Are you in a good place?

 Place is such a basic metaphor, that sometimes we forget there is a difference between our physical location and our state of mind. We've all heard that the thing that counts in real estate is "location, location, location." There's a good reason for that.

According to research described by Annie Murphy Paul in The Extended Brain, we use our surroundings as a way to prompt our thoughts. When we are out in nature, we think one way and when we are staring at a computer screen, we think another. Although our experience of our thoughts is that they are related to content, often the kind of thoughts we think are also related to context. 

We have a lot of language about place: we have to find our place and know our place (sometimes in that order). While it's hard to change what goes on inside our heads directly, it's easier to change our place. We can get up and move to a new location. We can choose a walk under trees or a quiet, safe den (we name our thinking spaces after the spaces where wild animals go to be safe and rest). It's not hard to move our bodies deliberately so that we are surrounded by different sights, sounds, smells and temperatures. Choosing the right mix will change what we are thinking so that we have different ideas and different feelings about our thoughts.

A place for big thoughts

We can also deliberately shape our places to feed our thoughts. We can choose the things we will see or hear in a place so that we are drawn to certain kinds of focus or so that we have the illusion of movement even while we sit at a keyboard and move only our fingers. We keep some of our memories in things, and those things can prompt us to have the feelings and thoughts appropriate to that memory. In NLP, we call these things anchors because they keep experience safely where we can reach them.

What do you think is easier: to change or mindset or to change your location? When you choose to get up and move out in nature, you tell yourself that change is possible and that progress is possible and that ceilings can turn into big, big skies. You might even have such a strong experience that you can anchor it to a small object that sits on your desk and prompts a useful change of mindset.


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