Surround Yourself Well - Day Eight

"Surround yourself with successful people then you will have no choice but to be successful. If you hang around with unsuccessful people than you will find it very hard, if not impossible, to be successful."

-Dave Chase

Positive people can help you reach your goals. You already have all the motivation you need. You need to learn how to tap into it.

Building on yesterday's post, something that goes hand-in-hand with ‘rule of five’ is the idea that you get what you focus on. An extremely successful friend of mine, Jody, uses this strategy. Every morning, she wakes up a few minutes early and spends 15 minutes thinking about her goals. Then, she goes to work on her ‘five things’ for the day after she's focused on her goals. She is a good example of how useful focusing and the action-oriented ‘rule of five’ can be. Ruthless execution of both habits (focus coupled with action) has led her to be the owner of a multi-million dollar art and greeting card company. If you spend just a few minutes each day focusing on, or reminding yourself about your goals, you help keep them alive in your mind. This makes achieving your goals more likely. You tend to get what you focus on! So, why not focus on your positive future?

Another good way to keep your business aspirations at the forefront of your mind is to surround yourself with other goal-oriented, positive people. Hang-out with people who mirror your goals and the values you hold for yourself. Nothing will kill your dreams faster than being around people who constantly tell you that: ‘You can’t do it!’ So get around positive people with healthy, ‘goal-happy’ attitudes. Ideally, you'll want to surround yourself with people that augment your weaker points, who absolutely stun you with their strength in certain areas and wow you with their talent every time you're around them.

Human tendency is to mirror the kinds of people we spend our time with. I actively try to spend my time with highly motivated business people. Every year, I look around my community and am excited by the talent within it. If there's someone I particularly want to meet, I 'six-degrees-of-separation' them until I make contact. I found one of my best business friends this way. He's a successful businessperson who is well insulated (meaning, cold calling doesn't work, sending cards didn't work, and short of stalking him, he was unreachable). It took me nearly three years of using every contact I had to try and meet him. But that effort eventually paid off. Now, he is one of my advisors and one of the people who encourages my business dreams. Whenever I’m having a bad day, I can call on him or any one of my highly goal-oriented friends to receive encouragement. Friends like this give you good, goal-driven energy.

While goal-setting for your business is partly about identifying what you want, why you want it, and how you’ll go about getting it, it is also very much about keeping those goals alive by breaking them down into manageable pieces, and surrounding yourself with people who encourage you to achieve them. It’s easy to set goals! You can get started on them right away. And you don’t have to know millionaires or billionaires. Simply look around you – there are positive ‘goal-happy’ people everywhere. Look for them in your surroundings. Then, as each goal-setting time of year comes around, and more and more of your goals have been achieved, your company’s shape and mold will grow stronger and stronger.

Your homework for today is to make a list of five people in your town that you respect, admire and want to learn from. This will be your list to work off of for the rest of the year as you start to build either a Mastermind Group or a close group of positive business friends who can help inspire you to your highest success. Ideally, down the road, these same five people will turn into your unofficial Board of Directors or Advisory Board.

Don’t forget to check back tomorrow for the final part of this series.