Transcript - How Your Spaces Shape Your Happiness With Leidy Klotz

Follow along with the transcript below for episode: How Your Spaces Shape Your Happiness With Leidy Klotz

[INTRODUCTION]

[0:00:03] PF: Thank you for joining us for Episode 568 of Live Happy Now. What if changing the space we’re in could also change how we feel about what we’re trying to accomplish? Today’s guest tells us how it can. I’m your host, Paula Felps, and this week, I’m talking with University of Virginia professor, Leidy Klotz about his latest book, In a Good Place, which connects the dots on how spaces can support, or undermine our basic psychological needs. Leidy is here to offer practical strategies for applying these observations at home and work and involving family members, especially children, in shaping shared spaces to build ownership, growth, and a sense of fun. Let’s have a listen.

[INTERVIEW]

[0:00:46] PF: Leidy, thank you for coming on Live Happy Now.

[0:00:49] LK: Thanks for having me, Paula. I’m thrilled to be here.

[0:00:51] PF: You have a new book out, and this is something that we have never talked about on the show before, which is something I don’t very often get to say. We typically don’t give much thought to how our physical spaces are affecting our well-being, and that is what you are talking to us about today. I’d love to start by finding out how you became so interested in this concept.

[0:01:13] LK: Yeah, that’s a great question. My academic background is as engineer and I teach engineering and architecture students. I’m a professor at the University of Virginia. Then my research over the last 10 years, or maybe 15 years has really gone more into the psychology of how people are experiencing space and then what’s the psychology of how we design space. Then to write a book, it’s like, what is the thing that readers would actually need to know about at this intersection? My interest in psychology and the built environment went together, but then the book is like, okay, what is the stuff that matters most here that maybe people aren’t seeing? That’s where it comes to like, okay, yeah. I think we all tend to know that our spaces matter, right? Nobody would say, “Oh, the space doesn’t matter.” But it’s like, how does it matter? What can we do about it? It matters in so many ways that what are the things that we should focus on to have the space contribute to our happiness, our thriving, or our self-determination, however you want to define it.

[0:02:16] PF: What’s interesting to me is it’s such a big topic, and in some ways, it just seems hard to grab a hold of, because it just feels so big. You’ve been able to take all these different things and distill it down and make it really clear for us why it matters. How long did this process take? As I’m reading it, I’m like, this just had to be a lot of work.

[0:02:39] LK: Yeah. Well, that’s a super kind thing to say. Most people don’t care about how long it took the person to do it, but it was a lot of work. Probably 15 years of thinking about this, or living at this intersection of the physical and the mental. But then, five years working really hard on the book. Boy, I wish I could have just gone right to what the book’s about, because there were a lot of ideas that were interesting, important, but well, not as important as the ideas that ended up in the book, and so there was a ton of distillation. I mean, my editor was incredibly patient with me. I mean, we had everything done, and it would have been a fine book and come out, and she’s like, “Let’s do another round.”

[0:03:24] PF: Oh, editors.

[0:03:24] LK: Keep distilling. Yeah. But it’s exactly what you need, right? You have to remind yourself that this is just me, and then hopefully, hundreds of thousands of people will engage with the ideas. It’s like, I should do the extra work to make it distilled. But I’m thrilled that you noticed.

[0:03:41] PF: Well, kudos to your editor, because it turned out great. Very readable. Let’s talk a little bit about how the spaces where we live, or where we work shape the way that we feel and interact with one another.

[0:03:54] LK: Yeah. I think, I mean, it goes to agency, competence, and connection, which may be something that your listeners are already familiar with, so that’s self-determination theory, and these are our basic psychological need. Agency is the psychological need to feel like we have a say in what’s happening around us. Competence is like, okay, we have a say in what’s happening around us, but now we can actually effectively interact with our surroundings. Then connection is connecting with other people, but also connecting with something bigger than yourself.

I think we pay attention, whether we use those names or not, we pay attention to whether we’re meeting those needs and our daily tasks and activities. The original way that we met those needs is through our spaces, and our spaces are still either feeding, or starving our basic psychological needs today.

