In this episode, Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer delves into the pivotal role of the physical environment in shaping our overall well-being. She stresses the importance of self-awareness and evaluation to gauge our true happiness in life. Dr. Schanzmeyer provides valuable insights into crafting a supportive and calming physical space that can positively impact our lives. The episode explores the interplay between willpower and environment, highlighting how our surroundings can either bolster or impede our goals. The discussion concludes with a focus on the significance of decision-making and the profound effect of our environment on alleviating decision fatigue.

In this episode, you’ll learn:

1. Take the time to evaluate your current level of happiness and satisfaction in life.
2. Create a physical environment that supports and enhances your well-being.
3. Recognize the limitations of willpower and focus on setting up your environment for success.
4. Make decisions and declutter your physical and mental space to reduce decision fatigue.

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https://youtu.be/6jm4uxc2BwQ

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Professional Bio

Are you a high-achieving, ambitious professional working mother, feeling trapped in the whirlwind of your demanding career and family responsibilities? Overwhelmed by stress, busyness, and societal expectations? Drained of energy and struggling to find balance while silently battling guilt and unfulfillment?

Welcome to a transformative journey a certified lifestyle medicine physician, experienced yoga and meditation teacher, and a mother of three. In this immersive podcast, she provides a path to authenticity, purpose, and vitality. Through tailored coaching programs, Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer equips you with the tools and strategies to regain balance and create a life aligned with your true self.

Our listeners, our clients, are high-achieving professional working mothers who have successfully transformed their lives with life design. They’ve overcome stress, found peace within their careers and personal lives, and are thriving.

Discover how to harmoniously balance your professional and personal life, relieve stress, and find your true purpose. Learn time management techniques, prioritize self-care, and regain meaning in life. Join Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer and begin your journey towards a life of ease, vitality, and impact, where authenticity leads the way.

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Podcast Episode Transcript

Welcome to Living True by Design. I’m your host, Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer career physician and enthusiastic baseball, tennis, I don’t know, kickboxing band mom. So here we are.

Welcome to episode 15. Today we’re talking about environment matters.

We’ve talked about on our previous episode about this level of awareness and you know, I feel like we need to kind of take a step back and be like, why do you need awareness? And really it’s because if there’s anything you’re dissatisfied in your life with, we have to figure out where we are to figure out where we’re going. And I’ve forever just been like, go to my next goal, go to my next goal, but I didn’t know to start with where I was.

And really evaluate, well, are you even happy where you are now? Like what makes you think if you’re not happy where you are now, when you get to your goal, you’ll magically be happy because it’s all external, right? And so I want to encourage you to stick with it and give it a listen, see what you think. And there’s, you know, a cool worksheet that you will get access to for free. And you can use it as we go through these, the series and see if it’s helpful to you. I think it will be. I hope it is. And I would love to hear from you if it is, if it’s not, if you have comments, questions, concerns, compliments, any of the above would be wonderful. I really would like to have a conversation with you. That’s what I’m really hoping to create here. So today we’re gonna be talking about our physical environment and why that’s important, how it’s important and…

I’m going to give you a way to think about your environment. Like there’s in the workbook, there’s a sheet just on physical environment and you can go through it. There’s these eight different components of your physical environment. And we’re going to talk about those and how those work together and how they can really support your life or conversely make things harder.

So get ready to hear about how meeting your needs in your physical environment can really create a supportive, clear, peaceful life.

Plus, we’re also gonna talk about a super important idea or concept about willpower, and I promise this relates to our environment, that a lot of people don’t talk about.

So today we would like to think about creating a space that calms us, gives us energy, sets us free, because the quality of our spaces can really enhance or detract from our life.

And I’m gonna kind of sell myself out a little bit here, but this morning I was so frustrated, you know how the mornings are with the kids. And when they get a little hectic and you’re trying to get out the door and people had moved my stuff and I couldn’t find it. It was like moving through quicksand, like someone moved the checkbook, someone moved, what else was I looking for?

