How your environment impacts your outcomes in life | Paul Gleeson | TEDxTallaght

I want you to imagine that you are in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean right now, you are sitting in this little rowboat, you are miles from land and you can't make any progress, you are stuck at sea. anchor you can't row against this wind and this swell so you just have to wait the only person with you is

your

rowing partner so you both have to ride out the storm and wait for it to pass when it finishes with one of you you will go out and roll for 2 hours, you'll do that, then you'll go in and then the other person will go out for 2 hours and you'll do it 24/7 for the same amount of time. what it takes to cross the Atlantic Ocean, when I spent 85 days in the Atlantic Ocean, you quickly realize the power of the

environment

around you and the impact it has on

your

mindset, and the concept of mindset really resonated with me. soon.

Very quickly when I decided I wanted to row the Atlantic the first people I contacted were the only Irish people who had ever done this Amon and Peter kavana and I will never forget the first time I met Aon he said Paul was trying to cross . The Atlantic has nothing to do with how much ocean experience you have, he said, also believe it or not, it has nothing to do with how good a rower you are, but it has a lot to do with how mentally strong you are, your way of thinking, I said Aman, it's better because I've never been on a boat before and I can't row and I was right when we went out to the ocean and your routine, if you want, is two hours on two hours off, so I row. for two hours, Tori, my rowing partner, would rest and then jump and paddle for two hours and very, very quickly you realize the power of the

environment

that you're in, so there's the macro part of the environment, so that the force of the wind, the sheer force of the waves and, sometimes, the absolute truthfulness of what you find and you cannot control that, but you also realize that there are small, sorry, microelements of your environment, the things that you can control. so how I would engage in a conversation with Tori, what I choose to read, what I choose to listen to, how I would process my thoughts and those became really powerful in impacting our overall environment because, like I said, our environment was going to affect the way we think. which was also going to affect how we behave and how we perform, so let me give you an example of one of them about 20 minutes after taking this photo, Tori was paddling and I was off shift in the cockpit and I heard this creaking sound quite A big wave lifted the boat right on our side, we didn't capsize but we went over 90 degrees.

They threw me across the cabin. Tori was in the ORS and she was thrown violently from the side of the boat and she broke two of her ribs, so I jumped out and grabbed her and took her inside and she was pretty shaken and she was crying and I was pretty shaken too I said, do you? would you like a letter? She said I'd love one, so what did we do? Before the trip, I contacted T's family and friends in Ireland and Canada. Canadian Tor and she had done the same for me and I said, "I want you to write a letter to Tor.

Now put in it whatever you want, but the context I'm in." I'm going to give it to her because it's meant to be an encouragement if she's having a bad day, so in this case I started reading a letter from her father and when I started reading it, she wiped away her tears and she started smiling. I thought it was working perfectly. However, as I read the end of the letter, I looked up and she was crying again and she just waved at me and said Paul, stop, I can't be here anymore. I think just too much emotion in the letter, I said, wait a second, your dad is quite sarcastic and he put a little postscript in it, he said: PS, be nice like a little Irishman, you might have to eat it and I'm kind of glad. that you have done it.

I laughed because that's exactly what she did and it just had this immediate effect on her. I was able to see these little things and we realized how powerful they could be in controlling the environment to some extent, when you think about the environment we all have in our lives right now the people in our lives affect the way we think well bad sometimes maybe neutral when I was a kid my mom always told me there's no such thing as can't and it used to drive me crazy so if I couldn't figure out how to do something mom I can't do this she said Paul there's no such thing as I can't and I get cranky and try to figure out how to do whatever I was doing this way.

I came back to bite her in the butt a couple of years later, when I told her she wanted to cross the Atlantic. The first thing she told me was Paul, you can't do that, don't worry. I was like mom, there is no such thing. I can't, but if you like this Mantra, if I could call it that of Mom, it had a really powerful effect on my thinking growing up. I didn't realize it at the time and it's another component that most of us here tonight probably. having a phone in your pocket another element of our environment is technology and how it

impacts

us when we were in the Atlantic we had a satellite phone with us which was the only piece of communication technology and some of you will know that satellite phones are very es It's expensive to make calls with it so we don't use it much but we turn it on once or twice a day to get a text and it was almost one of the highlights of the day because you turn the phone on and you get a message from maybe family or friends or sometimes from people you didn't even know and we also got a weather forecast and I remember turning on the phone one day and I was so excited to see how many messages we could have gotten five or six would be a good day and I was a little deflated because we just had a thought ah and my mood went from a little deflated to fear and absolute panic when I turned on the message because it was a weather forecast and it just said Hurricane Epsilon Warning and Epsilon was the name of the hurricane for so you know if it's a piece of technology, whether it's from the people in our lives, the one thing I learned from this experience or other adventures I've been on is the environment we have.

What's around us has a huge impact on our mindset and long-term mindset, you know, from a tipping point that affects how we behave every day in the work that I do when I work with clients, I often understand that I don't have time for this or I can't make time for that and of course we all have time challenges. I get it, but probably one of the greatest gifts I've received from these trips is that you know what the sun will do one day. put in all of us I don't know how much time I have the clock is ticking but I take advantage of the time I have because I will never get it back and if I had to think that I have my activities and my behaviors here every day and they affect the results that I will obtain in

life

if I accept that my way of thinking will play a role in how I behave.

I think most of us would agree that that's probably reasonably accurate if I then take a step. on top of that and think about my environment, so if you think about your environment, the people in your lives where you work, who you work with, what you read, what you listen to, what you choose to listen to, the people you choose to listen to, all that around. It has a huge effect on mindset, so today I was told that it's a good idea to maybe have a call to action and have a suggestion, one of the things that I'm very aware of is that if I make a small adjustment to my environment could be the place where I work it could be the people I spend time with it could be how I spend an hour a night it can have a very significant effect on mindset and over a period of time these little things add up I would have made 2,500 strokes every two hours in the Atlantic if you had to plot where you were going, that's nothing, it's the width of a fingertip on a map, so you would never do it, but over time these little accumulations build up until they become into something a little more meaningful, which in this case was us crossing the Atlantic, thank you.