[0:04:40] PF: Right off the bat in your book, you talk about how we spend time reinventing the spaces we live or work in with things like paint and design. But we’re missing something else. Talk about what we’re missing when we look at how we create our space.

[0:04:54] LK: Yeah. I think it’s really easy to jump to these very visible, tangible, also easy to change and see the outcome. They’re pretty certain. Instead of taking a step back and saying, how is this space going to make me feel, right? How is this space going to help me feel like I have a say in what’s happening, right? I would say that it’s more important that you can paint the space than the color that you paint the space, right? I mean, I think being able to feel like you’re in control over your surroundings is really important. I think that’s more than just being able to personalize the space. I think, because our spaces are static, we think, okay, the only way to change them is to change the physical space, but we can also change what’s around us, right? We can move. I’m sitting in one space talking to you, but I could have totally sat in a different space and there would have been a different experience. I think moving among the spaces to which we have access to be able to get whatever we need from them. Does that make sense?

[0:05:55] PF: It makes perfect sense, because for myself, for years, I would sit at my desk to write. That’s just because I came up as a newspaper person in a magazine. I was always at a computer. Then in recent years, I’ve started working from a couch. Completely changes the way that I feel about what I’m writing.

[0:06:15] LK: Yeah. Does it make you more free, or more creative?

[0:06:19] PF: Yeah. Because I feel more like I’m talking to a friend than I’m turning in a paper.

[0:06:24] LK: Yeah, exactly.

[0:06:24] PF: It just completely changes the way that I feel about my work.

[0:06:28] LK: Yeah. One of the things that I love when I’m sitting in a place that’s not the conventional desk. So, I’ll work on the University of Virginia’s campus and I’ve got an office and it’s distraction free, but sometimes it’ll be 70 degrees and nice outside and there’s a porch I can go sit on a rocking chair. I’m thinking, not only is this helping with my writing process, but it’s also just making me feel very fortunate to be able to choose, right? Like, oh, I’m sitting on my couch. I got to choose this. I have a writer friend who has the best example of this. She lives on a boat in Florida and she said that when she does her creative writing, she goes up on deck. When she does the editing, she goes into the cabin, which is such a –

[0:07:07] PF: See, that’s absolutely perfect. I love that. Because you talk about how spaces can spark a creative breakthrough.

[0:07:15] LK: Yes. Yeah.

[0:07:15] PF: I think that’s a great example. What are some other ways? Because not all of us have a boat that we can move around.

[0:07:20] LK: Exactly. Yeah. I mean, there’s some general things. I think the more open, or connected to nature, the spaces, or some research that shows that’s generally going to make you think more flexibly. But I think it really is more important to think about what works for you, right? I mean, certain people work really well in a crowded bar, that there’s a lot going on and that might actually be how they focus. I need a place that doesn’t have those distractions. I think, just taking the time to say, what’s the mental task that I’m working on? Where is this been effective in the past? Then trying to align the space with the mental task? Then if it doesn’t work, you can try a different one, right? It might be different.

[0:08:00] PF: How does that work, say, at home, where you’ve got yourself, you’ve got your family, you’ve got different people who have different things they want to accomplish and each room has a different purpose? How do you use that same kind of mindset if you’re looking at the spaces in your home?

[0:08:17] LK: Yeah. Thinking about the connection and boundaries. I think the home office is a great example and you want to be able to be distraction-free. But then, okay, how is this going to make my kids feel, for example? Is it better for them to just know that if the door is shut, that dad’s not available? Or is it better that they can see in and see that I’m working and then maybe not paying attention to them? Or is it better that it’s a complete open-door policy? I think that’s different for everybody, but I think it gets back to what would be my general advice is start with these basic needs. Start with agency, competence, and connection. If you’re designing the space, you’re saying, okay, how is this space going to help with the kind of connection I want with the other people in this space and then making that the first design consideration before what desk you buy, or what paint colors, or whatever the furniture is?

