[New Year, New You] Day 15: How to Pick Your Friends
We can count on the fact that sun will come up over the horizon in the morning, and that gravity will pull most objects to the earth. This offers a certain sense of comfort in its stability and predictability for us–something we can count on and rely on to just work. But when it comes to people and being able to accurately predict their behaviour enough that we are able choose friends and partners who will stick by us when the going gets tough, sometimes it feels like a bad game of Russian roulette.
One of the most challenging obstacles we have to overcome in life is the fact that we have been given very few tools to understand or navigate the wildly unpredictable, surprisingly volatile, hotbed of human emotion–our relationships with other people. While we’re all built very much the same mechanically speaking, we don’t all have the same amount of spiritual “fuel” in our “livingness tank and so we’re all going to face obstacles and challenges in life with varying degrees of persistence, courage and certainty. One of the biggest frustrations in relationships comes from the disappointment of realizing that other people do not respond to circumstances or situations as we might have hoped. Maybe our kids aren’t as productive or honest as we expect, our spouses may not be as attentive to our needs as we want, maybe there’s a friend who doesn’t take as much responsibility for her mistakes as you think she should.
What if you could predict, with the help of a few little tricks, exactly how your friends, children, spouse, coworkers and even employers would behave, and use that information to pick winners every time? This blog post will help!
You Are a Like An Antenna
When I tried to explain to my kids why things like personal integrity and values are more important than the material possessions in life, I told them, “You are like an antenna… an antenna that puts out a frequency based upon what you decide you are committed to being, doing and having in life. And the quality of the people you meet, the experiences you have and even your personal belongings, will all be determined to a very large degree by the frequency you put out into the world. I explain it a little better on the podcast here.
The more you are being true to yourself and your goals, the more you’ll be doing the things it honestly takes to reach those goals, the more you’ll be having the things you most want and feel good about in life.
So why can’t everyone just get on the work hard and stay happy bandwagon and make their lives amazing? There is a reason:
Life can dish out some uncomfortable experiences and these can knock a person down, reduce the amount of “fuel” in the spiritual tank they have to face life’s challenges and obstacles with. Any situation where you felt your goals, ideas, beliefs or your character (your unique way of being) came under attack could have contributed to lowering the amount of fuel in your tank. If you often found yourself in situations where you didn’t know how to be yourself, or you didn’t feel you could stay true to your dreams and goals without receiving a great deal of criticism or encountering big difficulties from someone else around you would have been like a big, fat leak in your energetic boat!
“Know your enemy and know yourself and
you can fight a hundred battles without disaster.
-Sun Tzu
Your Livingness Tank Tells a Lot About You
For a long time working with clients, I’ve known the only thing I need to do to create a significant and powerful improvement in your life, is help you take up more space as a person. If I can increase your willingness to BE yourself, then I KNOW with 100% certainty that you will be able to do and have the things you want. Your be, do, and have all hum to the same frequency. The less you feel you can be, the less you’ll do, the less you’ll have in life.
Now, if this is true working in from out, it’s also true working from out, in–if it’s true who you’re being determines what you’re doing and having, then we should be able to look at what people are having and doing in order to determine who they are being in life and where they are really at! When it comes to picking friends, partners and even business associates, it is much more important to look at what people DO and how they manage the things they have, than it is to accept flowery speeches, convincing promises, or the zing of tingly feelings you get when you meet them!
What A Full Tank Feels Like
People who have “full tanks” feel like they control and influence life much more than life controls them. Here, no matter what the obstacle is, people are willing to jump over any barrier, overcome any hurdle to make life go right. People with full tanks tend to see the best in others and assume everyone is “good” and just needs a little boost of encouragement to get on track.
Full tank people have a great deal of courage, confidence and productivity. They will be able to make decisions and act upon them swiftly. The have a lot of understanding about life and a lot of confidence that everything will turn out great, so when they look out at others, at their environment, animals, children, etc. they feel a tremendous amount of admiration and warm fuzzy feelings.
They’re not robots of cheerfulness, but cry bleeding heart tears when they lose a loved one, and burst with enthusiasm without considering what others think or feeling like they’re not being “appropriate.” They’re alive and able to express and experience their emotions with ease.
If they get angry, they will likely try to express and communicate it in a way that causes the least amount of harm to other people. They will seek understanding and use emotions like enthusiasm to motivate people creatively. Their dreams and ideas and creativity are important, and they will respect and value those things in others as well.
This person’s body is very healthy and strong and capable. They’re capable of a great amount of action and sport and movement, because stress doesn’t get a hold on this kind of person very easily. With confidence about life, and certainty about themselves and their ability to handle obstacles, they laugh in the face of adversity and rise to the occasion.
This person is trustworthy and keeps their agreements. Relationships are important to them, trust matters. If someone is counting on them, they will show up. They value and invest in their relationships with friends. They’re surrounded by other people who are trying to improve life as well, and when this person is around, things improve. Life gets better. People smile more and good things happen.
Their level of interest will be very high. They will be very capable of understanding many points of view, and able to experience many different kinds of situations and emotions. They have a high level of courage, communication and ability to confront. When this person talks to you, you KNOW you have all of their attention and can feel them fully present.
