Brian Tracy explains how the people around you shape your self-image and what you think you're capable of. He describes social comparison theory: you measure yourself against nearby peers, not abstract ideals. Pick three people you admire and practice their behaviors until they become part of who you are.
Did you know that the role models you choose to follow largely determine everything that happens to you in life? When you're born, you have no idea or conception of yourself at all. The way your parents treat you when you're a child largely forms your self image and determines whether or not you feel important, intelligent, valuable, safe or competent. Parents have an enormous impact on their children by the kind of people they are and the kind of models that they establish for their children. Children believe what you do, not what you say. You and I have been greatly influenced by the people around us as we grew up from the earliest ages. When you get older and go to school, you copy the people around you. You look up to certain role models and you try to be more like them, either consciously or unconsciously. In psychology, they say that you model the people that you most respect and admire, whether you're aware of it or not. Top people select good role models to copy. They are conscious and deliberate about the people they choose to imitate. They do not do this by accident, but by design. At Harvard, they call this your reference group. These are the people around you who you feel are the most like you. As a result of your chosen reference group, you will imitate their ways of speaking, dressing and behaving. If you choose a positive reference group, you will set higher standards for yourself and become a better person. But if you do not, the default setting is that you will fall to a lower level and imitate other people in a random and haphazard way. Your self ideal, your vision of the very best person you can possibly be, is strongly influenced by the people around you that you most admire. It's amazing to discover that most top people read a lot of biographies and autobiographies when they are young. As a result, they identified with famous and successful men and women at an unconscious level. They work to be more and more like the people that they most admired. The description for this is called social comparison theory. And more than 50 years of research shows that each person compares themselves with the other people around them rather than by some abstract standard. It's been said that everything you do in life is to earn the respect of the people you respect, or at least not to lose their respect. Top people like yourself have very clear values and virtues and you respect other people who seem to practice and embody those same values and virtues in their day to day lives. Your feelings of success and happiness are largely determined by how well you feel you are doing in comparison with other people at your same level. Sometimes they call this keeping up with the Joneses. You don't compare your lifestyle with that of multi millionaires or billionaires. You compare your lifestyle and organize your behavior based on the people around you who you feel are at your same level. Now, one of the fastest ways to improve your performance and the quality of your life is for you to select new role models. Men and women who you may know personally or whom you may just have read about or heard about. And then try to be like them most of the time. Let them set your standards. Compare yourself with the very best that you think that they might do. This automatically elevates you and makes you a higher performer in everything you do. And the more you behave consistent with the way that you think that people you most admire behave, the more you like and respect yourself and the better you do, you put yourself onto an upward spiral in life. Now, here's an exercise for you. Select three people that you most admire and would most like to be like sometime in the future. What behaviors do they have that you could begin practicing today until they become a part of your character and your personality?
