Your Peer Network Is Either Your Greatest Asset or Your Biggest Liability — Which Is It?

Well, hey there, my friend.

Jonathan Doyle with you once again.

Welcome aboard, as always, to The Daily Podcast.

Just a few brief moments to give you another idea to

move you along on your way.

You have to be conscious.

If you want to change your experience of any specific aspect of your

life, the first step is waking up.

You know, one of the biggest problems with addiction, and we are an incredibly

addicted society in this unique moment in history where you d- addictions are

complex, multifaceted, and ubiquitous.

Now, I know that humans have always been addicted to things ever since we

first figured out various substances, you know, but I think there was a

relatively small number of them.

There was, uh, you know, certain plants and certain liquids you could

use that people became addicted to.

But can you not agree with me that at this moment in history, the,

uh, complexity of the possible addictions is somewhat exponential?

There are just so many digital addictions, relationship addictions,

lifestyle addictions, all these different things that hold us in place.

And remember last week I said that the basis of all addiction is the

refusal to sit with difficult emotions.

People may disagree with that.

They may think I'm wrong.

But really, that's my genuine belief about what drives the addiction engine, is

that there are things in our life, there are feelings, there are circumstances

that are uncomfortable and unpleasant, so rather than actually face them and

be conscious and then develop strategies to deal with them, we choose to go

back to sleep, to stay in addiction.

But the good news is, the purpose of today's message is not around addiction.

It's around really waking up in a particular area of life.

And once we move out of various addictive mindsets, we begin to wake up.

When you wake up, you can begin to audit your life and look at the things

that are optimizing you, that are moving you forward, that are allowing

you to bless and serve and care for more people and live a bigger, more

expansive life, as opposed to remaining stuck in the same habits and patterns.

And what we're gonna talk about very briefly today is one of the most

powerful factors that shapes our lives, which is our peer network,

our friendships, the people that are around us that shape our beliefs.

Now, this could be the subject of a three-hour podcast with guests and going

very deep on this, but I wanna give you some very basic information, and,

and that's that consistent sociological studies have clearly demonstrated over

a very long timeframe that we tend to achieve the same outcomes as the

people we spend the most time with.

Now, I'm saying this, I've been saying this for decades.

I don't know whether this sounds new to you, but we're a species that is

super optimized for social cohesion.

So one of the ways that we've evolved through evolutionary psychology,

evolutionary biology, is to not risk being ostracized from the group.

You can understand in prehistory, if we did things, said things, chose

things that were different to what the group around us really wanted, that

presented enormous problems for us.

You could be ostracized, you could be killed, you could end

up being pushed out of the tribe.

So we learned very quickly to try and match our behaviors, our

language, our facial expressions to the people around us.

Made a whole lot of sense in a sort of, uh, prehistorical moment when you

had to do these things to survive.

And of course, now we live in these massively different, more complex

realities where if we say or do things, we're not gonna get necessarily

pushed straight out of the tribe.

We're gonna be… Well, let's try this.

Do you not agree that some of the most successful and influential people

often tend to people-- often tend to be people who say and do things

that are different to the norm?

So there can actually be a lot of rewards for being really, really authentic.

And, you know, some of you would also realize there can actually

be some consequences too.

But we can agree that at least we live in a moment where you're not gonna

die if you choose a different path.

Now, what I want you to think about is a lot of times on the journey

of personal growth and development, people get to realize, "Hey I, I want

different things to the people around me.

I, I, I wanna walk a different path.

There, there's attitudes and behaviors.

I mean, the simplest way to think about it, if, if all your friends

are drug addicts and you decide that you don't wanna be a drug addict,

that's gonna create some tension in the friendship group, right?

This is not really complex.

It's pretty straightforward.

So as we begin to choose new behaviors and different behaviors, we risk putting

tension on our existing friendships.

So what do we do here?

Well, the first thing, many of you who are regular listeners know that I've been

quite interested in the psychology of Alfred Adler, and his book or his idea

was recently turned into a book that was quite successful called "The Courage to Be

Disliked." You may have heard of the book.

It, it's an interesting read, but it's basically this idea that to

be really authentic, you have to risk the fact that not everybody

is gonna be a cheerleader for you.

Now, concentrate.

This does not mean you get to be obnoxious.

This does not mean that you get to start believing that you are completely

right on everything, everybody else is wrong, and you're forging your own path.