[0:09:09] PF: How will that change the way that we approach, really, the way we design our homes, the way we arrange things? How is that going to change the way we look at our homes if we start placing that first?

[0:09:20] LK: I think it’s freeing, right? Because there are a lot of ways that we can get agency, competence, and connection that don’t involve driving to Home Depot, or hiring a renovation contractor, right? Sometimes the renovation helps, but you may say, okay, if what I want is to grow through the spaces, or competence, right? If I want to show competence through the spaces, then maybe that’s about just going into some different spaces more frequently, right? It’s like, if you’re walking to work and you always go the same way, maybe you walk a little different path and now all of a sudden, you’re feeling like you’ve explored that path. You’re seeing new things. You get that little dose of, I can do this, that you get from accomplishing something that’s slightly out of your comfort zone. What you’ve done there is built in this growth opportunity for yourself through the spaces, and you could do the same thing inside your house.

You could say, I want to work in this closet for a while. Then if it works, you’re going to feel like, “Oh, that was good. I figured out something about my spaces.” I think that’s how it would look. Starting with those, that’s how it would look.

[0:10:22] PF: It could also be a fun family activity to do that with your kids. Let’s talk about that a little bit, how you can, one, you’re teaching them, you’re giving a foundation for something that they’re going to apply later in life, but it could also be fun to let them start reinventing that space. What would that look like?

[0:10:39] LK: Oh, thanks so much for bringing that up. That’s one of my favorite examples. I’ve got an 11-year-old son now. I was writing the book and I’m like, okay, agency is important. I was thinking about as we were setting up the house, we just needed the super simple thing, put carpet tiles on the stairs that are going up, because the stairs are pretty steep. If older people come, we don’t want them to be slipping. Okay, how do I give Ezra agency in this? I’m like, okay, well, we picked out the tiles together and then they’re just stick on. We made a little template to be able to stick them on in an even spot, and then he put them on.

He had fun doing it. Now he has ownership over it and he grew through shaping the spaces. It’s funny, but it’s also like, this is how we’ve always learned is by manipulating our environments, right? If you think about our ancestors, what did they need to learn how to do? They needed to learn how to build shelter. How did they learn? By moving sticks around. This is why kids play and move their bodies. It’s like, you’re stepping into this really primal way of learning and feeling good about doing so. Probably the most important thing is what you started with. It was super, super fun.

[0:11:50] PF: Yeah, that seems just like a great family activity. Your book has so many examples of how we can use space and what it does for us. Anybody that’s wondering how to move forward with this can absolutely find out by picking that up.

[0:12:05] LK: Yeah. That’s another credit to my editor. That’s another thing that happened in that last revision was at the end of each chapter, just eight to 10 practical tips for how you can use the ideas that we’ve just seen.

[0:12:20] PF: We’ll be right back with more of Live Happy Now.

[BREAK]

[0:12:28] PF: Now, let’s hear more from Leidy Klotz.

[INTERVIEW CONTINUED]

[0:12:33] PF: Now, what about at work? Because you can’t usually be quite as free with our changes at work.

[0:12:40] LK: I think there’s a general idea. This is one of those tips, where it’s like, when you feel like your agency is being constrained, then look for adjacent freedoms. One of the stories I tell in the book is Nelson Mandela, when he was imprisoned for such a long time. One of the things he did when he was in prison was he found a place on the rooftop that he put it, bathed all day in sunlight. He convinced the commanding officer to let him create a garden there, right? It’s another extreme example, where it’s like, his spatial agency is completely taken away from him. Yet, he’s said, “Oh, look. There’s this space here that I can use.”

At work, for example, maybe you’ve been told to return to the office and there’s nothing you can do about it. But can you choose your commute time? Can you choose where in the office you work, right? Can you choose who you surround yourselves with? Recognizing that it’s this – the frustration comes from having this need for agency taken from you, but then saying, well, well, where do I have agency? My pet peeve is, you go to a – I was at a hotel this weekend for travel soccer. It’s perfect day outside and yet, you can’t open the window. It will be so nice, right?