If you catch one of these tigers, grab onto them and keep them as a friend!! 🙂
How to Pick Your Friends
You can tell a lot about a person by the choices they make in communication, control, personal belongings, relationships with others and their general outlook on life! You can see that a person’s communication, productivity, ability to control and handle situations in life, as well as their general emotional outlook on life, and how they treat and respond to others are just some of the great indicators of how a person is doing.
Since we know people with full tanks feel they are controlling life more than life is controlling them, you’ll see people able to maintain order in their environments and keep their personal belongings in good repair. People who are starting to feel life controls them will allow clutter and junk and incomplete projects to accumulate over time. This just further contributes to a sense of overwhelm and fatigue!
One of the biggest reasons decluttering is so beneficial, is because of how it helps a person get into communication directly with all the things they’ve been putting off, or have been indecisive about. It can be a HUGE confidence and productivity booster just to take on the purging and cleaning and decluttering of your personal space, or home!!
The more communication, courage, productivity, and even personal belongings seem to be falling out of control for a person, the more likely it is that life is controlling them more than they are controlling life.
Pay Attention to Intention
Take a moment to scan the news headlines and think about these headlines as you would the stories, information and comments you might receive from a “friend” in the street, or someone in your environment. Just having scanned the headlines for today’s news, I would say that the most common emotions I saw were; hate, anger, fear, worry, grief, anxiety, disgust. Just think of how listening constantly to that kind of information could drag a person down!
When you consider the quality of friends and company you keep, pay attention to the emotional level of their conversation! What is their intention when they communicate? When you listen to news, comments from others, etc. what kinds of emotions are trying to be promoted? Are they words of encouragement, motivation, or worry, fear, doubt? Are people’s words intended to undermine or invalidate your feelings, thoughts? Ideas?
Sometimes wolves do come in sheep’s clothing, and people can say things that are quite mean and degrading while pretending it’s “in your best interests.” You need to pay attention to how you feel in the person’s presence. Do you want to take up more space, or feel yourself shrinking back? Do you know what their intentions are in communicating? If not, how can you find out?
When observing the communication of others, pay attention to people’s intentions. What are they trying to make happen? What effect are they looking to create? If you’re ever in doubt, you can always ask! 😉 Are they victimizing themselves? Blaming other people? Worried? Fearful? Hopeful and optimistic?
If you were to constantly expose yourself to threatening communication, from a friend or family member, you could easily and regularly start to see the world with those points of view. The more you listen to headlines, the more likely you’ll feel more worried when you walked down the street. You’ll have more fear of accidents, theft, injuries, sexual abuse and violence. You’ll feel and be more mistrustful of others, just because of how much the information you’ve been receiving and how that could easily influence your point of view.
Three Tips to Choose Your Teammates for Life
When you become more able to see and accurately assess where people are at–how much life they have in their tank, and their honest intentions and objectives, then you will rapidly and significantly improve your ability to help others, understand many different kinds of people, and get along with them better, too.
Probably the single most important variables in determining with whom you should keep company are;
1.) a clear understanding of the person’s honest intentions and objectives,
2.) observation of their willingness to do what is required to take action and improve situations when under pressure,
3.) the amount of available time you have to commit to any particular relationship.
If the person has intentions and objectives to help, and says they do want to make life go better, is unwilling to work toward making that happen, then you need to be paying enough attention to see it. Some people talk the talk and never walk the walk. But if their talk is good, they can keep you invested and convinced for years.
Here are a few questions you can ask as part of your observations:
Control Over Environment: Do they keep good order and control of their belongings. Do they seem to always be losing things? Have they let clutter overtake them? Do they settle for broken, busted and falling apart stuff? Or they choose well and take care of what they get?
Communication: What kind of news do they pass on? What kind of emotion do they use to get other people to do things? (Inspiration, reason, threats and punishment, or manipulative trickery?) Can their communication be counted upon to be trustworthy and honest?
Productivity: Does the person contribute significantly? Does the person look busy but not get much done? Does the person appear lost, confused and unproductive?
Contribution (how much they are perceived as valuable by others around them): How valuable to others feel they are compared to what they say? What’s their actual contribution to others? To society?
You need to be able to listen to what people say, as much as be able to observe what they actually do, in order to get the full picture of who they’re really deciding to BE, and whether or not that companion is a good fit for your personal team of butt-kickers in life.
pssst… How Do They Behave Behind Closed Doors?
I talked about “social veneer” as this sticky, thick layer of socially acceptable “BS” people wear on the surface. Often people will act like they have much more energy in their tank when others are watching, but when doors close and backs are turned, you’re more likely to get a real look at where the person is at. This often happens in dating when everyone is on their best behaviour at the beginning of the relationship, then, when the pressure is on, people’s real emotional level comes out!
Tomorrow I’m going to take this conversation deeper and talk about how to spot who is really not on your side. Knowing these tricks could have prevented a lot of broken families, broken businesses and broken hearts! Stay tuned and thanks again for being here!!
Remember to check out the podcast for the rest of the story!