I was looking for like three things and none of the things were where I was expecting them to be. And it was so frustrating and such an energy drain. And I was thinking about how much time I have spent in my life, like looking for things in my house, you know? And when we have kids, you know, like things are not gonna be especially interesting kind of things, you know, they’re not gonna be where you left them.

And so part of it is us and ourselves and our environment. And our, the other part is our family and having tolerance and understanding, but then also building in the importance of our environment in our family, in our kids and having them learn this too.

So I’m wondering, have you ever noticed when you clean out a closet or clean out just your junk drawer, or maybe you don’t have a problem with your stuff clutter, but made a decision about moving furniture around and it just felt more clear and free. So that’s what we’re talking about today, our physical environment, like… clutter around us, but it’s also where things are sitting, you know, making sure everything has a place. What is this saying? Everything has a place for everything and everything in its place. That’s the saying. And then there’s the Ohio thing. And I think about that all the time. Ohio is only handle it once. So if you take your coat off, you put it back up instead of putting it somewhere else where you have to handle it a few times. Anyway, that’s a side note. That’s Ohio for you if you haven’t heard of that. But, um,

You know, a few years ago I hired, I was lucky enough to be able to hire a professional organizer to help me with my closet. And it was really profound because first of all, nobody really taught me. I think we’re supposed to just pick up these things over the course of our lives, how to organize your closet, or I suppose spend a lot of time on Pinterest, but I was like kind of over that. And so I was like so excited to have someone help me and she went through it and we got rid of so much stuff.

And it was incredible. And now my closet is still not as perfect as it was when she left it, but it’s really maintained for a couple of years and it’s incredible the difference it’s made. Now is my environment perfect? No, I don’t want to come across that I am like totally a clean guru.

You know, don’t have clutter in areas of my home because I do. But I think that that’s part of it. That’s part of like life, right? That we’re in it and we’re working on this together. So here we are. But my closet has been good. And I was thinking, you know, this would be a good test for coaches. If you’re going to like work with a life coach, tell them you want to see their closet as part of the, you know, your introductory call. Be like, show me your closet. I’m fascinated by it.

So today we’re talking about our physical environment and why that matters and how it can contribute to our lives. So I think one thing that people don’t realize a lot of the time is how powerful it is.

It can really affect our well -being.

Then another idea that I think people don’t talk about is how much it can support us. Like this morning, looking for things around the house when I couldn’t find them, it was so stressful and it took time when I didn’t have time. And if we have our environment set up to support us, it can really enhance the quality of our lives.

And then another thing that people don’t really talk about is how important willpower is, because I think we think we can just use our willpower to overcome our environment. And I really do believe that willpower is not as strong as our environment. So our environment is stronger than our willpower. Our willpower runs out. We just, by the end of the day, I don’t know if you’ve ever done this, but by the end of the day, if I’m trying to eat healthy and do, you know, whatever type of eating I’m doing, you know, not eat junk food and stuff like that. By the end of the day, my willpower’s gone and I just eat anything. And so that’s part of the same thing with the environment. You know, if we have the environment set up to support us, it can. I wouldn’t have junk food at home and that would be supporting me in what I want in my long -term goal versus the short -term reward, which we’re human. And…

We don’t, I think we don’t talk about the

short term versus the long term rewards. Because culturally everybody wants us to want to fulfill our short term goals all the time. If you just turn on the TV, look at advertising, look at the internet, they’re like, oh, you need this, you need this, you need this over and over, right? And so we have this kind of, I don’t know, almost cotton candy effect of, wanting our short -term needs met and when we can really meet our long -term needs and really have that supported by our environment.

There’s this quote by Michael Jordan and he says, once I made a decision, I never thought about it again. And that’s basically our environment can support us this way of like, you know, I’m going to make a decision. I keep using food as an example, but I’m going to make a decision to get out of the house early in the morning. And part of that is having my environment set up where I know where to find my purse and I know where to find the kids breakfast. I know where to find the lunchbox container. That’s what it was. We were missing a lunchbox container.

