What is Lewin’s equation? Before Kurt Lewin, most experts in behavioural psychology believed that a person’s habits and actions were solely the result of the kind of person they were, and not of the environment they were in at the time.
Today we know that people’s behaviour can vary considerably depending on the kind of environment we put them in. To capture this, Lewin came up with the equation that made him famous, and it applies perfectly to our habits.
In fact, this equation contains everything you need to know to build good habits, get rid of bad ones and keep moving forward in life in terms of health, happiness and building wealth.
The equation explained.
B = f(P, E). B is an individual’s behaviour, and it is a function (f) of the total situation, which includes the person’s own conditions (P) and those of the environment (E).
What the formula says is that a person’s personal characteristics (P) interact with the environmental factors of the group (E) and its members, and the situation produces a behaviour (B).
In other words, in many cases your environment will rule your life and your behaviour over and above your own personality. The wrong environment can cancel out or weaken your willpower for anything you set out to do.
Likewise, surrounding yourself with intelligent people makes you more intelligent. Surround yourself with stoners and you are more likely to end up a stoner.
See also: Achieving wisdom and mastery in the internet age
If you are starting a business, surrounding yourself with negative or mediocre people will make your company close or stay mediocre.
You are not in control of your life until you start controlling your life
It sounds obvious, but it isn’t. To improve ourselves, we must not only change the way we think, we must also change our environment. The moment you are the smartest person in a room and you keep surrounding yourself only with the people in that room, your growth is over.
The moment you have hit the ceiling at a company, your career there is over.
So, to move forward in life, at work and in happiness, the (E) must be changed, expanded and improved in quality, because it will add to the (P) and change our behaviour completely. Hence the importance of surrounding ourselves with people who always bring us something positive. People who add, and never subtract.
(Read: 20 daily habits that will improve your life)
Building habits: breaking the bad ones and replacing them with good ones
When building habits, you have to take into account something called “choice architecture”. We start from the premise that bad habits are easier and more comfortable than good ones.
In fact, the easiest habit to acquire is laziness, because it consists of doing nothing.
That’s why the idea is to make bad habits as hard as possible and good habits as easy as possible. For example, if you are on a diet and don’t want to eat chocolate cake, it will be easier not to fall into that bad habit if you don’t have any chocolate cake at home.
See also: How to break bad habits without willpower, according to neuroscience
In the same way, if you want to be a more confident and outgoing person, having outgoing people in your “environmental” circle will help you become what you are surrounded by.
If you want to succeed as an entrepreneur, spending time with lazy people or stoners won’t help, while spending your time with other business owners can be a springboard, giving you knowledge you could not get any other way.
A former drug addict has a 100% chance of relapsing if he surrounds himself with the same people who got him into drugs, regardless of his willpower, while moving away from that world and applying willpower increases his chances of successfully quitting the habit. This applies to any field.
(Read: Willpower and decision-making: what you need to know)
Your environment also includes the news you are exposed to
Be very careful with the news you consume because, although you may not believe it, a glut of negative news can cancel out your willpower to shape your projects.
If you are planning to open your own business and you hear that 80% of them are failing, it could cut your willpower short. There is nothing wrong with knowing the official failure rate of new businesses, as long as you don’t focus only on that. That figure should serve to warn you that there is danger. But then focus on how the other 20% did it so you can take note, and on where the 80% failed so you don’t fail the same way.
(Read: The 6 most common bad financial habits)
Do we have a fixed mindset or a growth mindset?
There is a huge difference between these two types of mindset, and we don’t usually stop to think about it.
When you use a fixed mindset, you make use of specific (fixed) skills to achieve a goal.
When you use a growth mindset, you start from the premise that you can improve, learn and build new skills on top of the talents you already have.
The secret of success lies not in being an expert, but in being an eternal learner. Remember that.
In short: if you want to control your own personality, you will have to control, and in many cases change, the environment where you spend most of your time. If you don’t like your life, change it. You are not a tree (Warren Buffett).
See also: 25 habits of successful people
Featured image: Pko (photographer), CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
