Here’s the dead honest truth: some of your most favorite people have to go.
Get out the Big Social Shears and start a-prunin’!
If you’ve got friends or family or associates in your life who are not only NOT helping you to get ahead, but worse, actively keeping you down…cut them free. Personal and business growth – ALL growth – can only take place in a positive environment.
Negative folks are killing your ability to evolve
If they’re just “there” like the guy you see every day at the mini mart or what have you, then that’s not who I am referring to. There are plenty of people you see each day who are just the background of your life.
Neither good nor bad but probably more good than not. But you honestly don’t give them any deep attention as it is. Those folks are harming nothing.
But others, particularly those you are close to, can be destroying your ability to become the next great version of yourself. Family members can be tricky.
Coworkers or anyone else you are forced to see in a day can be tricky too, so you may have to run with an adaptation of my advice there.
Do your best to find a way to limit your exposure to these people
In these oddball situations, you have to take your growth process to another level and learn methods that enable you to see these negative people but suffer no harm for the exposure. Bill Harris has the tools for that. Look for him on this site.
But the easiest way is pure avoidance, to include removal of the dead weight from your life.
It feels good to bitch and pity yourself, as a group, when life’s not panning out
I’ve been deeply involved with partners who always had complaints and woes. I wasn’t all that far ahead of them and we’d frequently enjoy an hour or three round of “Man my life sucks” with all in attendance agreeing heartily with the guy on his left.
There’s a certain camaraderie to it and it feels like a support group. But it’s not. Life will CONTINUE to “not pan out” if you allow these meetings to keep taking place.
All you’re doing is reinforcing the bad in your world. Like weeds, it keeps the nutritious yet delicate fruits and vegetables from coming up.
Your mind is that way – a garden
It needs weeding and it needs to be fed the right material. Partners like the ones I just mentioned were both weeds and toxic food for my plants. They had to go.
I’ve had family members who simply were not seeing how they were hurting the rest of us and I gradually contacted them less and less. That was the best I could do there. But it helped.
And in a couple of cases, it was noticed and we addressed why I’d drifted away and these family members tightened up their act.
I’ve had friends whose self-destructive ways were killing me in a sideways fashion. These friends were still deep into the life I’d left behind and they were dying from it. I loved them but could not convince them to stop or change.
And watching them commit slow suicide was adversely affecting my calm. Any time they called, it hurt. And even though I loved them immensely, I cut them free. It was hard.
The same has been done to me, in reverse
For the same exact reasons. And it was justified.
In all of these cases, once the dust settled, I made leaps forward in my evolutionary process, both personal and business. You might want to give it a try if you’ve got some buzzkills in your world.
And you definitely want to give yourself a break, if it was the other way around. We all fuck up sometimes. Accept it. Learn from it. Move on.
The photographer of this post’s featured photo: Gary Chan
