You have an important decision to make, and that involves what isn’t working and who isn’t working. Let’s start with what isn’t working. What strategies, tactics, methods and habits are not working, to make you wealthier, happier and healthier?
Be honest with yourself. What isn’t working? List them down. No one has to see what you’re listing, but you must list them down immediately. These are real easy to fix because all you need to do is use the power of decision making to move in a new direction.
You see, it doesn’t matter so much whether you make the ‘right’ decision all the time. It just matters that you make a decision to do something. In time, if you don’t get it right at first, and you don’t give up on your goal, then you will succeed. Until then, you will have valuable learning experiences that will turn you into a leader.
And that’s the real power behind making decisions all the time – it’s the leader you evolve into. Leaders are those people willing to make fast decisions, take risks and then adjust where they are headed by making more decisions if required.
Do they make mistakes – of course! Who doesn’t. But, they are driven by the desire to be the best they can be so failure is not an option.
The Power Of People In Your Life.
Now let’s talk about who isn’t working. This is a touchy subject as it involves looking at the people that you associate with most of the time. They have tremendous influence over the decisions you make and actions you take on a daily basis, whether you are aware of it or not.
There are 5 different types of people you have in your life:
- People who make the same mistakes over and over and over again.
- People who are negative
- People who care about nothing. These are the friends who when you ask, “Hey, what’s happening with you?” and they say, “Nothing,” all the time. There’s never anything going on with them. They don’t care either way. They’re living life by default, not by design.
- People who make you feel drained. Every time you talk to them, they just drain your energy.
- People who always try to manipulate your time.
The unfortunate part about all five of these types of people is that many times you can’t identify them immediately. That’s why it’s important that for 72 hours to 7 days, begin to write down your conversation.
The late, great Jim Rohn said that we’re the average of the 5 people we talk to the most. You’re going to be able to narrow down, from your work, community, personal life, who isn’t working.
After having a conversation with someone, make four columns on a piece of paper or on an Excel sheet with the following:
- Column one is going to be You’re going to have a brief moment where you write exactly what you were talking about. Not word for word, but enough to show you were paying attention to what was actually said.
- The second column is the amount of time you spent talking with this person.
- The third column, which is probably the most important column out of all of them is, how you felt after you had that conversation.
- The fourth column is their name, who you actually spoke to.
You want to begin to see who you’re talking to; how much time you’ve given them, which is the most important thing in the world that you have; and how you felt about the conversation. You will begin to immediately identify the wrong people in your life.
How do you get them out of your life? Very simple. Why is that vultures don’t fly in space? The answer to that is the environment is not conducive for them to do so. Well, you’re going to develop your own environment that’s not conducive for these 5 types of people to come into your life.
Once you’ve identified them, this is how you’re going to either change them or they will move on, keeping in mind that you can’t actually change a person, but you can change yourself and therefore have an influence on them, possibly changing them indirectly.
They’re either going to change like you’re changing, or they’re going to go away. Those are the choices. But you’re not going to be directly confrontational with them. You’re going to become busy. That’s all it is, busy. They can’t talk to you if they can’t reach you. They can’t email you if you keep taking your time to email them back.
Don’t dedicate your time to people who unfortunately don’t matter. If you have identified them as one of those people who are not helping you get where you need to go, who are not thinking in the right place, who doesn’t sound like the type of person you want to be around, why have them around? Why allow them to come into your life?
They might be nice people, but nice people you can talk to maybe once a month. Nice people, you can talk to every couple of months. I have some nice people I only talk to once a year. They’re nice people, but they have nothing going on that’s going to benefit me.
What I mean by benefit is people who are going to build you up and speak great things into your life. They don’t fit into any of these five types of people. They’re not draining you, they’re not manipulating your time, they’re not doing the same foolish things over and over again. They care about something. Every time you talk to them they don’t tell you there’s nothing going on. And they most certainly aren’t negative.
You have to begin to identify the people in your daily and weekly life, because that’s going to determine your mindset moving forward. We’ll talk more about mindset another time, but you have to begin to guard your mind, your body, your soul.
Become More Productive and Effective In Your Life.
By becoming more productive and effective in your life you literally won’t have time to try and drag around dead weight with you. In fact, it’s almost impossible to be as productive and effective as you can potentially be when there are people holding you back mentally, physically or emotionally.
The first time I applied this in my life was years ago when I discovered there was a friend who unfortunately continued to talk about themselves all the time. That’s the only conversation that they have that’s worth anything, just talking about themselves.
What I did is become busy. Why do I want to listen to someone talk about themselves 24/7? That’s not something I want to dedicate my life to, and I don’t think that’s something you want to dedicate your life to.
It’s not that you don’t want to listen to a friend. Keep in mind, we have those moments when we want to share those frustrations with our friends and vent, and yes, we listen to our friends’ lives, absolutely.
But this isn’t what I’m talking about. I’m talking about someone who is constantly and consistently having a “me fest,” and that’s not the type of person that you want to dedicate your time, as you move forward in your goals.
Who are you walking with? Who are you around? If you don’t make the decision to identify the problem, you’re going to have a hard time solving it. The second part of that is, if you don’t make the decision to take action on a daily and weekly basis to remove the problem, you’re going to have a harder time moving forward.
You have to clean your glass. That’s what this decision making process is about. You’ve got to get out of your life what isn’t supporting you to become more of who you are, whether it be strategies or people. Begin to identify the people who aren’t on your team.
They’re not necessarily hating on you, but they’re not on your team. They have a different agenda than yours, and you need to find like minds. Just on the internet alone, there are 3 billion people. I guarantee you there is somebody who will bring great things into your life, just as much as you will into theirs.
