The place doesn’t matter nor does the subject matter but what resonates is the passion, emotion, and that distinct feeling a great conversation evokes. A friend, a peer, a sibling, your son or daughter, your spouse or partner. A great conversation with someone you love, sacrifice for, experience life with, desire, or have created life with can be some of the best conversations ever.
One of the many secret ingredients to maintaining a healthy mind, body, and spirit involves surrounding yourself with people you love, admire, and fill your soul with goodness.
- Who is that person or people for you?
- How often do you experience that opportunity?
- What is the content of the conversations?
In theory, that is the objective. Identify those people in your life that offer inspiration, support, laughter, and goodness. Then, surround yourself often and frequently with those people and in return you have a higher probability to benefit from those encouraging experiences.
In practice, it can be difficult. Difficult, due to a common scenario, that we didn’t pick our family and siblings, we may have amassed a varied group of peers over the years due to a number of reasons and context. Which means when many of us take a self-inventory of who we surround ourselves with we tend to identify and select from a binary perspective. Most often, during a self-evaluation, our social circle is placed in two buckets – “In” or “Out.”
Conducting a self-inventory is not easy rather it can be complicated and evoke mixed emotions such as stress, anxiety, and beyond.
The process of evaluation can be complicated as well as challenging to identify who invigorates us and fills us with energy, who challenges us in a healthy way, who supports us in times of need, and who is a vampire and sucks the life out of us.
Therefore, a simple suggestion is to avoid deciding who is “In” or “Out.” As an alternative, identify and celebrate and honor the friends, family, groups, etc. across your social circle who offer the opportunity to inspire you, provide encouragement, enables you to laugh, or grounds you in who you are.
Once you’ve identified who inspires you. Then, seek them out regularly, make the time to connect, share with them how they fill you with encouragement and joy. That doesn’t mean you have to exclude the others in your life. What it means is that you set boundaries, take charge of the frequency, and manage the amount of soul sucking energy that others withdraw when you’re with them.
Great conversations won’t happen unless you seek them out by identifying who enables that to happen in your life. Therefore, surround yourself with those that enable you to feel vulnerable, encouraged, and leave you with that distinct feeling that you don’t want the moment to end.
Now, go find that person and have a Great Conversation!
