125: Changing Who Influences You Will Change Your Life - #GrowYourLife

Hey, everyone. Thanks for listening to the Grow youw Life podcast. My name is Jeremiah Krakowski, and on this podcast we talk about ways for you to grow in your life and your business strategies that can help you both with your mindset, the way that you do life, that affect business, as well as strategies for business. Some weeks we talk more about the business strategy. This week, we're going to be talking more about a personal life thing that has a major effect on business, has a major effect on your mindset. But before we go into that, I want to say, listen, if you are not part of the Grow your Life Facebook group, be sure to join it. There's over 1500 people just like yourself that are growing in their life and in their business every single day on Facebook. If you've ever wondered, is there a place for you to ask questions about your business? If you've ever wondered if there's a place for you to safely learn new things, to grow in a community with people just like yourself, that's what this group is. And so check it out. The hashtag grow your life group on Facebook as Well. There's over 123 episodes of this podcast alone on your favorite podcast app, so be sure to check those episodes out as well. Now, today we're gonna actually go based off of a blog post that I wrote on Aug. 3. This is something really important and something that I'm passionate about personally in my life because I've seen the impact that it has because I've seen how much it changes us. Now, we talk about boundaries. We talk about connecting with people and the boundaries that we want to make sure we. We safely don't let certain voices into our life, that we, you know, we have the right influences, that we have boundaries on the. On the. Our time, our thoughts, who our friends are, who gets access to us. Boundaries, talk about relationships. But what I'm going to talk about is changing the voices that you listen to. And those voices could be coming from any different place. It could be news media. It could be a family member, a friend, a client. It could be anybody. It could be somebody from church. It could be any number of people. When we just let anybody speak into our life, we end up psychologically having problems. That's the best way I can put that. Not everybody is supposed to just dump their opinions into your life. And so you have to be intentional to kind of guide and direct who you let speak into your life. I have very specific people that I go to as mentors, as people in my life that I Care about their opinion. I see some of them on here right now. They're watching live. We're doing Fly on the Wall recording right now of this podcast on my social media pages. And if you follow me on social media, you can actually listen to these episodes early. Engage with me live while we go live and record these episodes. Pay attention to the voices that you're listening to. Hopefully I can be a voice of positivity and encouragement and empowering voice for you to go after your dreams. That's what my goal is. But there's other voices out there that are criticizing, that are ridiculing, that are meant to tear you down, that are not encouraging, that are not supporting towards your goals, and they're just not helping serve you to go after what you were meant to do. And so I see so many people all the time. They're in a family unit or at a church or they have a friend group. For me, it was a friend group that I had to break up with and change my friends. I struggled to grow as a business owner with the friend group that I was in because they were always wanting to party and hang out all the time and drink, and I wanted to focus on business. So I had to change my friend group. I had to make a whole new Facebook profile that changed my life. And I realized this is so integral for most people. Listen. If you want to change your life and you're listening to all the same voices and all the same people constantly speaking into your life, and they're negative people and they're the same people that you've always listened to. I'm sorry, but you're going to experience a hard time. That hard time is going to be confusion. You're going to be confused about, should I go this way, should I go that way? The opinions to listen to. And so we have to decide whose voices are we listening to. It could also be the media. A lot of political news media is very negative complaining. It'll convince you that the world is just being destroyed and going to hell in a handbasket. And that's not positive. That's not going to help you build the life that you want because you're going to be so focused and inundated with the messaging that's around you, the messages that you're getting, and that's what's going to spin around in your head. And so when you go to build your business, you're going to be distracted by all of these voices that are going off in your mind instead. We have the power. We have control to say, hey, I'm going to change who I'm listening to, going to change the channel. I'm going to stop listening to that person, start listening to this person. That's going to help me reach my goals. And that's one of the greatest things about being a human, is we have that ability to choose whose voices we're going to listen to. Somebody might have been a good voice for you in one season, and now you're in a different place in your life, a different season, where they're not. Where they're not the best voice for you to listen to, where they're not the best person to speak into your life and to tell you what to do and not the best advice for you. Again, people come into our lives for a season for a reason. And sometimes we're meant to. To leave graciously, hopefully not burning a bunch of bridges or, or, you know, in a, in a, in a fire. Right. Sometimes that happens, too. Sometimes we develop these toxic relationships, these codependent relationships, these. These addictive relationships with people where we constantly listening to their opinions in our lives, and we're bouncing so many ideas off of people that we. We struggle to. To really know what the right path to go is in our life. How do you know a voice is good for you or not? Well, listen, if you want to be a business owner, surround yourself with other people that are entrepreneurs, business owners. That's why I created the hashtag grow your life Facebook group. That's why this podcast exists. If you want to be a successful writer, surround yourself with writers. I'm in different writing groups. If you want to grow athletically, you want to surround yourself with people that have a common goal. If you want to change your life, you're going to have to change who you spend time around and what voices you listen to. And it's important to listen to positive voices that lift you up, that raise you up, that raise life in you, that excites you. Not just people that are constantly complaining and being negative and trying to tell you to not forget from where you came from, you name it. The different negativity that comes in our lives, from the different voices and the people squawking in our lives. You can go crazy if you just let anybody speak into your life. And so we have to be the ones that decide to pick and choose. Hey, listen, I'm not going to listen anymore to that person over there, and I'm going to listen to more of this over here. This is a bit of a topic about Boundaries, but it's more about sometimes there needs to be necessary endings to relationships, to connections, to situations that were good for a season but no longer are. And so you are going to change your life if you learn when to cut ties with certain people, when to end certain relationships that no longer serve your goals and are just holding you back. You know, we hear