Vote with your Feet.

Life is a series of storms; you are either going through a storm, leaving a storm or heading to the next storm. During the storms, people are going to show you their actual colours. Your so-called friends will become silent, your frenemies will gossip about your situation, and you will feel incredibly lonely. People come into our lives for a reason, a season and a lifetime. During the stormy seasons, few people will stick with you, most will disappear while others will come around to check if you are still stupid.

No matter what season of life you are in, always trust your path, your greatness and your purpose. Don’t engage anyone, situation or relationship that does not value you or your greatness. Vote with your legs by not going to anywhere you are not celebrated or encouraged. You are being called crazy all the time because the people you are hanging around don’t get it yet. Change the crowd you hang around, and those supposedly crazy goals will become routine. If you hang around professional athletes, saying you are going to run a sub-3-hour marathon does not feel out of the world, but if you hang around people aiming to run their first marathon, you will probably be seen as crazy.

Vote with your legs, change the crowd you hang around and take yourself to the next level. You have to do something different to do what you’ve never done. Greatness lies at the other end of fear. Do you want to learn a foreign language? Move in close proximity to where the language is spoken. Do you want to be financially free? Hang around economically independent people. Do you want to achieve your fitness goals? Hang around, fitness enthusiast. Do you want to quit on your goals? Change your strategies and join a mastermind group. As the saying goes “You are the sum total of the five people you hang around the most.” Watch where your legs are taking you, you are who you hang around.

In her 2012 University of Wisconsin Madison Commencement Speech ¹, Former CEO of Yahoo, Carol Bartz advised “ hang with the right people“:

OK. First, hang with the right people. That’s always been true, but it’s even more important in this open world of social networks. Networking was once considered a very self-conscious way to get ahead. It meant passing out business cards, but your social network is very, very important to you as you move through your career. A good network can take you down. A bad network can take you down. A good network can give you inspiration and ideas. So hang with the right people.

A bad network can take you down. A good network can give you inspiration and ideas. So hang with the right people.

In his book, Success Is a Choice: Make the Choices that Make You Successful ². Maxwell writes:

You will come in contact with a lot of people who can impact your efforts as you work on achieving your dreams—some in a negative way. Here are five types of people you are likely to encounter:

Refreshers—they inspire your dreams and energize your talents.
Refiners—they sharpen your ideas and clarify your vision.
Reflectors—they mirror your energy, neither adding nor subtracting from it.
Reducers—they try to reduce your vision and efforts to their comfort level.
Rejecters—they deny your talent, hinder your efforts, and impede your vision.

If you remain focused on results, you will stay grounded. The praise of others is less likely to go to your head, and the negative impact of people such as the reducers and rejecters will be minimized.

People come into your life for a reason, a season, and a lifetime.

Your Best Year Ever ³

The right peers serve as a support structure for our liberating truths. They help us retain our belief and commitment when we hit the messy middle. The main issue is the composition of the community and the beliefs it holds in common. If you surround yourself with scarcity thinkers, you’ll struggle to stay motivated in pursuit of your goals. If, on the other hand, you surround yourself with abundance thinkers, you’ll gain access to encouragement, emotional and material support, solutions, insights, and more. Ideas don’t just come out of the blue. They’re usually the product of conversations. When we’re around the right people, we make better, more useful connections between thoughts and generate fresh and innovative approaches to our challenges.

What Groups Work Best?

These peer groups can take different shapes and configurations depending on how intimate we desire them to be. Here are some examples of different groups that might work for you.”

Online communities.

Whatever your chosen goals, there are groups like this that can help you reach the finish line.

Running and exercise groups.

You can tap into an existing community by joining an exercise class or running club.

Masterminds.

These peer-to-peer coaching groups are a key way to learn best practices, get feedback on challenges, and hear how others have already crossed the hurdles you’re facing. These groups work best for sharing among people who are highly accomplished in their fields who feel comfortable sharing with others.

Coaching or mentoring circles.

Everyone needs a guide, preferably many. Mentors share their experience and maturity to counsel, inspire, and challenge us, whether in person or virtually.

Reading or study groups.

There is so much to learn about life, faith, family, and business that sometimes the best way is to get a group of people around a table and study a book on the topic together. The book gives the group a track to run on, and the right chemistry among the members can create conversations that go far beyond the book itself.

Accountability groups.

There are very formal accountability groups like AA or the Samson Society,15 but they can be more informal as well, like Scott and his friends. The idea here is that members are invited to speak into each other’s lives, usually around a predefined set of struggles, to encourage and challenge when needed.”

Close friendships.

Nothing replaces good friendships. Lewis and Tolkien’s relationship went on for years, and even when it was strained, it remained beneficial to both. Without Tolkien’s knowledge, Lewis even recommended The Lord of the Rings to the Nobel Committee for its coveted prize in literature. It didn’t win, but that“s the kind of belief Lewis held in his friend’s work.

Meditations

Daily Calm with Tamara Levitt – Reflection

Sometimes, people come into our lives and contribute by practicing loving kindness towards them. We can honour them and keep them close to our hearts.

“The moment you have in your heart this extra-ordinary thing called love and feel the depth, the delight, the ecstasy of it, you will discover that for you the world is transformed.”― J. Krishnamurthy

Daily Jay with Jay Shetty – Quit on a Good Day

Research has shown that you should try not to go to the market when you are hungry because it could lead you to buy more than you really want or need. If you are going to quit, try to do it on a good day, when the facts of the situation are clear.

Daily Trip with Jeff Warren – Passenger

As a passenger, you feel the spirit of being in-between, nowhere you used to be. But not yet arrived at a new place either. Meditation can give us a taste of that freedom. It is its own kind of in-between space.

Podcast