5 Tips to Surround Yourself with Success Models
image source:dbking
Surrounding yourself with the success models will automatically steer your life and your efforts toward success. A success model is someone who either has achieved a goal you are working towards or can guide you in the path towards achieving it. On the other hand surrounding yourself with the wrong crowd will make it much harder for you to succeed. Whenever you spend a lot of time around a person, you naturally become more like them whether they are a good or a bad influence. Here are tips on how to surround yourself with success models.
- Get a clear idea of your goals and personal valuesWithout having clear specific goals, and personal values there is no way to tell if you are surrounding yourself with success models or failure models. There is a difference between a goal and a personal value. A goal is a futuristic want you are working towards achieving. A good example of a goal is wanting to lose weight. A personal value, is a preference, a trait or characteristic you like that you can start implementing right away. Some of my persona values are positivity, optimism, randomness, humor and open-mindedness. Once you have goals and personal values you can start evaluating whether a friend is a success model or not.
- Spend less time with the wrong crowdYou will start realizing that some of your close friends or maybe even relatives aren’t a really good influence on you. Maybe they don’t believe that achieving your goals is possible and tend to always put you down when you bring them up. Or maybe their personal values don’t align with yours. Whatever the case is, just try to spend less time with them. Also when spending time with them, make sure you are steering the direction of the conversation. For example if they bring up a negative subject, just switch the conversation by starting to talk about something positive. Get them talking about things they like or love so that you can experience their positive side.
- Build your social skills
In order to have more choice in the quality of friends and relationships you create you must have good social skills. When I was younger I had bad social skills, and was great full for any friends I made whether they were good or bad. As I started working on my social skills I started having a lot more choice in the friendships I make. A quick tip to improve your social skills is to simply introduce yourself to strangers when you’re out. I usually just say “Hey, I’m Andrew, Whats your name?”. It’s a natural reaction for a stranger to introduce him/her self back. Just carry on the conversation from there. You might be really nervous trying this out at first, but just do it at least 10 times, and it will start becoming easier. I will be discussing social skills in future posts, however this tip I gave you will help you get started. - Get involved in workshops and social groups related to your goalsIf you want to lose weight, you should join weight loss support groups or go to group fitness classes at your gym. This will help you come into contact with others who are working towards your goal of losing weight or staying fit. It will certainly also increase your chances of making friends with similar goals. As you spend more time with those new friends you will automatically move closer and closer towards your weight loss goal. For example if you were to go out to eat with one of those new friends they will tend to order healthier foods. This will encourage you to also order healthy foods or menu choices also. I just used weight loss as an example goal, however this strategy works with any other goal.
- Offer value to your success modelsOnce you have made friends who are success models make sure you are offering them value. Don’t just become a vacuum that only sucks value from them. Otherwise you will notice the relationships will deteriorate and they will be trying to avoid you. You just need to ask what is valuable to my new friend? Maybe there is a skill they are trying to learn that you can teach them or help them in learning. Maybe you can introduce them to other cool people. Maybe you can invite them to fun events and parties that you go to.