You are Who You Hang Out With…

Have you ever heard this before?  I didn’t start hearing this until after I hired my Executive Coach, 12 years ago. The concept of hanging out with people and becoming more like them was a total foreign idea to me. I had really paid no attention until my coach and I started talking about it.  And it’s funny, once I started paying attention to it I got it and knew I had to make some changes in my life…

There were some very negative people in my life who were totally zapping my energy, (My coach called them “Negative Norberts.”) not too mention the ones who were more like time sucking vampires.  And I started noticing how I felt when I hung out with those people and realized after I was with them I didn’t feel good and felt mostly drained.  That’s when I started making the difficult change of moving those folks out of my life. It wasn’t easy to do it, and it took some time. For the most part I was simply honest and said I was making some positive changes in my life and they were welcome to come along or not.

Before I met my coach I was an incredibly negative person, I know hard to believe those of you who know… Yet it’s true.  I was surrounded by it 24/7 and I grew up in it. And it wasn’t until my amazing coach pointed this out oh so gently to me on more than a few occasions that I started to make some “positive” changes in my life.  It certainly wasn’t easy to change my attitude and my way of looking at things over night. Yet I have to say, the more I surrounded myself with amazingly wonderful and positive people, the easier it was for me.  Plus I also read a ton of books on the subject and that helped too.  Reading Napoleon Hill’s Think and Grow Rich was huge, along with all of Esther and Jerry Hick’s Abraham books.

Well that was a while back and thank goodness there have been many wonderful changes in my life since then.  And it wasn’t until after I started my own business 5 years ago and had to go out and find new clients, that this concept reared it’s ugly head again and again… “You are who you hang out with” kept
coming up.  So I focused on attracting clients who my same positive, successful attitude and it worked like a charm.

One of my favorite quotes that I was told many times and that truly helped me was—“If you hang out with 9 broke people, guess who will be the 10^th? — You!” And certainly I didn’t want that to me. So this totally helped me find and hang out with much more successful people. In fact, it’s always good to hang out with people who have a bigger vision and play bigger in their work and their life, this way it gets me to do the same as well.

The lesson in all of this is simply to pay attention and be aware of who you’re hanging out with. And know that that one or more people out there could have a huge impact on you and your life. So take a chance, make a change, and hang out with those folks who make you feel good and encourage you to be the best person you can be in this world.

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