[0:13:51] PF: I know. That makes me crazy. Yeah.

[0:13:54] LK: I’m like, when that happens, I get really frustrated and I’m like, all right, well, at least I can rearrange the furniture in the room, or do something to take a little bit of agency back.

[0:14:04] PF: Has writing this book changed the way that you approach things like that?

[0:14:08] LK: Yeah, definitely. I think it’s just helped me start with those things, instead of eventually stumbling upon them when I’m frustrated with my space, also with the growth. I mean, growing through our spaces and growing through navigation and that so much of the modern world is like, okay, this is climate-controlled room. There’s GPS. There are all these things that are great. I’m not going to get rid of. But they do take away some of these opportunities to grow through figuring out how to manage your spaces. Putting myself in unfamiliar space, or slightly uncomfortable space and figuring it out is another thing.

[0:14:42] PF: Then, when we’re out in the world, so home is a big deal. That’s the one where we can really, really make a lot of change. Work, probably a little bit less change, but there’s still a lot that we can do. What about when we’re just out in the world? What are some practices we can implement that makes us more aware of the spaces around us and how they’re affecting us?

[0:15:01] LK: My favorite is just space before screen, right? It’s really easy to get habituated to our surroundings, and most of the time that’s good. When I’m walking through my house, I don’t want to have to scrutinize the baseboard molding and the carpet and the chandelier every time I go by. I want to be able to think about what I’m thinking about. Then now on top of that, you’ve got our phones, right? You see people moving through the world, myself included, where you’re immersed in this screen and not seeing what’s going on around you. Just using the screen as a cue, it’s like, when you find yourself looking at your phone, say, “Hey, wait a second. Have I actually taken in the space that I’m in?” This could be a new space. It could be a space that you’re in all the time.

I’ve got a friend who was telling me, she said, “Oh, now I think about you when I wake up in the morning, because I immediately look at my phone and I’m like, oh, no. Leidy said I should take in the space.” Even though it’s a room that she’s in all the time and she notices new things, or appreciates it in new ways just by taking it in. Space before screen is one. I think, also, just having some times where you turn off the navigation, maybe literally, or figuratively. Maybe it’s like, you do say, I’m not going to use GPS to get from point A to point Bm and you notice something different about your city. Or it’s like, I’m going to purposely go for a wander this afternoon and just get familiar with more of the space that’s around me.

I think again, going back to your fun idea, that’s something that can be fun, but it is also going to make you feel like you grow a little bit and expand your territory literally, right? It’s like, now all of a sudden, you know your neighborhood better.

[0:16:42] PF: Right. What does that do for us from a mental health perspective? You do talk about how the screens have taken things away from us.

[0:16:53] LK: Yeah. I mean, the screens have taken – It’s so obvious when you say it, but the screens, I mean, they’re two dimensional, right? They’re only working through two of our senses. Really, it’s sight and sound. But our spaces are three-dimensional. They’re complex. They’re always changing. They work on touch and smell and sight and sound. You’re taking yourself out of this incredibly rich world. That’s one of the challenges. There’s that piece of it. But then, there’s also just like, when screens are making things so easy, they’re taking away some of this mental – It’s not exactly the same mechanism as weightlifting, or going for a run for your cardio, but it’s mental practice that we are no longer getting.

There are studies that predate the screen problem that show that taxi drivers who are navigating with GPS, their mental capacity deteriorates faster than taxi drivers who are navigating with other forms of navigation. This is a use it or lose it. Again, I’m not saying that we should turn off GPS, but I’m saying that navigating space is something that builds our capacity and keeps us sharp and we want to don’t throw out the positives of that when we’re making our lives easier.

[0:18:13] PF: Also, we’re then connecting with our surroundings, whether it’s nature, whether it’s a people on a sidewalk, whatever it is, instead of just being in our screen, we’re in the world.

