Surround yourself with good influence and change your life
By: Mansi Patel
Tags: Positivity, Change Your Life, Mindset, Influence, Mindset Shift

Image by Moni Mckein from Pixabay

All of us are fruit of the influences around us. When we are little, our major influences are usually our parents, our household and school. As we grow up, we get exposed to other people and surroundings, we get new friends, we do new activities, we get curious, therefore our sources of influence increases further than just our household. While it’s good to get out of your usual environment and experience the world, we also have to be careful on what we expose ourselves to because, whether we want it or not, everything around us can influence us. Our brain is like a sponge, it absorbs every information its surrounded with, and it’s harder to remove data that’s already in your mind than the opposite. This has a huge impact on what kind of person we become, so it is definitely important to acknowledge what is around us and keep only what is best for our well-being. Here are the top ways to maintain proper influence around your life.

1. Filter your social medias

The past year, I’ve been mostly seeing random and demotivating posts on my feed when I wanted to grow and improve my mindset. I’ve been seeing the same kind of post from people, displaying habits that weren’t mine. All of that didn’t represent my values and didn’t represent what I wanted to become. Neither did I feel inspired by what I saw. I quickly realized that I was following the wrong kinds of pages and the wrong people. Therefore, a big cleanup was needed to improve what is displayed on my feed. I first determined what I believed in, who I wanted to become in the future, and started following pages that aligned with that. And that was one of the biggest game changer for me. I now see things that motivate me, that make me learn new information and inspire me to become a better person. We have the power to curate our feeds in the way we want, and that’s our biggest power regarding social medias. So, why not make it into something that brings us knowledge instead of consuming information that doesn’t serve us good?

2. Filter your surroundings

When we’re young, it seems that it’s easier to make friends, but once we grow older, it becomes harder because we slowly realize what our values are, therefore we become more selective regarding who we are surrounded with. I’ve personally felt so in the past years, and have become very selective regarding who I spend time with, because aligning with the right kind of people has a huge impact on yourself. No matter what you say to yourself, you can end adopting other people’s habits without you even realizing it. You spend time with people cursing a lot, you’ll unconsciously start adopting that vocabulary too. You spend time with people who like smoking, your brain will gradually normalize smoking as if it’s not as bad as you think, and you may end up smoking too. You spend time with people who always criticizes life, you’ll unconsciously start criticizing and finding negative point of everything in life too. This is why it’s so important to ensure that the people around you are inspiring, positive and with good morals. As said by Jim Rohn, you are the sum of the 5 closest person to you. Make sure they represent your values and if they don’t, it’s time to evaluate who you spend time with.

3. Filter your sources of entertainment

Your source of entertainment impacts greatly the outcome of your mindset. Watching meaningless videos on YouTube, viral memes, endless TV shows, news about celebrities…sure it may be entertaining, but realize that they don’t bring any source of wellness to you. Now, it doesn’t mean that we should completely remove it all from our lives, from time to time it can help change our mind and give us a laugh. But life is about balance, and the problem is when these sources take too much of your time, and it becomes an addiction. Why not also watch informative videos or tutorial videos that can make you learn new things, play games that stimulates your mind, watch a documentary about some interesting topic, or read the news to be up to date regarding what is happening in the world? Your mind will be filled with much better information this way, and you’ll have more meaningful conversations with people too.

And here you have it, 3 simple yet very powerful ways you can start curating what goes into your mind, to have good influence around you, and therefore change your life into a positive and meaningful one. Remember, life is about the actions you take towards what you want to become, so start now and take one step at a time towards a fulfilling future.