I'm Sam Wood, and this is your motivational moment for this week, and we are going to be removing negative people from your life. Now. I know that sounds harsh, but I'm also confident and comfortable saying that. I better. Soon as I said that, your mind went to a certain group of people or particular person that you know isn't good for you. They're a bad influence, they have very different values. They drag you down. You don't feel
good about yourself after spending time with this person. You know. One of the terms that I use is they're an energy vampire. You know, they sort of suck your energy or I don't know. You feel like their relationship with you is transactional to them. Don't actually care about your well being or you doing well. It's more about what they get out of the relationship rather than being a two way street. There's a myriad of different ways in
which people are not good for us. But I think we need to start by acknowledging, and you may have heard this before, we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. So I think if any of those things that I mentioned before, you are nodding along, going Yep, I absolutely have that person or that type of person in my life. And then you're also saying, oh, yeah, that person would actually be in one of the people I spend the most time with,
they would be in that top five. Then it makes complete sense that they are going to be doing you damage in some way, whether you feel that they're holding you back from happiness or achieving what you want to achieve, or they're emotionally draining on you, or whatever it might be. So I'm not saying we only look at the five perop we spend the most time with, but I think
that's a really important place to start. Then we look outside of perhaps the more obvious ones, and there might be people that until now you haven't even realized they're having this negative effect on you. The easiest way is to actually observe how you feel before you catch up with someone, and then again how you feel after we catch up with someone. Which sounds very simple, but how
often do we actually do this? Why if you are feeling like I don't want to spend time with this person, or you get anxious about it, or you're not looking forward to it, or you know it's going to put you in a bad mood or drain you or frustrate you, or there's going to be anxiety or anger or arguments. Do you continue to see these people? Or why are we not recognizing the emotions that they're creating or the behaviors that they're creating and doing anything about it. So
I think that's a really important place to start. Now. I said at the beginning, this sounds harsh, because sometimes the people that are impacting us negatively we are very close to. They might be a partner, a very close friend, and to sort of say cut these people out of your life can sound drastic. And I'm not suggesting that that is the only way to deal with these things. But reducing the time you are spending with these people, or changing the relationship you have with these people by
having some really hard, honest conversations has to happen. And I know that this isn't an easy thing to do. In fact, I'm not even suggesting you do anything ration rush out and make wholesale changes tomorrow. You're going to observe behavior over a month to really identify how and who are impacting you. But I think it's really important that you acknowledge that it's happening, and then it's really
important that you accept that it's going to be hard. Now, one of my favorite sayings is hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. I'll say that again, hard choices, easy life, easy choices, hard life. Often do we avoid the tough conversations, the confrontation, the uncomfortableness, the awkwardness, and
things just get worse. You're just not prepared to have that tough situation, and therefore you have months, sometimes years, sometimes decades of pain that could have been avoided if you were prepared to have that hard situation or face that hard situation. So before you start just chopping people out of your life, have those hard conversations. Life is short,
we don't have much free time. We need to value our happiness more highly and protect it more strongly, and to reduce the time that we spend with certain people or cut that time out all together is a really really powerful way sometimes of taking back control of our own happiness and our own strength. So this is not one of those listener tasks that is black and white.
You have to spend I believe probably a month evaluating, and then you need to identify who in your life brings that to you in spades, and who in your life perhaps creates the opposite, and you need to do something about it. And it's really really, really hard, but I promise you this your first reaction, I swear to you will be God. That was hard. God, that was uncomfortable. But I wish I did this a long Tomica sh