Your inner circle is vital to who you are and how you succeed in life. Close friendship is about access, and this access should be structured. Access to friendship, or your inner circle, should be gained through trust and commitment. The people around you can affect you and determine if you have a negative or positive outlook on life or goals. You should be able to analyze someone’s capacity to handle the responsibility of being close to you.
Determine the value of the person before adding them to your inner circle.
Base the access you give to people on the ability they’ve demonstrated. Always see people for who they are rather than what they could become. There is a wide range of distance between potential and realization, and you don’t want to be left hanging to bear the consequences of disappointment and a break of trust.
Bring people into your life based on their works and what they’ve demonstrated. The different stages they are in should determine what information they get to know about you and how willing you can go to inconvenience yourself for them.
Understand the different layers of your network.
Not everyone is your friend; learn to label individuals accordingly; there are acquaintances, work colleagues, neighbors, coursemates, etc. Someone falling into any of these categories doesn’t automatically make them your friend.
It’s essential you live your life by design and not by chance. This design includes your choice of friends, which affects many things about us. When the appropriate people are there to support you, anything is possible.
Here are the different ways close friendship influences us:
Friends influence our habits.
We learn habits both consciously and unconsciously. We often pick up the habits of people we spend most of our time with, which is where friendship comes in. If you choose the right people to build a close friendship with, you protect your positive outlook. To avoid the Influence of negative patterns, you should be intentional about the kind of people you allow into your inner circle.
Friends influence your choices.
Close friendship can affect your life choices, ranging from selecting a life partner, career, place of residence, and the lifestyle you live. Our friends are often the first people we go to for advice when we need to make crucial decisions, even the less important ones. The type of advice a friend can offer depends on their quality, and this advice ultimately influences our choices. So, to live a quality life and make sound decision-making, you need to be deliberate with the type of people you make as friends.
Friends impact your positive outlook.
Happiness often comes from within but can be influenced. Also, negative or positive energy is contagious; the people in your inner circle usually affect your state of mind. Having friends who have a positive outlook on life, are humourous, and choose to live a happy life tends to rub off.
Protect the boundaries of your inner circle.
There is a strong relationship between friendship and living a healthy and productive life. Positive behavior can spread through a network of people in the same way that negative behavior can. Close friendship doesn’t happen by chance; it requires a high commitment and intentionality to make it work.
What you do not value, you lose. We often take things that have the highest value in our lives. The similarity in values and past experiences is a crucial element in friendship. Keep these things in mind as you evaluate your inner circle.
