We are surrounded by people who have a huge influence on your success or failure with your goals. If you don’t know your promoters and detractors, you may let the wrong person into your inner circle. Then they sabotage your journey and help you fail.
Want an easy tool to help you build your inner circle? Try this one borrowed from the world of customer loyalty and marketing. Learn more in this week’s Goal Success by Choice.
Amuse Bouche
Before we get to today’s post, I offer you this light “amuse-bouche” to entertain your mind before we get down to business. Like any other amuse-bouche, you may hate my “dad joke,” but it is worth every penny that you paid for it, right?
A family of moles had been hibernating all winter. One beautiful spring morning, they woke up. The father mole stuck his head out of the hole and looked around. “Mother Mole!” He called back down the hole. “Come up here! I smell honey, fresh made honey!” The mother mole ran up and squeezed in next to him. “That’s not honey, that’s maple syrup! I smell maple syrup!” The baby mole, still down in the hole and blocked by his parents, was sulking. “I can’t smell anything down here but molasses….”
Goal Success by Choice
Do you have dreams that you are trying to make come true? Do you have a goal that you are trying to crush? Success doesn’t happen by chance. Success is a series of choices that can make you unstoppable. Goal Success by Choice helps you make these choices to move you closer to your goals.
Are you ready to help build a world where no goal dies of loneliness?
Are people delighted by your success or helping you fail?
Choose to focus your time, energy and conversation around people who inspire you, support you and help you to grow you into your happiest, strongest, wisest self.
Karen Salmansohn
My Goal Success by Choice blog series is dedicated to exploring the choices that help you achieve your most important life goals. But, what about the elephant in the room as I share these tips and tools? You aren’t on this journey alone. You aren’t the only person who influences your ultimate success.
As I explained in my Operation Melt book, “unless you live alone on the side of a mountain, you spend your days surrounded by people. Some are people you know, and they are your family, friends and colleagues. Others are people you kind of know, like the waiters and bartenders and baristas at your favorite haunts. Then there are people you don’t know at all who are just strangers on the streets — the extras in the film of your life. “
Every person you interact with can significantly impact your success or failure. So, you must know whether you can trust each person to have a positive impact or whether you should be a bit more skeptical.
Real-Life People, Real-Life Impacts
I know a person, let’s call her Cindy, who is actively working through a weight loss journey. Cindy is dealing with a number of factors that complicate her journey and might lead the average person to quit. But, Cindy is anything but average, and she is staying committed. Cindy makes positive choices every day and takes her nutrition, exercise and other health-related factors seriously. Her dedication remains unwavering even when the scale doesn’t report positive results – these results aren’t because Cindy isn’t doing the right things.
How does Cindy stay so dedicated to her goal? Cindy’s husband, John, is a tireless supporter through every step of her journey. He consistently cheers her on, helps her brainstorm alternatives, and even built her a gym inside their home. Cindy’s journey would be far more difficult if John wasn’t so supportive, and she might have given up. Fortunately, this isn’t something Cindy has to worry about because John is her biggest cheerleader.
I experienced similar levels of support during my weight loss journey from my wife, Liz. In fact, through every goal I have set in my adult life, Liz has always been there and been a huge advocate. She does this even when it is inconvenient for her. Without Liz, who knows where I would be in my life. I am very fortunate to have a supporter like her.
While there are many stories I could share about experiences with positive, supportive people, this isn’t always the case. Through my weight loss (and other quests to achieve goals in my life), I have encountered many people who are far more negative and less supportive.
- I once had an employee who I trusted and considered a friend. Despite our alleged friendship, she said that she thought my weight loss was too big a focus, and I should be focused on getting her a promotion instead. She essentially believed that this had to be an either/or situation, a false dichotomy. Then, once I left the job, she went silent and completely cut off our relationship.
- I had an experience with someone I knew socially and, again, considered her a friend. Then, after my weight loss, instead of being supportive, she told me that she liked me bigger and that it was a mistake.
- I also had countless experiences with people who tried to be supportive but inadvertently said things that really made me grimace.
Everybody who sees or knows about your goals will have an opinion. Your hope is that most of those people will be supportive and make your journey easier. But, there are also people who will be unsupportive. Some may even try to derail your success because they feel threatened or jealous.
The people you choose to allow inside your circle of trust is an important decision. It could mean the difference between success or failure with your most important goals. Like so many other areas of your life, your autopilot needs to be switched off. You’ll need to choose discipline over default (see Discipline Not Default).
Who Is In Your Circle
Why is it so important that we carefully choose the people in our circle of trust? These people tend to shape who we are. They have a phenomenal impact on our behaviors, ambitions, beliefs, and success or failure.
Jim Rohn, a well-known motivational speaker and coach, is famously quoted as saying, “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.” This means you are, quite literally, the company that you keep.
