Transcript 0:00 Welcome to the Wired for Impact Podcast, a teaching podcast designed to help you slow down, cut through the noise, and focus on what matters most. I'm Justin Thibault. 0:10 Personal and organizational leadership has been a major part of my professional study and development. I earned a graduate degree in leadership and became a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member. 0:21 What I share also comes from more than two decades of personal investment with books, mentors, education, experience, testing ideas, mistakes, and failure. 0:31 That journey led me to build practical tools for greater clarity and direction. 0:36 Through the Wired for Impact framework, we explore eight life domains: purpose, work, finances, family, friends, health, interests, and faith. 0:47 The goal is to help you identify alignment, build toward fulfillment, and make an impact unique to who you are. This is designed to be practical and useful regardless of your background or starting point. 0:59 You can find more tools and resources at www.wiredforimpact.com. That is the number four wiredforimpact.com. Now, let's get wired for impact. Who is shaping your life? 1:12 About two years ago, I started building a framework for myself around one simple question: Who is really shaping my life? 1:19 As a Maxwell Leadership Certified Team Member, I have access to a number of leadership and personal growth resources, and one idea that pushed my thinking further came from John Maxwell's The 15 Invaluable Laws of Growth. 1:32 The broader concept is simple. The people closest to us matter. Who we spend time with matters. Who we listen to matters. Who we allow to influence our thinking matters. 1:46 And the more I sat with that idea, the more I realized I did not want to leave it as just another good thought. 1:53 I wanted to build something practical around it, so I created what I now call my mentorship, friend, and helping grid. Every quarter, I step back and assess the people in my life. Who am I spending time with? 2:07 Who is influencing me? Who am I learning from? Who is challenging me? Who am I helping? Who am I keeping close simply because of history? And one question has come increasingly important. 2:20 Are the people closest to me aligned with the direction I say I want my life to go? Over the last two years, this has become more than a personal reflection tool. I use it with coaching clients. 2:33 I use it with people I mentor. 2:35 And I bring versions of these same questions into conversations with people who are trying to grow, get unstuck, make better decisions, or simply become more intentional about where their life is going. 2:49 One thing I have noticed is that we spend a lot of time evaluating our goals, habits, careers, finances, and future, but we do not always stop to evaluate the people who have the greatest access to our thinking. 3:04 And that matters because you can have a great goal and still be surrounded by people who consistently talk you out of it. 3:11 You can have a strong desire to grow and still spend most of your time in relationships that normalize staying exactly where you are. 3:20 You can want to become more disciplined, financially healthy, professionally capable, emotionally mature, or personally confident, but if the environment around you constantly reinforces the opposite, growth becomes much harder. 3:36 That is why I continue to use this framework personally and in my coaching. It creates a different kind of conversation. Not just what do you want, but who are you becoming? This year, I became even more intentional. 3:52 I set a specific goal to spend more time around people who are strong in areas where I want to grow. Because the more I work with this, the more I believe something very strongly. Proximity has influence. 4:07 The people closest to you affect what you normalize, what you talk about, what you tolerate, what you pursue, what you believe is possible, how you think about money, how you think about work, how you respond to pressure, how seriously you take your health, how you talk about your future, how you think about risk, how you define success. 4:33 Over time, the environment around you begins shaping the person within you, and that is what I want to talk about today. 4:41 Not networking, not social climbing, not cutting people off because they do not make enough money, not finding five impressive people just so you can say they are in your circle. I want to go deeper than that. 4:56 Who has access to your thinking? And maybe even more importantly, who is shaping the direction of your life? 5:04 Because whether we realize it or not, the people closest to us help establish what feels normal, and what feels normal often becomes the standard we live by. Your life has an environment. 5:17 Before we talk about individual people, we have to talk about environment. We understand environment when it comes to almost everything else. 5:26 If you want a plant to grow, the environment matters, the soil matters, the water matters, the temperature matters, the sunlight matters. 5:35 You would never put a plant in poor soil, deprive it of sunlight, and then spend six months blaming the plant because it is not growing. But we do that to ourselves. We say, "I wanna grow. I wanna make more money. 5:49 I want a stronger career. I wanna become healthier. I wanna build something. I wanna become a better leader. I wanna become more disciplined. I wanna change my life." 5:59 But then we spend most of our relational time in environments where none of those things are being pursued. And eventually we wonder, why am I having such a hard time changing? Maybe the issue is not only discipline. 6:13 Maybe your environment keeps pulling you back toward your old normal because every circle has a normal level of ambition, a normal level of complaining, a normal way of handling money, a normal attitude toward work, a normal attitude toward health, a normal tolerance for excuses, a normal level of learning, a normal level of courage, a normal way of thinking about opportunity, a normal way of responding to failure. 