follow the crowd and try and make every moment as innovative and fulfilling as possible - even meetings.

It’s a mindset that takes a leap of faith for some and we measure performance by output rather than time spent chained to a desk.  There are always some people that might not have the discipline to work in this type of environment, but with practice and assuming that you are following your passion, it’s a fulfilling way to work and a life enhancing way of interacting with your colleagues and community.

So we’d like to invite you to try some of this stuff out!  Perhaps you’ve got a favourite spot in your local park that you love to visit. How about setting up your desk there for a morning and working from there?  Declutter your office at home and make it a place that you really want to be in. Grab some flowers from your local florist or simply from the garden.  Place them in your work environment. You'll be amazed at the difference all of these small modifications can make to your creativity when you add them all together! If you combine all of this with the other pillars of your Strength Temple you are onto a winner and the results you desire will materialise without you having to chase them.

Oh, and don't forget...  #RespectYourTemple

Rich Davis