How to Choose Your Inner Circle

"You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.", said renowned business man Jim Rohn. Whether you agree with this or not, one thing is certain, the people around you matter and will have an impact in your life in one way or another. So choose your inner circle wisely. Surround yourself with positive people that can encourage you. Negative, pessimist people are dangerous and will rob you of opportunity and growth. Surround yourself with honest people that can challenge you, you will find more opportunity for growth when you're not the smartest person in the room. Make sure these are open minded people, close minded people will of course challenge you, but will always think they are right and therefore always tell you you're wrong when you don't agree with them. Finally, if you have a certain goal or purpose in mind that you want to get to, reach out to people that are already there and make them part of your inner circle, and don't limit yourself on who this could be. I've hear stories from some very successful people of how effective this was for them. Stories that go as far as reaching out to some pretty powerful people and actually getting them become their mentor. Author and Entrepreneur Tim Ferriss has some great information on this topic that you can find on the web. This of course doesn't mean we push everyone that doesn't fall in this category out of our inner circle, since we'll have cases where it's not practical or possible to do this. But as long as you identify where these people stand and the majority of your inner circle does fall in this category, you'll be more likely to lift these people up vs them dragging you down. This topic is pretty popular and I'm certainly not the first to write about it, so you'll find a lot of information about exercises on how to rate your inner circle and a lot more advise on this topic. Bottom line, dedicate some time to this regardless of how you want to approach it. Do it now if you feel you need to make a shift from where you are, or do it whenever you feel things aren't going in the right direction as you might find it difficult to change course without changing your crew!