6:42 Stay in an environment long enough and its normal starts to become your normal. That is something I have become much more aware of. You do not have to consciously agree with everything around you for it to influence you. 6:55 You just have to be around it long enough. Let's talk about how proximity shapes possibility. Environment does more than influence behavior. It can influence what you believe is possible. 7:07 Sometimes we are not limited because we lack ability. Sometimes our frame of reference is simply too small. We have never seen someone do it. We have never heard someone think that way. 7:20 We have never watched someone manage money differently. We have never seen someone build a business. We have never been around someone who takes personal growth seriously. 7:31 We have never watched someone reinvent their career. We have never heard someone openly talk about goals, strategy, discipline, and long-term thinking. 7:41 Then suddenly, you get around someone who does, and something changes. Not because they gave you a five-step plan, not because they fixed your life, but because they expanded what you believed was possible. 7:56 Sometimes proximity gives you permission to think differently. The right person can expand your imagination. The wrong environment can quietly shrink it. Look at who has access to you. 8:08 So if proximity matters, we have to ask who actually has access to us. Think about the people closest to you. 8:17 Not everybody you know, not everybody who follows you online, not every coworker, not every relative, not every acquaintance. I mean the people who actually have access to you. 8:30 The people you call, the people you text, the people you vent to, the people whose opinions matter to you, the people you tell your dreams to, the people you call when something goes wrong, the people you spend your free time with, the people you listen to when you are uncertain, the people who can talk you into something, and the people who can talk you out of something. 8:52 Now ask yourself, where are they going? Because that may tell you something about where you are going. Maybe an even harder question is, what does being around them make me believe is normal? 9:06 That can be uncomfortable, but it is worth asking. Whether you like it or not, your five have a financial culture. One of the clearest places this shows up is money. 9:17 Suppose the people closest to you believe debt is normal, saving is impossible, investing is for rich people, making more money is somehow wrong, talking about money is uncomfortable, starting a business is too risky, everybody hates their job, everybody lives paycheck to paycheck, everybody buys things they can't afford. 9:39 Think about how difficult it becomes to build a completely different financial philosophy inside that environment. Now imagine another circle. People talk about investing. They discuss business. 9:51 They talk about ownership. They develop skills. They celebrate promotions. They encourage each other to build. They ask questions like, "What are you learning? What are you building? What opportunity are you seeing? 10:04 How are you thinking about your future? What are you doing with the money you are making?" Those two groups may live in the same city. They may earn similar incomes. 10:14 They may come from similar backgrounds, but they are living inside completely different mental economies. That matters because income is not only affected by effort, it is also affected by exposure. 10:28 What opportunities do you see? What do you believe is possible? What risks do you understand? What skills do you value? Who taught you how money works? Who taught you how careers work? Who taught you how ownership works? 10:45 Who taught you how to negotiate? Who taught you how to invest in yourself? 10:50 Your circle does not automatically determine your income, but it can absolutely influence the decisions, habits, expectations, and opportunities that affect your income over time. Money is only one example. 11:04 Thinking may be even more important. Pay attention to the dominant conversations in your circle. Are they about possibilities or problems? Ideas or people? Solutions or complaints? Growth or gossip? 11:19 Responsibility or blame? Action or excuses? There's a major difference between having friends who listen to your frustration and having friends who help you stay frustrated. Healthy relationships do not ignore pain. 11:34 They do not pretend everything is fine. They do not force positivity. But eventually, healthy relationships ask, "What are you going to do about it?" 11:43 That question matters because some people will help you through a difficult season. Others will help you build a permanent residence there. Know the difference. 11:53 There are people who can validate your struggle and still call you upward. They can say, "I can understand why you are frustrated," and then five minutes later say, "But you cannot stay there." 12:06 Those are valuable relationships. Believe it or not, standards are contagious. Over time, those conversations begin shaping our standards. 12:16 Spend enough time around disciplined people, and discipline starts looking normal. Spend enough time around people who read, and learning starts looking normal. 12:25 Spend enough time around people who train physically, and health starts looking normal. Spend enough time around people who save, and investing in financial discipline starts looking normal. 12:37 Spend enough time around people who take ownership of their lives, and excuses become harder to tolerate in yourself. The opposite is also true. Low standards can become normal. Constant complaining can become normal. 12:51 Blame can become normal. Cynicism can become normal. Chaos can become normal. Stagnation can become normal. 