[0:18:24] LK: Yeah, that might be the biggest one, right? This connection with something bigger than yourself is going to make us feel really great, right? Seeing yourself as part of this magical, larger world with all these amazing things in it is going to make you feel good. There’s, as you know, the feeling of awe, one of the most powerful feelings.

[0:18:43] PF: Oh, I’m glad you brought that up, because you talk about transcendence. I love that topic. Anyway, you talk about the power of awe. Can you share your practice about the awe audit? That is so hard to – it’s easier to read that than it is to say it. The awe audit. And talk about how to do it and what that does for us.

[0:19:03] LK: Yeah. The people who have done the most research on awe, they characterized the ways that we get it. There’s the predictable spatial ways, like seeing the grand canyon, but there are also all these ways where you just in a space. It could be a cathedral, or it could be even just something being on top of a parking garage and looking down at your town. That can be awe-inspiring, because you’re like, wow. This is, I feel I’m part of something bigger. This transcends my understanding of the world.

The awe audit is just paying attention to when those moments happen, right? It’s like, okay, if going on top of the parking garage, this is one that works for me and looking down on the town, if that makes you feel awe, then make an appointment. Can you go there monthly, or every other month and have that feeling of awe as a way to recharge yourself? Again, it doesn’t have to be the top of the parking garage. It’s just noticing when those are happening. That’s the audit part. Then revisiting it and making it part of your regular practice.

[0:20:02] PF: Then, what’s that going to do for us if we do practice awe?

[0:20:05] LK: You’re breaking yourself out of your regular patterns of thought, right? You’re thinking about, okay, this transcends my understanding of the world. This is a completely different viewpoint. It makes the daily concerns fall by the wayside and you’re connected with this much larger, bigger world. It’s just a refreshing perspective shift.

[0:20:27] PF: Yeah, absolutely. Then when you surprise and delight your mind like that, then you love the feeling that it gives you, you’re going to want to seek out more experiences like that and find some more ways to do that.

[0:20:36] LK: Yeah, 100%. And it should carry over and make you look at everything you see after through a slightly different lens, right?

[0:20:44] PF: Absolutely. This book is very informative. It has so much that it teaches us. I think its biggest gift is it really shifts the way that we start looking at spaces that we’re in, things that we’ve taken for granted. It’s like, I can do something with this. I can do this differently. That is really, really wonderful. It’s very enlightening and we’re going to offer a download of a free excerpt of your book to all of our listeners. As we let you go, what is it that you really hope listeners will take away from this conversation and then ultimately, from reading In a Good Place?

[0:21:21] LK: I think the empowerment is huge. What you just said, which is that we have more control over our surroundings than we tend to think. If we can focus on agency, competence, and connection, those are things that we have a lot of control over. I think that that’s my great hope for readers and listeners.

[0:21:43] PF: Terrific. Well, Leidy, we’re going to tell them how to find you, how to find your book and how to find the other books that you’ve done. I appreciate you sitting down and talking with me about this today. It’s been just a fabulous conversation.

[0:21:55] LK: Yeah. Likewise, Paula, and I really appreciate it.

[END OF INTERVIEW]

[0:22:03] PF: That was Leidy Klotz, talking about how intentionally engaging with our spaces can better support our happiness and growth. If you’d like to learn more about Leidy, check out his books, follow him on social media, or download a free excerpt from his latest book, In a Good Place, just visit us at livehappy.com and click on this podcast episode.

That is all we have time for today. We’ll meet you back here again next week for an all-new episode. Until then, this is Paula Felps, reminding you to make every day a happy one.

[END]

In this episode, you’ll learn:

Why your physical spaces influence your happiness more than you realize — and how they feed (or starve) your core psychological needs.
How to use your surroundings intentionally to boost creativity, strengthen family connection, and reclaim a sense of control — even in places you can’t redesign.
A simple practice for experiencing more awe in your daily life by noticing and revisiting the spaces that shift your perspective.

Visit Leidy’s Leidy’s website.

Discover his latest book, In a Good Place.

Download a free excerpt from In a Good Place.

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