WHY IT'S IMPORTANT TO SURROUND YOURSELF WITH WINNERS

One of my favorite quotes by the great Les Brown is, “If you hang out with nine losers, you’re about to become number ten.” Brilliant. Jim Rohn states, “You’re the average of the five people you come into contact with the most.” My mother always told me, “Birds of a feather flock together.”

When I was hanging out with drug addicts, I became a drug addict. When I was hanging out with losers, I was a loser. When I associated with scumbags, I acted like a scumbag. Simple as that. I can look at every single phase of my life, and I clearly became just like the company I kept.

I quit hanging out with, I’d say, 95 percent of the people I knew before getting out of prison the final time. Once I surrounded myself with motivated, loving, driven, ambitious, and successful people, that was exactly what I became. When you start hanging out with successful people, you start to pick up their daily habits that got them where they are now and are taking them even further on the road to success.

It is critical that you get rid of any poisonous people in your life if you want to be happy. If they don’t have your best interest at heart, if they tell you that you can’t do something, if they laugh at you for having dreams and going after them, if they say things to put you down, then they are not your friends. You need to remove them from your circle if you want to have true success and happiness in your life. It’s just like guarding your mind. It’s hard to stay positive and focused on your dreams and goals when you choose to hang out with people who tell you “you can’t” all the time, are constantly laughing at you for going after your dreams, or influence you to participate in something that goes against your dreams and beliefs.

A real friend is always going to have your back and will always encourage you to go after your dreams. A real friend doesn’t tell you what you want to hear. A real friend tells you what you need to hear.

Energy is contagious, good or bad. Have you ever heard someone say, “I got a bad vibe from him,” or “I felt so much energy just being around that group”? That’s because we feed off the energy in our surroundings.

So if you are around people who whine, make excuses, have a bad outlook on life, and are not striving to become better, that energy is going to rub off on you. They put a damper on your day just by spending time with you. However, if you are around a group of extremely excited individuals who are passionate about their dreams, it is almost impossible not to feed off their energy.

When you surround yourself with other individuals who have the same or similar dreams as you and are equally or even more passionate and enthusiastic about their dreams and life, something magical happens. When you have people in your life who encourage you every day to go after your dreams and tell you when they think you are not giving it 100 percent of your effort, it makes the process of attaining your dreams possible and inspires you to persevere. We all need encouragement to take on big goals, and we definitely all need someone to hold us accountable by letting us know when we are getting off-track from our goals.

If you want to live a happy and successful life, start eliminating negative people from your life completely and start surrounding yourself with people whom you want to be like. Watch how much of a difference it will make in your life when you surround yourself with winners.

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HOW TO REPLACE BAD HABITS WITH GOOD HABITS

WHAT ARE HABITS?

Humans are creatures of habit. A habit is a routine of behavior that is repeated regularly and tends to occur subconsciously. Charles Duhigg, reporter for the New York Times and author of The Power Of Habit, said, “About 40 percent to 45 percent of what we do every day sort of feels like a decision, but it’s actually habit.” Even the smartest, most creative, most ruggedly individualistic of Homo sapiens are on autopilot much of the time, eating, working, and communicating with others through habit.

There are some good evolutionary reasons for this: habits save us time and mental energy in negotiating the world and free our minds to invent things like fire and computers. They also limit the size of our brains (and therefore our heads), making it easier for human mothers to survive giving birth. But our hardwired ability to form habits makes us vulnerable, quickly picking up self-destructive patterns, too.

The process by which new behaviors become automatic is called habit formation. Old habits are hard to break, and new habits are hard to form because the behavioral patterns we repeat are imprinted in our neural pathways. But it is possible to form new habits through repetition.

I don’t care who you are or what you have accomplished. We all have bad habits to some degree or another. Nobody is perfect. What we need to focus on, then, is analyzing ourselves daily to find bad habits and replace them with good habits.

HOW TO MAKE THE CHANGE

Many techniques exist for removing established habits like withdrawal of reinforcement by identifying and removing factors that trigger and reinforce the habit. Recognizing and eliminating bad habits as soon as possible is advised. Habit elimination becomes more difficult with age because repetitions reinforce habits cumulatively over a lifetime.

According to Charles Duhigg, there is a loop that includes a cue, a routine, and a reward for every habit. An example of a habit loop is this: when a TV program ends (cue), you go to the refrigerator (routine) and eat a snack (reward). The key to changing habits is to identify your cue and modify your routine and reward.

For whatever you consider a bad habit, there is a good habit that can replace it. I used to watch TV. I don’t like that it consumes a lot of my time, resulting in me being unproductive, and I definitely don’t like the way it makes me feel. After watching programs such as the news, SportsCenter, or even commercials, I would have worry, fear, anger, or even feelings of hate flowing through me, and those are feelings I want to avoid at all costs. This also goes with protecting your mind from anything harmful. I started replacing TV with books that enlighten my mind, body, and soul, thanks to my mentor Marlene who wouldn’t stop encouraging me to read, do some physical activity like exercising, or conversing with other people. Now I don’t watch TV except when the Los Angeles Rams are playing.

Identify the habits you want to change, then identify the cue and modify the routine and reward. And if you fail on your initial attempts, don’t give up. Figure out what went wrong and plan strategies to overcome that obstacle the next time. Keep your positive attitude and keep trying. You will get it eventually.