STOA #4| You have the wrong friends. How to find out and how to fix that

Congratulations on trying to become part of the top 1% now, who constantly improve themselves mentally as much as physically 🏆

In the last episode, we already talked about how crucially your environment influences you.
To read the last episode:
https://wearestoa.beehiiv.com/p/stoa-3-environment-works-heres-fix

Introduction
The Power of Friendship

Your environment does not only consist of your home & your phone. The most influence, that you receive is by your friends and family, not by your phone. (Although both are extremely influential)

Now what Mark Ambrose talked about above is not just a well-known quote but has a lot behind it, we are not aware of.

You see, we humans are not made to think for ourselves. Not at all, in fact we are made to think in communities. We are made to fit in, to follow opinions.

Therefore, the attitude “I do not care about others’ opinions” is nothing more than a lie.

Example 1
Your Friends decide what you eat.

I want you to think back to the last time you were out to eat with your friends or family. If your memories are not too hazy, I want you to think about what they ordered.

If you remember, you will realize, that whilst ordering, none of these orders were made individually. They asked for others’ opinions or made exclamations about what they will order to receive assurance by others at the table. Orders were changed or even copied throughout this process.

That is because the opinion of others gives us assurance, that we will not be excluded from our community. That is an instinctive thought-process, that manifested itself in our minds for us to survive. If we wouldn’t have had this thought-process from the start of humankind, humanity would be extinct. You needed a community in the first eras of humanity in order to survive.

I hope you now realize how far a human being will go in order to fit into their community.

Example 2.1
Do you have true friends?

You surely can not pick your family, but you can pick who to surround yourself with and who you want to be around.
I bet many of y’all are the only ones in your friend group, trying to improve yourselves, wondering why it’s not working out.

You need to realize, that there are 2 possible types of friend groups, and one of them prevents you from personal growth.

1.
your friends do not spend their time, trying to improve themselves mentally, physically as well as spiritually & your motivation is useless.
You may not realize it consciously but their missing respect for your boundaries will put you into multiple subconscious decisions of: “Should I focus on myself or try to stay accepted by my community?”

Guess what your decision will be in the long run.
You will act in favor of your community.
You will fail on your self-improvement journey.

Example 2.2
Imagine your friends are all ahead of you.

They are more intelligent than you, more successful than you, more in shape than you and in general satisfied with their lifes. They talk about their past successes & their future plans, they reflect on themselves and focus all on their self-improvement journey and the people they love.

Either you do fit into that community already and try to stay accepted or you do not fit into that community and try to start getting accepted.

You will have many occasions in which you will ask yourself “Should I focus on myself, or risk not being accepted by my community?”

Guess what your decision will be in the long run.
You will act in favor of your community.
You will succeed on your self-improvement journey.

So if you have an issue with finding such like-minded people to grow with, we made a free Discord for people like you, who want to improve themselves to become the best version of themselves.

Connect with the right people.

How do you fix that?
Now how do you apply that to your own life?

Upcoming in Part 2.