You’ve heard this before: You’re not stronger than your environment. If you want to change your life, you need to hang out with people who support your transformation.

Otherwise, you’re just fighting for nothing. Your environment will limit your aspirations, your goals and dreams — no matter how bold they are.

But what if you don’t have like-minded people around you right now? Does it mean that you’re doomed? Or, that you should pack a suitcase and move to an artistic community of free spirits living in the forest?

In the 2013 movie Oldboy, Joe Doucett (played by Josh Brolin) ends up in an environment that’s designed to destroy him. Joe is an alcoholic. After he passes out drunk one night, he gets kidnapped. He wakes up locked in a hotel room, without any clue of how he got there. Over the next weeks and months (that later extend into years), he’s served food + booze regularly. With no way to get out of his confinement, it seems like drinking himself to death may be the easiest solution.

But Joe wants to live and see his daughter again. He perseveres. Soon enough, he’s putting the booze down the drain as soon as it arrives. On top, he starts working out and, as a result, transforms from an unhealthy alcoholic into a physically fit, strong man.

Joe’s kidnappers stacked all the odds of staying sane against him. Yet, he manages to find a way forward.

What about you? Do you really need a better environment, different friends or job before you can start working toward your dreams?

Meet Your Explicit Personality — The One That Limits You

I’ve been telling this story to myself for a long time:

I’m struggling to meditate and progress spiritually because I don’t have the right context. I need to be in a community of people who are on the same path. Otherwise, I miss out on the greatest version of myself I could become if only my environment supported it.

This sort of story can be very convincing. Maybe you have a similar one in your head. You tell yourself that you must find the right people who “understand you.” You play a victim by focusing on how the world around doesn’t look the way you’d want it to.

To an extent, this is valid. The people around you can influence who you are in very real ways. That’s because there’s a part of your personality that’s fluid and adjusts according to the circumstances. In his paper about Self-Concordant Goals, Kennon M. Sheldon calls it your explicit personality.

You can think of it as the mediator between your innermost values and your environment. It’s the identity that allows you to position yourself in relation to the world. Daniel Kahnemann calls it “the remembering self” — because it’s based on the story you tell according to your life events.

Some expressions of the explicit personality can be things like: I’m a doctor (because this is the job I’ve been doing for the past 20 years) or I’m a bad wife (Because I failed to be there for my husband when he needed support last Saturday). The explicit personality is circumstantial and hence, dictated by our environment.

Many people identify with this personality layer entirely — and this precisely limits them. From this place, you easily tell yourself a story that you can’t pursue your dreams — because your environment dictates otherwise.

But this isn’t the whole story. If you dig deeper, there’s another aspect of your personality — the implicit one.

Implicit Personality Allows You To Connect With Your True Self

If you have a hunch of what you want in life — or even just a strong feeling about what you don’t want — you aren’t a complete stranger to your implicit personality. You are self-aware enough to notice the gut feeling which tells you what’s right for you. This is a great starting point.

According to Sheldon, the implicit personality is the deeper and usually more unconscious layer of who we are. Yet, it’s also more stable throughout our lives than the explicit one. It’s based on our deepest values, preferences, likes and dislikes that don’t change much, even when our environment does.

Daniel Kahneman refers to it as “the experiencing self.” By this, he means that this part of yourself is based on what you experience moment-to-moment — for example, how you feel about your job right here right now. This is very different than identifying with the stories you or other people tell about you (e.g. you’re a doctor who’s recently been a very bad wife).

Now, the existence of the two personalities is both bad and good news.

The bad news is that it’s usually the explicit personality that makes decisions about your life. If you overidentify with it, you may make choices based primarily on how other people see you.

However, the good news is that the implicit personality can start informing your choices. The two personalities can have a “conversation” with one another. And because the implicit personality is always there, you can initiate this conversation at any point of your life.

Sure, it may be hard — especially when your environment reinforces a version of yourself that doesn’t feel authentic to you. As Sheldon points out:

“To ‘be true to oneself’ is to consciously refer to one’s stable values, motives, and beliefs as one makes decisions, which can be difficult when momentary social influences are insensitive or contradictory to these values and beliefs.”

But it’s always possible to live at least a bit truer to yourself. No matter what the circumstances, you can always make a tiny move towards your implicit personality. This is what “getting to know yourself” means. If you do this over time, the results may surprise you.

Joe Doucett was able to do it even when his environment stacked the odds against him. He was in a setup designed to destroy him by reinforcing his explicit identity as an alcoholic. Had Joe clung to this, it might have been his end.

But despite the odds, he was able to connect to the values of his implicit personality. This included the love for his daughter. His True Self proved stronger than his environment.

How To Follow Your Dreams When No One Around You Does

Sometimes, you have no other way but to be stronger than your environment. Of course, you may gradually leave it and move towards one that better accommodates your dreams and values.

But sometimes, to get to a more nurturing environment, you need to start with what you have right now.

One of the great Buddhist teachings revolves around acceptance for your current circumstances, instead of always striving to be somewhere else. Pema Chödrön talks about this when she mentions three methods of working with chaos. She calls them: “no more struggle,” “using poison as medicine,” and “seeing whatever arises as enlightened wisdom.”

Maybe her wise words will inspire you to see that where you are at right now is the perfect starting point to wherever you intend to go next.

“Everything that occurs is not only usable and workable but is actually the path itself. We can use everything that happens to us as the means for waking up. We can use everything that occurs — whether it’s our conflicting emotions and thoughts or our seemingly outer situation — to show us where we are asleep and how we can wake up completely, utterly, without reservations.” — Pema Chödrön

If you experience chaos, then this is the place to be and look into. If you have dreams you want to follow, the way to do it isn’t to wait for a “perfect” setup. The latter leads to discontentment because it takes away your power to be in charge of your experience exactly as it is right now.

If you struggle with the people around you, remember that those who make you feel uncomfortable can be messengers — if you choose to see them that way. You can use your encounters with them to grow. Not necessarily in the direction they want you to go — but to uncover deeper and deeper layers of your implicit personality.

Sometimes, you will also need to connect with people who reaffirm your values to you. This is important. But remember that you can do so in many forms — by reaching out to people online, reading books, watching movies and even listening to music. Make sure you give yourself a chance to see your values reflected by others. Initially, this will help you see them as valid.

If you ever need to talk, I can be one of those people. Feel free to email me at marta[at]selfawareness.blog or subscribe to my newsletter for a more regular inspiration to connect with yourself.

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