We come now to our fourth week in my ten-week goal-setting success formula, and this week’s tip follows the first three: Up your well-being, set the “right” goals, and improve self-regulation. It is: Make the petri dish effective.

My clients are fond of hearing me say, “A goal is not a goal is not a goal.” What I mean is that all goals are not created equally, nor can you proceed forward with confidence and energy towards your dreams unless you’ve assessed the petri dish that you live and work in as far as supportive people, a positive environment, and even the unconscious prompts you receive aurally, visually and through your other senses.

The first part of the petri dish is your social web. Research has shown that moods are contagious, as are behaviors like becoming obese, quitting smoking and being happy. Because of that, you need to pay attention to who you talk to on the phone, who you live and work with, and even who you exchange emails with. Are these people positive? Supportive of your efforts? When you have good news, do they ask you to elaborate on your accomplishments, and even brag about you to others? That is the best type of cheerleader to have in your life, particularly because “active-constructive” responding allows you to feel happier for longer periods of time, and if it’s the first response you get to your sharing, you’re more likely to recall the event with fondness later on. If you get a negative, jealous or cynical response to your good news, research shows that you’ll probably stop sharing right there, which robs you of multiple opportunities for joy and advancement.

Another part of the petri dish to pay attention to is the ratio of positive to negative comments around you. The Positivity Ratio shows that in order to be flourishing, creative and in an upward spiral of well-being, you need to have at least three positive comments to one negative overall, with the optimal ratio being five to one for both work teams and marriages. More recent cutting-edge research also shows that a positive comment can also be a question/inquiry, and a negative can be seen as an advocacy statement in which you are making “I” statements.

Finally, I also ask clients to look at their surroundings from a “priming” view and make appropriate changes as necessary. In my latest book, “Creating Your Best Life,” I pulled together so much disparate research and made so many unique suggestions around this topic that “Publisher’s Weekly” made a special red-star note that this chapter was worth the price of entry, and I don’t disagree because it has such a powerful on what we do and think.

Although there is far more to say than I can synopsize here, research has found that things like photos of people in our environment can either cause happiness and goal-directed behavior or discontent, and the scent of lemons can make us clean up a room or leave it messy. The words of songs and pictures of album covers can evoke positive emotions or destructive behavior, and watching “Mean Girls” can cause aggressive, unfriendly behavior. If we’re asleep at the wheel in our own lives about this aspect of goal-setting, we can end up with dashed dreams without even understanding what happened to our noble efforts, so I encourage you to read the chapter of my book that will deepen your understanding of what to do around this aspect of goal accomplishment.

So remember this week that once we’ve crafted intrinsic goals, we have to look around at whether or not we are surrounded by people, words, scents and emotions that uplift us, and then take decisive action to create positive primes (license plates, email addresses and even bank passwords) and create the environment that supports us the most.