You may have heard the saying ‘you are the average of the five people you surround yourself with’.
A large part of setting ourselves up for success and ‘winning our week’ is introducing productive practices and being mindful of or discarding practices that are less productive and this extends to the people we spend our time with.
When it comes to relationships, we are greatly influenced by the people around us. In fact, our relationships affect our self-esteem, our way of thinking and our decisions.
So, today we want to discuss the quality of our relationships and if they are serving us in a positive way.
But how often are we actually stopping and looking around at the people we are surrounded by and thinking we need to make changes?
The impact of negative relationships
We may not even realise the value and importance of the company we keep. While having positive influences around us may contribute to our perceptions and overall success negative influences may negatively affect these same outcomes.
For example, imagine you have a friend that is critical of everything you do. While you may only see that person once a week and think, ‘it’s not a big deal’ this may actually have a large impact on you. Especially if your contact with this person is more frequent than with your more supportive and motivating friends.
This sort of contact can be damaging as the negative effects of this sort of interaction can compound and affect our behaviour.
If this sounds like someone in our network, it might be time to audit our relationships.
1. Keep your critics around
We might assume that the best strategy for auditing our relationships would be to simply remove all negative influencers and only surround ourselves with our biggest cheerleaders, right? Well, this is not necessarily the best strategy.
While we do want to have people around us who are supportive, if we only receive biased positive feedback, we are unable to receive constructive feedback and grow.
Having positive influences who are willing to offer us constructive feedback allows us to gain new perspectives, or insights on our work.
2. Consider the company you keep both online and offline
With our online lives ever growing it can be common for our closest friends to be people who we rarely see face to face, or who we have not met in person. Still, these online relationships can have a great influence over our behaviour and success. So, if our online relationships are not serving us positively it may be time to let these go.
3. Control the amount of time you spend with people
Who we choose to spend our free time with is often within our control. While we can choose our friends we can’t choose our family. That said, we can certainly recognise if there are particular family members who bring us down or have a negative influence on us.
Similarly, we may have life-long friends who served us at some time in our life, but who have failed to grow or change since we were kids. As we get older and our goals and routines change, so will the people in our life.
Regardless of whether we spend most of our time with family or friends, if we do realise that someone does bring us down, we can control how much time we spend with them. In the example of family, if we’re being intentional about how we spend our time, we don’t need to default to spending most of our time with family simply because we’re related. Think of quality over quantity when spending time with these select family members.
4. Spend time with people who bring out the best in you
Now that we have audited the relationships that don’t have a positive impact on us, we can make time with people we admire and that make us see our own value.
When we’re surrounded by others who we respect, we are on track to live a positive life.
Over to you…
When we think about the people, we spend the most time with, if anyone is having a more negative than positive impact on our lives, it may be time to reconsider their role in our lives. Instead, we should strive to spend our time with the people who we really admire and aspire to emulate.
Now get out and Win Your Week!
