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The Need for Positive Peer Pressure | Ep #35
60 Plays4 years ago
Jim Rohn famously said you are the sum of your five closest friends. Hopefully, you are choosing to surround yourself with individuals who are willing to challenge you at times by "positive peer pressure". Meaning, they are making you feel uncomfortable with your current norm and help you find personal growth within the discomfort.
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Host: JoshCearbaugh.com
Podcast: MultifacetedMasculinity.com
12 Week Course: Jumpstartyourlife.com
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Transcript
Improve Your Life in Three Minutes?
00:00:00
Speaker
Do you have three minutes? Then you have enough time to improve your day. Who knows, maybe even your life. And if you've got five minutes, then I ask that you pause and go ahead and leave a review. They mean the world to me. All right, without further ado, let's go ahead and dive into today's three minute thought.
Are You Just a Sum of Your Friends?
00:00:23
Speaker
Jim Rohn very famously said, show me your friends and I'll show you your future. Or maybe you've heard the phrase, you're the sum of your five closest friends. And what is the point of those phrases?
00:00:40
Speaker
I mean, first of all, let's dive into what I disagree with.
The Power of Personal Ownership
00:00:45
Speaker
And that is if you embrace that phrase, I'm the sum of my five closest friends, or it's all about the friends that are in your life that influence you.
00:00:55
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Really, that's taking away personal ownership of your own identity and your own decisions and your own guidance. It's basically saying, I am, in certain ways, a victim to my five closest friends. The only thing I can do is I can change my external circumstances. I can change my friends. I disagree with that. Really, what it is is you change your internal world.
Friends' Influence on Life Perspectives
00:01:19
Speaker
And there are relationships that can change with you and there are relationships that can't. And the ones that can't, it doesn't mean that the person is less than or bad. It's just that they did not pivot with you to grow into who you were meant to be. That said, I actually agree with the phrase of the five closest people in your life really do sum up who you are in the sense of
00:01:47
Speaker
they are normally the ones that influence your lens on life. I mean, if you think about it, it's those friends that you go to to process things, to open up to, to invite into the vulnerable moments, and they bring their life experiences to the table and contribute in the ways that they know how to and can. And so in their response to your process, basically helping you navigate your inner world,
00:02:15
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their experiences, their perspectives, you integrate them into your lens on life. And so in that sense, it does influence how you see life or who you become.
Evaluating Your Circle
00:02:26
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That's why it's important for you to take inventory of who those five people are. You need to take personal responsibility, but also take inventory of who are those five closest people. And I would challenge you to be willing to let
00:02:43
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one or two of those five people that are the closest, be willing to challenge you, to call you higher, to be willing to not be okay with your insecurity. And it's not a matter of de-validating your pain or your process. I'm talking about the fact that you need one or two people within your friends.
Growth Through Challenge
00:03:05
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that actually challenge you see i have friends who. They will sit with me metaphorically in my emotional process they are loving their empathetic their kind they're available just to let me verbal vomit every now and then and let out my frustration.
00:03:23
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But you know what, they're also there and are willing to give me a verbal slap every now and then or call me out on a tendency that I may have, whether it's gravitating towards being a victim or looking at the negative or different things that I personally can gravitate to. I actually need that loving slap, that positive peer pressure of being called higher
00:03:48
Speaker
into the person that i know that i'm supposed to be but sometimes i'm afraid to or i don't really want the discomfort that's required to step into that person so sometimes you need that love and that empathy and that camaraderie but sometimes you need to be stretched you need to be challenged
Story of Exceeding Limits
00:04:06
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Because when you're stretched and you're challenged, and that being the positive peer pressure, that's when you actually are able to accomplish more. Your bandwidth is able to increase. I mean, a great story that kind of represents this is
00:04:21
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Years ago, I was in a men's group and we had this contest where you grab a couple weights and you see how far you can go. I stood off to the side. I took my turn, but then I stood off to the side and I was watching and I said to this other guy, I said, watch. I'm going to sit here and I'm not going to say anything. I'm just going to watch other guys do it.
00:04:45
Speaker
see how it goes. And so that's exactly what we did. We watched, people went back and forth. I don't remember the exact numbers, but let's just say for argument's sake, the longest somebody could carry was to 50 feet. And then I looked over to my friend and I said, now watch this. And I went over and I went marine on them. I basically started getting right next to whoever it was that was carrying the weight and started cheering them on and was like, you can do it, you go farther, come on, come on, let's go.
00:05:15
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and just started going nuts. And basically what happened was the next five guys that went and they weren't substantially larger men or more athletic. It was just the next five guys. They broke the longest record.
00:05:30
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for the person that was before them out of all the guys that had gone. And my point is sometimes you need those friends as part of that five that you have in your life to actually call you out, to cheer you on, to make you uncomfortable, to metaphorically carry those weights longer than you had before.
Acceptance vs. Challenge in Friendships
00:05:51
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So ask yourself, who are your five closest friends?
00:05:54
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I mean, have you surrounded yourself with people who just accept you who you are, which there's value in that, but is that all they do? Do they just continue to accept you but never really challenge you? If so, it may be time for you to find individuals who are willing to accept you but also love you enough to call you higher and to be more of a man than you may feel like you can access in any given moment.