"Surround yourself with people who lift you higher.”

When you ask someone “what’s the most important thing in your life?”, their response is often the people they care about.  We as humans are social creatures, and we require positive social interactions and meaningful relationships to thrive. 

We don’t choose everyone that’s in our lives. Our parents, siblings and family are given to us at birth (and aligning our relationship with them so that it serves us is an entirely different conversation for another time). Today I want to talk about the people that are in our lives based on the choices we make.

When we choose where we work, we inherit the culture and team that we collaborate with. When we go to fitness classes or join hobby groups, we’re surrounded by other people who’ve decided to be a part of it as well. These are non-permanent tent poles in our lives that hold up our day to day environments.

Today I want you to take a moment to think about how the people in the settings are serving you. Do they inspire you, or add gossip and drama to your life? Do you enjoy time with them, or do you try to avoid them and co-exist alongside them?

If you want to be the very best version of yourself, you need to “surround yourself with people who lift you higher”.

There are two different approaches to this. The first is more radical. Change your environment! Get a new job, go to a new gym, and do different things that put you in different places. Especially if there’s an overwhelming toxicity in your life, the best thing you can do is bear the short-term uncertainty of change to find a new more empowering environment.

The second approach is more subtle. You can be more intentional with the way you integrate into your current environment. Find that person at work who you look up to and make an effort to grow closer to them. Ask the healthiest person in your fitness class out to lunch and witness their habits. 

When you spend more time with positive, established, inspiring people, their choices will be contagious and affect yours. You better believe that you’re not going to catch yourself making excuses to a fast-paced colleague who does it all, or order fries as a side at lunch when your workout partner is getting salad.

In the book “The Compound Effect” author Darren Hardy describes the way you relate with people as either limited associations or expanded associations. Choose to limit your exposure to people who drain you, or cause you to not be the person you want to be. This is creating a limited association. Then choose to make more time for the people who are a good influence on you, and invest more in them so that their influence supports you. This is an expanded association.

To wrap this up and make it tangible, let’s create some personal awareness. Who is one person that is in your life that you’d probably benefit from spending less time with them, and one person that you’d love to have more time and correspondence with?

If you feel like you’re leaving potential on the table and not achieving the levels of personal health, success, productivity, and contribution you’re capable of… And you know that more consistency and structure is your ticket to reaching your goals… Then this is for you! 

In 5 minutes a day for 21 days you can install the ⁠Super Habits System⁠ to become ridiculously consistent, take your daily output to elite levels, and live a life that other people have a hard time keeping up with!