There needs to be a humility and a calmness here, 'cause ultimately you

are accountable to God for you Uh, yes, you have responsibilities to

the people close to you, but what you do with your life and whether or not

you, uh, instantiate and actualize the potential that you have is on you.

So you're really responsible ultimately for what you do with these gifts.

It's why Jesus in the Gospels talks about the parable of the talents.

If you're not a Christian, it's just this story where, you know, this landowner,

this rich king gives different servants certain amounts of money and basically

says, "I'm going away, do something with this money." And some of them, you

know, double it and triple it, and some of them just, you know, break even.

But the story is about this one servant who was afraid and dug a hole in the

ground and hid it and said, "Look" And the king comes back, and they

just dig it up out of the ground and say, "Here it is, I'll give it back

to you." And the king's angry because he said, "I didn't want it back.

I wanted you to do something with it."

So that's the pressure on our lives.

That's the existential tension that we live under, is we've got

to make something of ourselves.

So I'm covering a lot of ground in this, uh, short message, but I, I guess what

I'm saying to you is, if there's anything in you that wants different results,

whether that's better health, more money, travel, you know, better relationships,

a promotion, you're probably going to have to do different things.

And if your friendship groups and your peer networks are not doing

those things, you're gonna have to find the courage to be disliked.

And you don't need to be obnoxious about it, as I've said.

You just-- The way I used to teach this on stage was just allocate time differently.

Allocate time differently.

If all your friends go to the bar every Friday and you wake up Saturday so

hungover that you get nothing done for the whole weekend, you don't have to

just walk up to your friends and say, "Listen, I've listened to this podcast

from Jonathan Doyle, and I've decided you people are beneath me, and I will

have nothing to do with you again.

Away from me, you evildoers." That's not gonna happen. You just allocate time

differently. You say, "Look, you know, I've got an early start Saturday morning.

I, I, I'm not gonna make it." And you'll get some blowback, right?

You'll get some pushback.

And you can just extrapolate this to any area of your life.

Whether you're fifteen or fifty-five or eighty-five,

there's gonna be some correlate.

There's gonna be some situation you can relate to where you

just go, "You know what?

Gonna do that thing or haven't that…" So it can be as simple as sometimes you

can be sitting with friends and the, and the language gets off, and it's critical

and negative, and they're gossiping about people, and it's just you're sitting there

going, "Uh, is this, is this what I want?

Is this, is this-- You know, do I wanna do this anymore?" And you just

begin to allocate time differently.

And the last thing I'll say to you is, you also need to be conscious about who do

you want to be around I'm blessed to have some incredibly interesting, successful

friends, people that I love dearly who are just doing life on a big scale in

business, in, in, uh, in public life.

And I'm really blessed and, you know, just so grateful for the time that

I get to spend with them because I lo- I just-- They're interesting.

They're doing, they're living, they're being, they're, they're in the game.

They live certain ways.

They're not writing themselves off.

They're, they're planning.

They're growing.

They're serving.

They're active.

They're healthy.

So this is the essential message of this short podcast today, is I want

you to audit your friendship groups.

I want you to audit your peer networks.

And I know this is hard, and it's a reason.

It's like this just success leaves clues, right?

That's the ultimate constant idea of personal growth.

You don't have to come up with this yourself.

You just have to look around you and go, "Oh, this is interesting."

Wealthy, successful, healthy people don't tend to hang around people

who are acting in degenerate ways.

Now, for my people who are listening that are of, of spirituality and faith,

I'm not saying we ignore the poor.

That's not my point.

You know, because the more abundant you become, the more blessing and

energy and, and, and the sort of love that you have in your life, the more

you have to give from your abundance.

I'm just saying that you don't have to spend your time with people who are

living in ways that are holding you back from the growth that could be yours.

So just start to pay attention to this.

That's it for today.

I'm gonna stop, otherwise I'll keep going.

Please make sure you've subscribed to this podcast.

Hit subscribe if you like it.

Send it to some friends.

Let's grow this.

Be a huge blessing to me.

Uh, if you're not following me on Instagram, I'm on jaydoylespeaks,

one word, @jaydoylespeaks.

I'm on YouTube.

You can find everything else on the website at jonathandoyle.co.

God bless you, my friend.

Go audit that peer network, and if anybody gets angry, don't tell them to email me.

God bless.

You and I are gonna talk again tomorrow