Environment Design without Expectations
When you become a parent, your life instantly changes. This could not be more cliché, but perhaps it’s cliché because it is entirely true. It truly is amazing that this little alien, this being that doesn’t speak your language, behaves entirely different to you or anyone you know, doesn’t move in the way that you know humans to move, and adopts a nocturnal life which they expect you to take on, yet looks eerily just like you, this little person has the power to teach you so much about yourself, the world we inhabit, and how we interact with it. I know you didn’t come here to read about my journey to parenthood, and I promise this is going somewhere. Bear with me.
Among the many things my son has taught me in his short time on earth, one of the most valuable is the importance of environment design. As an expecting parent, you prepare your home for your child. You create a space for them, you imagine what they might need, you might even get some advice from others who have done this before. However, what you don’t know when you are priming your home for their arrival is what they will be like.
This, in essence, is environment design. You are designing the environment your son or daughter will interact with. You are imagining what they will need and how they, and you, will be able to interact with the space to help them grow and learn, and ultimately, gain the skills they need to be more independent. Throughout this process, we create a set of expectations, situations we play out in our naive-expecting-parent minds.
“This is the crib our baby will “sleep” in.”
And here comes where my son taught me what environment design truly means. There is a sense that when you are designing an environment, whether that’s creating a training session, writing up a lesson plan, or discussing a sleep routine with your significant other for your child, that the design will yield exactly what you imagined would happen. You think about it for so long so it must mean that the desired behaviour is inevitable. I would think to myself, “This is a perfect sleep routine. We’ve thought about everything. We’ve got it all. We’ll do this and VOILA - off to ZZZ-town.”
Boy was I wrong.
My son taught me that environment design is not about the outcome, it’s about the conditions. In this case, I thought that designing the environment around a newborn would inevitably elicit the behaviours we wanted from him (ie. routine, order, stability, sleep…. please just some sleep). The behaviour or outcome was never up to me nor my ‘intelligent’ environment design, it was up to my son. The only thing I could provide for him was the conditions for him to succeed. The conditions for him to fall asleep on his own. Whether he achieved that was never up to me, it was all in his hands. I create the conditions and he acts.
My one-year-old has taught me that you cannot force anyone to behave in a certain way. The only thing we can do is create the conditions for them, the rest is up to them. In life, we are sometimes given the responsibility of designing the environment for others. Parenting, teaching, coaching, essentially, all positions of authority. There is an illusion that we control or are in charge of people and their resulting actions. However, instead, if we see ourselves as facilitators of environments, we allow others to succeed/fail without our ego getting in the way. We must create the best possible scenario for 'success' whatever that may be for each situation.
By designing environments, we are facilitating behaviors. Although it may feel like we control others in our positions of authority, we must acknowledge that we cannot control the actions of others. Being aware of this false sense of control is extremely liberating.
As a new parent, I have learned that as much as I felt like I could control everything, even a newborn baby controls their own actions. The only thing I can do is create the right conditions for him, and then it's up to him.
I create and I step back.
With the birth of my son and a more dedicated mediation practice (which I will discuss at some point), I have been able to learn the power of accepting what is and letting go of expectations I had of outcomes.
I am grateful that my son has taught me this invaluable lesson.
As Todd Beane puts it, our children "Stand, Sing, and Fall". We need to prepare the stage for those who look up to us, hold the spotlight for them, and support them when they leave the stage.
