Thinking Happens Somewhere
We tend to locate thinking inside people. We invest less curiosity in where thinking takes place.
This is now being explored across a range of fields.
We devote considerable attention to what informs our thinking. Experience. Knowledge. Relationships. Bias. Emotion. Values. We often assume place is incidental. A backdrop. The setting in which coaching, leadership and everyday life unfold.
Place is doing more than framing our experience.
It quietly participates in what captures our attention, what feels possible, the meaning we make from what we encounter and the decisions that follow.
Place is more than scenery.
It becomes part of the system from which our thinking emerges.
Attention is never limitless. It is selective. Every day we filter more than we consciously notice. If attention is the beginning of discernment, then anything that directs attention warrants closer examination. Place may be one of the most pervasive influences of all.
Place is not synonymous with nature.
It might be a woodland path.
A train carriage.
A hospital corridor.
A school staff room.
A kitchen table.
A waiting room.
A coaching space.
An airport departure lounge.
A familiar city street.
An online forum that, over time, comes to signal reflection.
Every place offers cues. Some invite expansion. Others narrow scope. Some encourage certainty. Others make room for ambiguity. Some slow our thinking. Others ask us to keep moving.
None are neutral.
Over the past seven decades, researchers from environmental psychology, anthropology, geography, architecture and, more recently, neuroscience and public health have each approached place through different intellectual traditions. Despite their differing perspectives, a common thread is apparent. Place is not merely where life is lived. It is one of the conditions through which awareness, perception and sense-making are continually informed.
Roger Barker's work in ecological psychology (1947) challenged the assumption that behaviour could be understood independently of its surroundings. James Gibson (1979) later proposed that environments offer alternative possibilities for action. Stephen and Rachel Kaplan (1989) demonstrated how certain settings restore directed attention and cognitive capacity. Since then, research has continued to deepen our understanding of the relationship between place, cognition and decision-making.
The evidence has become richer.
The invitation has become simpler.
What does this place make more available?
And what might it be asking of us?
We often describe systems through structures, processes, culture and hierarchy.
Yet every system is also encountered somewhere.
Architecture.
Noise.
Light.
Weather.
Rhythm.
Movement.
Geography.
Proximity.
These are not peripheral details. They are woven into the conditions where thinking takes place, subtly reconfiguring what becomes easier to notice and what remains a blind spot. We cannot separate cognition from context as cleanly as we sometimes imagine.
This may explain why the same person thinks differently according to place. Not because they have changed, but because everything around the act of thinking has.
Agency can be treated as something we bring with us - something to develop, strengthen, recover or sustain. Yet perhaps it is less self-contained than we suppose. More plausibly, agency is relational. It arises through the interplay of person, place, relationships, history and circumstance.
The surgeon whose discernment sharpens in theatre yet falters in a board meeting. The artist who finds clarity on a crowded pavement yet struggles in an isolated studio. The executive who reaches a decision only after swimming. The student whose interest reappears in the museum rather than the classroom.
The conditions alter. So too does our readiness for clearer thinking.
This is not to suggest that place determines our thinking.
It does not.
Nor is it merely advocacy for coaching outdoors or redesigning workplaces.
It is, however, a call for greater discernment.
To acknowledge what this place brings into focus. What remains at the edges. What becomes more accessible. What is easily overlooked.
There are places many of us return to because thinking seems easier there. Others we avoid without quite knowing why. Some become associated with beginnings. Others with endings. Still others with messy middles. None of this need be mystical. It may truly reflect the continuing relationship between perception, memory and place.
Contemporary scholarship is opening this conversation far wider than environmental psychology. Anthropologist Setha Low (1992) has long argued that place is cultural as well as physical, infused with resonance and social significance. More recently, Victor Counted (2023) has explored how relationships with place contribute to belonging, wellbeing and human agency, particularly where movement, migration and multiple places become part of daily life.
What I find especially compelling is the proposition they hold in common. Place is not fixed. It is in motion.
Douglas Allen, Mary Lawhon and Joseph Pierce (2019) build on this, positing that place is not simply somewhere we occupy but something created through relationships, agency and everyday practice. Together, their work broadens the inquiry.
Place extends beyond somewhere on the map.
It cannot be confined to a point of reference.
It enters into how we orientate ourselves to the world, negotiate belonging and construct meaning.
No two people experience the same place in quite the same way. Not because the place itself has shifted, but because each of us arrives with a unique constellation of memories, relationships, expectations and lived realities.
Place, then, is never passive.
Neither are we.
Between the two, interpretation is always taking place.
As coaches, leaders and practitioners, we seek to refine our thinking.
Perhaps equal curiosity belongs with the conditions in which that thinking is taking form.
Not because place provides answers.
Not because one environment is inherently better than another.
But because recognising place as part of the system enlarges our awareness of what contributes to sound judgement, perception and meaning-making.
Place rarely announces itself.
We spend much of our lives moving from place to place.
Less often do we consider how those places move through us.
Continuing companions in how we attend, interpret and decide.
Where.
Kirsty Knowles
Founder of Think Being®
Accredited Coach, Facilitator, Mentor Coach, Coach Educator, Consultant & Board Director of Professional and Personal Development at UK ICF -
Co-creating Change & Development for Mindset, Leadership and Culture
With dynamic style, sense of play, and intuitive practice, Kirsty co-creates an engaging thinking partnership for personal or professional mindset, leadership and culture development. She fosters self-discovery to surface what has fallen into shadow, and agency for future-fit impact across different domains of life. It surpasses technique; it’s about being fully by your side. Kirsty is advancing the profession through daring dialogue.
References
Allen, D., Lawhon, M. and Pierce, J. (2019) ‘Placing race: On the resonance of Black geographies’, Progress in Human Geography, 43(6), pp. 1001–1019. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/0309132518803775.
Barker, R.G. (1947) One Boy’s Day: A Specimen Record of Behavior. New York: Harper & Brothers.
Counted, V., Ramkissoon, H., Captari, L.E. and Cowden, R.G. (eds.) (2023) Place, Spirituality, and Well-Being: A Global and Multidisciplinary Approach. Cham: Springer.
Gibson, J.J. (1979) The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin.
Kaplan, R. and Kaplan, S. (1989) The Experience of Nature: A Psychological Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Low, S.M. (1992) ‘Symbolic ties that bind: Place attachment in the plaza’, in Altman, I. and Low, S.M. (eds.) Place Attachment. New York: Plenum Press, pp. 165–185.