You know, just things that are set up in our environment to support us and really enhance our life. Like, man, that’d be fun to have all the stuff ready to go in the morning, you know.

But this thing with Michael Jordan of when the decision is made, you don’t even have to think about it again because when we’re in this area of indecision, like, I don’t know, like there’s a letter on my desk. Like, do I, am I gonna file it? Am I gonna take a picture and store it somewhere digitally? Like, do I need to call and make an appointment for something? And those kinds of things add up and they’re in the environment.

But they’re contributing to indecision and kind of a mental clutter. And if we can deal with it, then we can let it go. But we look around clutter and it’s just this draining mental situation. But that’s the part of the idea of this decision that’s not made. And I think that’s what really drains us is that clutter when we look at it as a pile of decisions that need to be made.

And if you’re a working mom that makes decisions all the time at work and then at home, and then you have this pile of clutter, it’s like the decision fatigue is a real thing. And it’s just like, oh my gosh, I can’t even deal with it. And it’s not because you’re lacking willpower, it’s because you’re physically at the end of your rope. We don’t have any more to give and that’s okay. So.

The idea is we can set up a structure that supports us in these areas so that we don’t have to rely on our willpower as much. We’re always gonna have to do some, but it runs out, you know?

And I think culturally people aren’t told this. Culturally we’re saying, you know, look at the diet industry, the diet, you know, exercise industry of even medicine. Like just use your willpower, just go on the diet, just go to the gym and just make yourself do it. It’s kind of this different interpretations of force of just like force yourself to do it. You can always force yourself, you know? And that is not gonna be… sustainable long term to force anything honestly.

So that kind of willpower force is finite versus our more sustainable environmental, which is sustainable and can promote your wellbeing.

And I think it is this short term versus long term goals, right? So here’s a little mini one, the dishwasher. I don’t like unloading the dishwasher and it’s one of my kids’ jobs, their chores to do it. But yesterday I was unloading the dishwasher and I literally, if I have found, if I look at the clock and can say, this is only gonna take literally two minutes.

Cause it’s one of these things that feels so overwhelming sometimes when you have all these other things to do, it can feel really overwhelming. Like, oh, it’s going to take forever. I don’t have time. That’s another thing we tell ourselves, right? I don’t have time. I’m like, okay, I have two minutes. I can do this for two minutes. And literally it takes like two minutes to unload our dishwasher. So I was able to do it. But the idea is that the short term goal was just like, I need rest. I don’t want to do it. So that was my short term. But the long term goal was I can get the dishes clean. I can get the dishes out of the sink into the dishwasher and have a more calm, peaceful, clear, free environment. But in that moment, I was like, I don’t care about my environment. I just don’t feel like doing it. So there’s this transfer of finding enjoyment and motivation, which that’s a whole other thing. But I’m using this term loosely.

Finding enjoyment, we’ll call it enjoyment, finding enjoyment in the short term versus finding enjoyment in the long term. Because the long term is great, the house is clean, it’s wonderful. But the short term is where the rubber meets the road and we just have to take action. And that’s where the willpower versus environment can really make a huge difference. If your environment is set up to go to the gym every morning, your gym clothes are easy to find, your shoes are easy to find, you want to meditate, your meditation little cushion is set up, however you want to do it.

I’m gonna do a part two for this. So this is gonna be a fairly short episode, but I’m gonna do a part two where we’re gonna finish talking about our environment and why it matters to us and how important it is in our life design and how we have needs that can be met within our physical environment. So I can’t wait to get into that. That’s gonna be in part two.

That is gonna be also in the free worksheet. So come on over to Instagram, Dr. Libby Schonsmeier. Leave me a message if you listen to this and you can also go to a link that should be here for the free worksheets and check it out on physical environment and I’ll get a lot more into it on the next episode.