How to Choose the Right People to Be in Your Life
By: May Pang
Tags: Life Lessons, Mental Health, Relationships, Self Improvement, Life

The Choosing Exercise

I ventured away from my family when I was 17, not realizing my life would be one grand, nomadic adventure. Since then, I’ve lived in multiple continents and dozens of cities. After my first few bouts of extreme loneliness and realizing my closest friends were at least 30 hours and $2,000 away, I decided to try to consistently choose meaningful relationships instead of merely waiting for them to happen to me.

The exercise involved both paying attention to the relationships that already existed in my life, as well as the new ones I wanted to create. Here’s my process:

1. Log your time

Every day at the end of the day, I’d write down anyone I spent more than an hour with that day. It doesn’t have to be someone who is a friend (yet) — it could be your university tutor, your cleaning lady, or the barista you make small talk with at the coffee house every day. I also recorded solo time. Do this for at least two weeks to get a good cross section of your life.

2. Log your feelings

Record how that interaction made you feel. Did you feel energized or drained or neutral? A simple 1-5 scale will work. Be descriptive about the feeling — did that person make you feel defensive? Anxious? Empowered? Use as many words as possible, and don’t overthink it.

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3. Know thyself

This is the most crucial step in the process. It’s important to understand what makes you happy is different from what makes someone else happy. Figure out what that is for you.

From Steps 1 and 2, identify what it is specifically that makes you feel good or bad in those interactions. See if the same words come up across multiple interactions. List your must-haves and cannot-haves.

For example, my top three must-haves are intention, kindness, and effort. And my cannot-have is inconsistency.

4. Choose intentionally

Compare the qualities you identified in Step 3 with the people you spend time with. Are you investing most of your time in the people who meet your emotional needs? Or is your energy being wasted on those who only return it with negativity?

“It is better to be alone than in bad company.” — George Washington

One strange irony I discovered while performing this exercise was that we tend to take our best relationships for granted the most.

Think about it — when life gets busy, is it often your spouse that gets dropped first because you know they love you and will forgive you? On a bad day, are you cranky to your spouse and on your best behavior with the barista? I now save my best self for the people who matter most.

5. Break up with toxic relationships

This is one of the hardest steps. It’s heartbreaking to let go of a long history, even though we’ve known for some time the friendship no longer serves us. While it may be true you had a great friendship in the past, you might have grown in different directions now. Be grateful for the past, and let it go.

Here’s a useful tip. Every time I struggled with this, I remind myself emotional energy is a finite source. Any energy you’re investing into a negative relationship is energy you’re not putting into a meaningful one. I’d imagine that emotional energy was a currency (like money) and that I only had a certain budget. When I sat across from the person, I’d ask myself if I’d I be here if I had to pay $200 to spend time with this person? What if that meant I’d no longer have enough currency to spend time with my favorite person?

I very quickly realized I’d pay an infinite amount to spend time with my family, but I’d have an immediate, visceral reaction to paying any amount to spend time with certain people.

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6. Make new friends

Consciously seek out the type of relationships you want. If you want to be an entrepreneur, go find a mastermind group. If you want to get outdoors more, go find a hiking group. This is one of the few things in life your 6-year-old self was better at doing than your 30-, 40-, or even 50-year-old self.

If you’ve forgotten how to initiate contact, I wrote another article on how to instantly create intimacy with anyone you meet.