Those who you associate with the most in your life will either help you in becoming successful or play a part in your failures. Who do you associate with the most?

Are you a part of any teams right now in your place of work? Those on your team will not all be your friends, but they will reveal whether you are a team player or not.

You will also see if you’re heading in the right direction in your life or not, by how your team performs and behaves. Who you are will be revealed by who your friends are, and who you hang out with the most.

1. Difference Makers or Trouble Makers

Do the people you hang out with the most inspire you to make a difference, or are they troublemakers? Everyone will see who you hang out with, and they will know what kind of people they are.

So, they will determine from this what kind person you are. Who do you think the best type of people to hang out with are?

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Leadership is influence and influence is leadership. There are laws to influence, and one of those laws is “who you are is who you attract.” There is no getting away from it and there is no disguising who you really are. The difference makers and the troublemakers do not share the same values.

So, people who want to make a positive difference in their life and the lives of others do not want to hang out with troublemakers, and the troublemakers don’t want to hang out with the difference makers.

If you are thinking right now that you want to make a change in yourself and help others to make a change, then you must change what you value.

When you have changed your values and you want to start making that change, then you will first need to prove this to yourself and to those you want to help. You will not be measured on what you say about making a change, but on the action, you take to implement the change.

I do my best to hang out with people who want to help make a difference in their own lives, but mostly in the lives of others. They want to deliberately work on themselves every day to improve their personal growth and development.

They also want to help others to work on themselves and improve their personal growth too. You will become the average of the five people you hang out with the most. So, who do you hang out with the most and what differences are they making, and helping you make?

2. The Five People We Hang out With

Learning that you will become the average of the five people you hang out with the most might surprise you.

The five people we hang out with the most will not determine what we do or how we behave because everybody has the freedom to decide how we react and respond to things that happen in our lives.

But, think about it, we believe the same things, we think very similar, we do what they do, we eat what they eat, we drink what they drink, we dress how they dress, we act like they act, and we talk like they talk.

The decisions we make in our lives are our own, but they can be very heavily influenced by the five people we hang out with the most.

If we hang out with the wrong people and they influence us to make the wrong decisions, that will have a very negative impact on our future.

When I started my career, I was starting to hang out more with the manipulators and the troublemakers, I was easy to manipulate by them. So, my behaviour started to change to be more like them.

But, later in my career I decided to stop hanging out with people like that, and wanted to hang out with people who would help me to help myself and others.

When you start to leave people behind who don’t add any value to you, and don’t want to help others, you will be on your own for a time. But it is what is required if you want to change and hang out with people who have a strong character.

3. Leaving People Behind

It is difficult to leave people behind, so it takes character, and even more character to start hanging out with inspirational people. When you eventually do meet people who are inspirational and have strong character, they will want to see and believe who you are.

They will want to believe that you too have a strong character like they do. They will determine this by the actions you have already taken and will take.

Until you can prove to your newfound acquaintances that you want to make a difference in the world, you will be on your own.

This is very difficult, and some people can’t handle this, so they eventually end up going back to the people who had a negative influence on them. If they do this, then nothing in their life will change.

For me, this started when I moved away from my hometown of Liverpool in the UK. I was 28 years old and moved to Scotland to take up a different job, a real leadership role. I wanted to do this so I could make a difference and help others to make a difference too.

You don’t have to move away from your hometown to start hanging out with difference makers and helping others. But I saw this as my opportunity to make some real changes.

I didn’t know anybody in Scotland, and I didn’t know anybody in my new job, so things were very tough at first. But I didn’t let this stop me because I had my own mission, and I was travelling in the direction that I decided for myself.

Making this move to Scotland was the opportunity to prove to myself that I could change for the better, and I could help others to change for the better too. I didn’t want to be well known, I wanted to be worth knowing.

I wanted to become the most valuable leader I could be, so that I could add the most value I could to others who I worked with. You can do the same by working on yourself every day too and becoming the most valuable leader you can be.

I worked in Scotland for four years as an engineering production manager, and I led the engineering production teams when on shift. I wanted to help the other engineering production managers I worked with, the team leaders I worked with and the engineers I worked with.

4. Adding Value To Your People

I saw it as my responsibility to add the most value I could to them all, so they could add the most value they could to others. Leaders create leaders. Who could you add value to today?

After four years of working in Scotland, I moved to London to take up an even higher leadership role as an engineering performance manager. I saw this as an even bigger opportunity to help more people and create more leaders.

As I moved in job roles and in different parts of the UK, I was changing who I hung out with. I did my best to be my best self every day, and the average five people I hung out with had a positive influence on me.

The reason is I was choosing to hang out with difference makers and people who wanted to have a positive influence on me and others. This also had a positive impact on how I was performing in my job roles.

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From reading this book, you will have a different and better insight on the changes you want to make in your own life. The changes you need to make in yourself so you can do your best to be your best self every day.

When you finish this book, look at those you hang out with at home and in the workplace. What changes will you need to make?

As you grow and develop in your life, you need to be willing to leave those behind who don’t want to grow and develop with you. Don’t think of it as you are better than them or you don’t like them anymore because that is not the case. You are not better than them or anyone for that matter.

All you are doing is changing the direction of your life, so it is better for you. There are people who you may have already left behind in your life. It is unfortunate, but if they are holding you back from moving in the direction you wan to go, then you need to leave them behind.

There is a saying, “If you can’t change the people, change the people.” Meaning if we can’t change how the people, we hang out with behave for the better, then we must change the people we decide to hang out with.

I welcome hearing how this post has influenced the way you think, the way you lead, or the results you have achieved because of what you’ve learned in it. Please feel free to share your thoughts with me by commenting below.

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All the best,

Tom (Lead, Grow, Influence)