often a lot of people, they're afraid of that because they don't want to be disloyal and they don't want to break commitments and obligations that they have. Listen, I'm not telling you to break commitments or obligations. Be honorable, for sure, 100%. There's times, though, where it's better to leave graciously from a situation than to stay in a situation that's damaging and holding you back from your dreams. And so when you can figure out how to leave graciously those situations, that's going to better your life for the future because you're going to change the channel on who's influencing you. The people we surround ourselves with create our lives because they get to speak into our lives and they, they, they, they have opinions. And whether we say we care about other people's opinions or not, we ultimately are human. We're going to listen to people's opinions. And so be selective as to whose opinions you're going to listen to. You know, you don't want to spend time with somebody who's a narcissist or a liar or somebody that is constantly complaining and negative all the time. These are people that I've chosen to limit my exposure to as little as possible. Interestingly enough, I was most attracted to those types of people for years based on, on trauma and experiences. I was most attracted to people that were gaslighting for years. And then learning about that, I've learned, you know what, that's a pattern for me. I'm gonna have to realize, A, I'm kind of attracted to that personality. And then B, it's not healthy for me. When I notice these red flags, it's okay to move on and you start to recognize who are safe people in your life. Really great book on this topic is Safe People by Dr. Henry Cloud. I really like that book. As well as his book Boundaries, as well as his book Necessary Endings. You know, when it's time to end relationships, these books that he has, they're, they're like the quintessential encyclopedia on relationships. When it's time to leave, who are the best people to encourage you, to empower you? And so I'm not even really doing his message justice by sharing some of this with you. But what I found is, is that for me, whenever I've changed who I have exposure with, whose voices I'm listening to on a regular basis, it's completely changed my life. It's completely impacted my ability to do more. I'm able to accomplish more. I'm able to reach more people. I'm able to have more of an impact. I'm able to fulfill more. More of what I was created for and my destiny by making sure that I'm aligned with the right people in my life. Not just people that make me feel good either. Not just people that are saying what I want to hear. That's not what you want. You don't want just people that are saying what you want to hear. Whenever I talk about this, people are like, well, I don't still want people that are just saying what I want to hear. Like, no, that's. You don't want people that are avoiding conflict completely. Like, we got to have some confrontation. We got to call people and raise them up. I have healthy relationships with people where, when I'm not at my best, they raise me up to a higher level. And that's what you want. You want people that raise you up to a higher level and call you up to a higher level. You want people that empower you to fulfill what God put inside of you instead of you just being tossed to and fro by the opinions of so many different people. You can get focused on, where am I headed? Is this relationship serving me? Is this relationship going to help me reach my goals? Or is it. And if the answer is, I'm not sure, maybe that might be somebody to limit your exposure to in your life and to make sure that you spend more time with the people that are helping you go after your destiny, that can raise you up, that can encourage you. And listen, there's some people, they just don't even have the capacity to be there for you at that level. They were there at that previous season. Now you're growing. They have not. It's time to move on. And that's okay. It's not a bad thing. It's not disloyal. You're not disloyal to people by growing. I see so many people that hold themselves back from growing, from taking risks, from stepping out towards their destiny because they're afraid of leaving behind the people that helped bring them to where they are because they think that it's a bad thing to grow. It's not Listen, you can't save everybody either. You can't be the savior to everybody else in your life. What you have to do is make sure that you do what's best for you, that takes care of you and your family first. And then if anybody wants to join you in that journey, then they can. And so this is a very nuanced topic. Again, there's other layers to this, right? But at the end of the day, I want you to realize that if you want to change your life this specifically to somebody that you've been living your life a certain way, you're wanting to build a business, you're wanting to be an entrepreneur, you're wanting to get more of a certain goal, progress forward towards a goal. Change the voices that you listen to and that will change your life. Change the exposure to the people that you spend time with. Limit exposure to certain people and that will change your life more than anything else that I can tell you. Sometimes that means getting into a different environment. Sometimes that means finding new friends. Sometimes that means identifying different voices that are going to be healthier for you. Sometimes that means getting rid of negative influences in your life. Even could be tv, media, certain media on the television that's so negative, ultimately you can change your life by changing the voices you listen to. One of the best ways to do that is find people that encourage you, that are encouraging you towards your goals. Start reading books by authors on the topics that you're interested in to start to understand what does a positive voice sound like. And then you'll start to attract and identify other people that are working on their stuff as well. Another great thing that has helped me is going through therapy, getting help. I work with a therapist on betterhelp.com and this isn't sponsored by them. I just love sharing about them. They're awesome. And working through the issues of a trauma informed therapist. Somebody that can help me work through the issues of why was I so attracted to these personalities? All based on childhood experiences and, and ways that I, you know, messages, growing up and learning to rewire those parts of my brain so that now I can align my activities, my actions, my choices, my decisions to what's going to help me grow as a person to reach my goals. So I highly recommend that as a resource for you. If you experienced any level of trauma in your life, finding a therapist that can help you. BetterHelp.com is a great resource for that. Now, if you're a business owner, somebody that wants to build a business, grow a business, you haven't yet scheduled a free 45 minute call with me on my website jeremiah.com youm can do that by going to jeremiah.com or forward/ free call and we can talk about where you at, what it's going to take to get you to the next level in your business so that you can start to get more sales leads, customers and clients. It's not a sales pitch, it's you and I doing a deep dive together about your business. Now how do I benefit from doing this for free? Well, it helps me know how I can serve my clients better. I come up with better content. I come up with better podcasts, come up with better social media content, better blog posts. All of that based on the feedback that I get by listening to my customer on these calls. And so be sure to schedule a free 45 minute call with me on my website Jeremy growski.com free call grow your life everybody.