Are Your Associations or Relationships Serving You?

Choose the people you associate with carefully as they are great contributors to your success. If you associate with or surround yourself with the wrong people, they will negatively impact your life and business, as they slowly, almost unnoticed, nudge you just a little off course every day. Until you wake one day, far down the wrong road wondering how you landed up so far off course and how things managed to go so wrong.

Action Idea: Take a really hard look at your environment and evaluate everyone, who you spend time around that has or may have some form of influence over you. Explore how all these associations are affecting you what have they got you doing, listening to, reading, thinking and most importantly how do these associations make me feel? Be brutally honest with yourself, as you make up your list of associations, careful detail the type of influence they have over you.

Are your Associations Positive or Negative
There are two main criterion, to use when evaluating all your associations or relationships. Firstly are the associations or relationships positive, do they make you feel good and contribute to your success. It is obviously very beneficial to promote these relationships and associations and you should work to spend more time around these people, as they will have a positive influence on you. Secondly, look at any negative relationships or associations, are they negative, draining and do they sap your passion and drive. You clearly want to limit these associations as far as possible and even eliminate these people from your life completely.

We Mirror the Behaviour of the People Around us
We have mirror Neurons in our Brains that mirror the behaviour of the people around us, so whether you believe it or not, both groups of people exert influence over you. The best example of this is shown when one person in a room yawns and within minutes everyone in the room has had an unconscious urge to yawn and has yawned themselves.

One group will contribute to your growth and take you where you want to go. Whilst the other group will creep into your life, like a thief in the night and slowly over time rob you of your energy, passion, drive, discipline, potential and success. It is a no-brainer for me and should be obvious to you that one of these two associations will help you to go in the direction you want to go and the other one will gradually creep in and rob your potential. So stop wasting your time on people that are like vampires that drain your life blood and energy and begin to invest your most valuable asset, your time, with only people that matter.

Post Audit Clean-up
After you have carried out your personal people audit and decided, which associations and relationships are positive and contribute to your success and which don’t. You only have three choices available, so that you can gain the maximum benefit from all your positive associations and reduce the effect your negative associations have on your life.

Disassociate – Completely eliminate those draining and dream killing people from your life. This is obviously not a decision you should take lightly, but I believe it is a really crucial and often very difficult decision to make. This very tough decision will eliminate a huge drain on your potential and help you realize the quality of life you desire.

Limited Association – If you are unable to completely dissociate from certain people and eliminate your associations with them completely. Due to family ties or work associations, etc. then it is imperative that you limit the amount of contact you have with these people. We have so little time at our disposal; invest your most valuable asset very wisely. Invest major time into associations that will assist you and minor time into relationships that could hurt you.

Expand Your Associations – As this is the area where you are going to leverage the most benefit, it is obviously the place where you should focus your energy. Identify people that you believe you can have a mutually beneficially relationship with and who you feel you can add value to and who in return will add real and lasting value to you and your business. These are called associations, which you develop on purpose and should be a conscious part of your success strategy.

When you invest time around these people you expand your circle of influence and by default you reduce the amount of time you waste with the wrong people. This is not an easy exercise to carry out, but it is most certainly a very worthwhile one. If you are trapped in a cycle of unacceptable results and you seem to have reached a ceiling on your success journey, carrying out this audit and consciously choosing your associations going forward, may very well be the catalysts you are searching for, to take you to the next level.