The people around us can either push us toward our goals or quietly pull us away from them. Learn how to evaluate your social circle, protect your progress, nurture positive relationships, and become a positive force in the lives of others.
As much as we’re all about chasing dreams, we know that our social circles are absolutely vital for our existence. We simply aren’t meant to be alone, and the idea that we can just put our heads down and chase our goals solo is usually fanciful thinking. We need our friends and family around us, and we need to feed into their lives too. But that’s not to say that our social spheres are all positive all the time, and they can hold us back and corrupt us as well. Our social circles can help to make us and contribute to breaking us. So what do we do with that?
We think that we all need to sit down and go through the hard task of thinking about the people in our lives and ask the question: Are my friends and family members positive or negative forces in my life?
If this leads to you realising and being confronted with the idea that a number of your friends and family members are actively holding you back, making you a worse person or constantly causing trouble, then you will have a hard task ahead of you.
First of all, you need to make sure that you aren’t mistaken, so you need to question yourself and make sure that you aren’t deceiving yourself (or being misled) – it can happen, especially if we’re in a bad space.
But if, on further reflection, you realise that your core group of friends are always trying to take you away from your goals and lead you into negative behaviour that will harm your life, then you have to chart a path forward, and that’s where it gets very difficult because you may well need to cut ties with them and that’s a hard thing to do.
And it raises a really hard moral dilemma because it also doesn’t seem right to abandon people who have been friends. If you’ve been around a person or group of people for a while, they are a part of you in some real sense, and, anyway, loyalty is important and we cannot live in a world where we constantly cut people out of our lives and are cut out in return. That sort of social instability in our lives isn’t sustainable
We cannot (and don’t want to) make a call for you, but we can call it the way we see it. We think that you should lean towards keeping people around rather than cutting them off. It just seems a bit harsh to cut someone out of the picture because they’re always negative, for example. But we draw the line if a person or group is actively taking you away from your goals or being destructive forces in your life by taking you down a bad road. At that point, you might need to cut one or two people out of your life entirely.
However, there may actually be a more positive way to handle it.
If you have at least one person in your life who is a positive influence (or, at least, is not a negative force), start spending more time with that person and less time with the destructive elements to your social sphere. If you keep doing that, you will invariably end up associating with more and more positive people and that will help you be a better and more effective person. If you keep looking out for the best people in your orbit and associating with them, you’ll be on a positive trajectory.
At the same time, you can just refuse to engage in any negative choices involving the destructive person (or group). It only takes you doing that a few times for you to either rub off on them positively, or for the positive changes you are making in your own life to bring about a natural separation.
We know that thinking about cutting people off or holding them at arms length can feel like a harsh response. Again, loyalty is a virtue, after all. However, we also know that we only have one life and that nothing can make or break a person like the people around them.
If you’re looking for examples of this, you only have to look at the graveyard of the careers of young football players who had the talent and opportunity to make it in the Premier League, but got pulled into a flash lifestyle that held them back and wrecked their lives.
The same is true for us, whether our dream is to make the business a success or simply reach some goals in the gym.
Again, we know that this is hard as anything, but we have to make sure that our social connections aren’t holding us back.
On a side note, you’ll notice that we’ve only spoken about friends, but, obviously, the same thing can apply to family members. It’s just that how to actually handle problematic family members is a whole other thing and deep waters we’re not going to venture in this time.
Having said all of this, we should also notice that there’s a positive side to our relationships. A good friend will call out our rubbish, hold us accountable and push us to be better. A positive force in our lives will help pick us up when life keeps beating us down and stand by us when others abandon us. Truly, you cannot put a price on that.
If you realise that the people in your life are positive forces, helping to push you along, we think the best response is to be grateful for them and then really look after those people.
After all, we can’t have expectations of having people being positive forces in our lives if we’re just going to be selfish takers who don’t give anything back. In a real way, feeding into other people’s lives is its own reward, but it also seems to bring about further good things as well.
Perhaps, then, even more important than evaluating the people in our lives, is sitting down and first ask the (even harder) question: Am I a force for good or a force of chaos and destruction in the lives of the people around me, or am I simply absent?
Keep running.