It is easy to dismiss this concept as a function of peer pressure. I know: we have all been dealing with that since we were kids and have learned to get over it, right? Well, I disagree. First, most of us have not actually learned to get past peer pressure. Our whole lives are races to keep up appearances and fit into our peer group or the group we wished were our peers. But, we will put a pin in that soapbox for another day.
The impact of the people around you is more than peer pressure; your brain is wired to be like those people.
Quick tangent, this is like my fourth or fifth blog post this year in which I shared neuroscience details with you. I am not sure how I became the brain science dude. I just find it fascinating that so much of our behavior is biology. I find it even more fascinating that we can actually change our brain’s programming through deliberate, disciplined choices.
Ok, back to our brains. Neuroscientists have discovered that, amongst the mass of neurons in our brains, there is a particular type called mirror neurons. These neurons fire as we observe actions performed by other people. These neurons then lead us to subconsciously engage in the same kinds of actions. This is the science that is at the heart of why yawning seems contagious. This is also why emotions seem contagious.
Mirror neurons are so powerful that they can result if physical changes in our bodies. In one study, participants were shown videos of a hand placed in visibly cold or visibly warm water. The study found that the observers experienced physical changes in body temperature just from watching. When the video showed a hand placed in cold water, the observers’ skin temperature dropped in their hands.
Our mirror neurons’ job is to read the room and make sure we fit in. This means that the people in the room need to be chosen carefully, especially those we trust or interact with frequently.
If you surround yourself with people who have can-do attitudes, chase their own goals, and achieve success, you will likely mirror that behavior.
But, what if you surround yourself with fixed mindset people who believe that life is happening to them, are negative and lack goals or ambition. You guessed it, you will begin to mirror their behaviors and likely get the same results.
Have I convinced you that the people around you matter? Are you already thinking about times that the people in your circle have lifted you up or held you back? Are you starting to evaluate the people in your circle today? Good! Let me share a tool that can help.
The Ultimate Question
It is important to evaluate who is in your inner circle because these people will impact your success. Take a critical look at the people in your life and bucket them into three categories:
- People you trust and know will help you unlock your full potential – your inner circle candidates.
- People who are neutral to you, but you want to keep them in your extended circle of friends because you love or enjoy them, and you know you are important to them.
- People who are more dangerous to your goals and are active or passive saboteurs on your path to the life of your dreams. With this group, you will want to carefully manage how frequently and closely you interact with them. Keep your guard up.
As you evaluate the people in your life, you will need a tool to help you. To simplify this, I would recommend a single question inspired by Fred Reichheld’s book The Ultimate Question.
After years of research, Fred Reichheld and his team discovered that a single question can be used to predict customer loyalty and profitability for a company. Essentially, this question is a predictor of whether a customer is a promoter of a company and will do their marketing for free. You have likely been asked this question by many companies over the years.
The question is: how likely is it that you would recommend [company or service] to a friend or colleague? 0 being not at all likely and 10 being extremely likely.
The result of this question will categorize customers into one of three buckets:
- Detractors: Responses of 0-6 are customers who are unhappy on some level and will speak negatively about the brand / company / product.
- Passives: Responses of 7-8 are customers who are fairly indifferent and will neither promote nor degrade the brand / company / product.
- Promoters: Responses of 9-10 are customers who are highly satisfied and will enthusiastically promote the brand / company / product throughout their circle of influence.
As you conduct your mental survey of the people in your life, you can use a similar question.
Your ultimate question: how likely is it that the impact of having this person in my inner circle will help me become the person I want to be?
The people in your nine and above category will be your promoters and candidates for your inner circle. Your zeroes through sixes are the ones who may represent danger to your goals. Everybody in the middle is neutral and will neither likely help you reach your goals nor will they be of any harm along the way.
Once you have this information, you can start spending more time and giving more trust to your promoters. You can work to move neutral people to promoters over time; maybe they just don’t know your why. You can also work to contain the influence of your detractors.
Caution: make sure to use this tool for good and not evil.
No matter what category an individual falls into, they are still human beings. They are still worthy of your respect, empathy, and support as they go through their journey in life. This tool is not intended to be used to start viewing every person in your life as a tool to get what you want. The goal of this tool is for you to know where each person sits in relation to your goals.
You don’t know where you fit into somebody else’s ultimate question, so it is best to work to be a promoter for them.
So What?
Despite the many tools, techniques and strategies available to help you achieve your goals, you aren’t the only one who influences your results. We are all surrounded by other people. Each one of them moves you closer to the life of your dreams or may sabotage your journey (intentionally or inadvertently). Being aware of the influence of others is essential because we mirror the people around us (hint: some of it is your biology, not your behaviors). We can borrow a simple tool from the marketing world to help us decide which people to allow into our inner circle and who we need to keep at arm’s length.
Do you need a partner who you can be sure is a promoter to help with your goal? I am a professional 10 for you!
Click Here to learn more about my Operation Melt coaching services.
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