Who is on your team?

What do you believe is the most important factor in reaching your goals and achieving success?  Is it information?  A plan?  Money?  Your zip code?

Researchers in economics, psychology, business, and public health have been asking this question for years.  And what they have found is somehow both surprising and obvious: it’s the people we surround ourselves with that have the greatest influence on our behaviors, attitudes, and—ultimately—our results.

Darren Hardy, in his book The Compound Effect, writes “according to research by social psychologist Dr. David McClelland of Harvard, [the people you habitually associate with] determine as much as 95 percent of your success or failure in life.”

Or, as motivational speaker Jim Rohn, says, “you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.”  I personally prefer Tom Bilyeu’s take on it: that we are the average of the five ideas we spend the most time with.  

But the point is the same: if you want to succeed, you have to pay attention to—and carefully curate—the voices you accept into your head and heart.

So where to start?  

As always, start with awareness.  Are you aware of the choice you have over where you place your attention?  Or do you find yourself passively aboard the ADD train, getting shuttled from one loud voice or flashy TikTok video to the next?

Then take the time to reflect on the 5-7 people who currently have the greatest influence on your life, in terms of both time and impact.  They could be people in your close geographic community, but they could also include distant friends or family members, authors, podcasters, bloggers—anyone else with whom you invest significant time and attention.  

I strongly suggest writing their names down on individual Post-It notes or index cards.  Then arrange them in terms of their level of influence.  This represents your current team.  Your starting line-up.  Be honest with yourself.  Who is your leadoff hitter?  Who is playing cleanup?

Now look at that list in the context of your ideas about who you are, who you want to be, and what you want to achieve.  In what ways—good and bad—are your team members contributing to your success?

Chances are, you have some positive, maybe some negative, and surely some neutral contributors, and that is okay.  There is no reason to judge ourselves—or anyone else for that matter.  The purpose of developing awareness is simply to look at what’s going on with curiosity and compassion.

You might even look at your team and feel a little trapped.  Curating our influences and building our team is hard.  For example, what do you do about that childhood friend who was so important to you for so many years, but whose drama and neediness now drains your cup rather than fills it?  How many “real talks” do you need to have before you cut ties?

Or you might live with family members who don’t believe in or support your desire to change.  When it comes to changing nutrition and workout habits, for example, it is common for friends and family members to feel threatened by your desire to improve your health, and to shame you, doubt you, or deliberately sabotage you in order to assuage their own feelings of shame, insecurity, or unworthiness.

It can be really, really hard to face the reality of our team sometimes, and to acknowledge that the dream you have in your heart is bigger than the environment in which you find yourself.

And if it feels impossible or overwhelming to “let go” of a team member, remember that the key to building a stronger team is not to focus on removing members, but instead to focus on introducing new members and slowly growing their roles over time.

How do you decide the kinds of people to include on your team?  How do you identify existing holes or gaps?

This will be different for each person, depending on your identity, your values, your goals, and how you define success.  But to give you some ideas, these are the qualities I look for in a team member:

Aspirational.  I choose to put my time and attention toward people I look up to and strive to be like.

Affirming.  It is important to me to have someone on my team who is capable of seeing me and affirming my worth in the world, regardless of my successes or failures.

Resourceful.  Put people on your team who you can go to for advice!  And who are generous in sharing it!  Look for people who are older than you who seem to have some important things figured out, whether that’s how to overcome self-doubt or how to install a window frame.

Challenging.  Know first that you have biases and blind spots, and actively seek people who are not afraid to point them out to you and help you fill them in.  Don’t just accept critical feedback.  Pursue it.

Creative.  I definitely have a creative side but tend more toward the rational and ordered.  My creative default is to use fun colors but to color within the lines.  I need someone on my team who says “Lines?  What lines?”  And draws their own picture.

Intimate.  Perhaps the most important person on your team is the person with whom you can share your deepest fears and greatest vulnerabilities.  Or just the random mumbo-jumbo of your everyday life.

The most important take-away here is that the people in your close inner circle matter.  A lot.  But this is not the only team that you have.  You have a whole other team of people... inside your head!  In part 2 of this series, we’ll dig into your inner team and identify ways we can optimize those voices for success.