13:00 That is why I believe we have to be intentional about who has close access to us, not because we're better than anyone, but because we are all more influenceable than we'd like to admit. 13:12 For me, this is still a work in progress. I want to be very clear about this. My top five is not perfect. I'm still working on it. I'm still assessing it. I'm still refining it. 13:25 This is not a framework I built two years ago, completed, and checked it off the list. It is something I continually return to. Every quarter, I ask, "Who is in my life? Who am I spending time with? 13:37 Who has become more influential? Who has become less influential? Where am I growing? Where do I need more exposure? Who do I need to move toward? Where do I need to create more distance? 13:49 And where am I simply settling because a relationship is familiar?" I have made major changes in my relational world over the last year. 13:58 Some were intentional, some happened naturally, some were uncomfortable, and I do not believe I am finished. In fact, I hope I never am, because I'm changing. My goals are changing. My responsibilities are changing. 14:11 The areas I want to grow are changing. So it makes sense that my relational environment will evolve, too. What I need around me today may not be exactly what I need five years from now. 14:22 That does not make relationships disposable. It means I want to remain intentional. This year, I want to improve my top five even further. 14:31 Next year, I expect to assess it again, and I want to continue doing that year after year, not because I'm constantly trying to replace people, but because I do not want to become passive about something that has such a significant influence on my life. 14:46 This is not about creating the perfect five. I'm not even sure there is such a thing. It is about continually asking, "Are the relationships closest to me supporting the person I'm trying to become?" 14:58 And equally important, "Am I becoming the kind of person who adds value to the people closest to me?" For me, this is not a finished system. It's an ongoing practice, and that is what makes it useful. 15:11 Not all of my top five are the same. There's another important part of the framework. When I think about my top five, I do not just make a list of five names. 15:21 I look at the role those relationships are playing in my life. I think about them in three segments: who is mentoring me, who is riding alongside me, and who am I mentoring? 15:33 I believe a healthy relational life needs all three, but these positions can also change. Someone who once mentored you may eventually become more of a peer. 15:43 Someone who rode alongside you for years may move into a different season. Someone you once helped may eventually outgrow your ability to help them. Relationships have seasons. 15:53 The goal is not to freeze people into permanent categories. The goal is to stay aware of the role each relationship is actually playing now. 16:02 You also have to become one of the five, and this may be one of the most important parts of the whole conversation. Everybody wants better friends. Everybody wants successful friends. Everybody wants encouraging friends. 16:15 Everybody wants people who make them better. But ask yourself, would the person you want in your circle want you in theirs? That changes the conversation. Instead of only asking, "Who do I need around me?" 16:30 ask yourself, "Who am I becoming for the people around me? Am I bringing ideas, encouragement, accountability, wisdom? Am I dependable? Am I growing? Do I celebrate other people's success? Can people trust me? 16:48 Do I keep confidence? Can I challenge people without belittling them? Do I bring energy into a room, or do I drain it?" You attract stronger relationships partly by becoming stronger relationally yourself. 17:02 And if I'm mentoring someone, that becomes even more important, because now my life is not just influencing me, it's influencing them. Let's talk about auditing your own five. So let's make this practical. 17:16 Take out a piece of paper. Write down five names. Do not overthink it. Who are the five people who currently have the greatest relational influence on your life? Then ask, "Who is mentoring me? 17:29 Who is riding alongside me? Who am I mentoring?" Beside each name, ask, "What does this relationship bring out of me? What behavior does this relationship normalize? What conversations dominate our time together? 17:44 Does this person challenge me? Do they encourage growth? Do I admire the direction of their life? What am I learning from them? What am I contributing to them? 17:55 Do I feel bigger after spending time with them, or do I feel smaller? Do they make excuses easier or ownership stronger? Do they respect the direction I'm trying to go?" Then go one level deeper. "Who do I want in? 18:08 Who do I need to move away from? Who do I need to move toward?" And if you are mentoring someone, "Does this person genuinely want to grow?" Are they teachable? Are they taking ownership? 18:20 Am I helping them move forward, or am I trying to carry them? Then ask what may be the hardest question of all: 18:27 if I continue becoming more like the environment created by these relationships, am I comfortable with where I will be five years from now? Do not rush past that. 18:38 Sit with it for a moment, because if the answer is no, something probably has to change. 18:44 My final thought to you is this: sometimes we are desperately trying to change our lives while remaining completely committed to the environment that helped us produce our current life. That is difficult to sustain. 18:56 If you do not like your current level of living, if you do not like your current level of thinking, if you are frustrated with your income, if you are frustrated with your career trajectory, if you are disappointed with your progress, do not only ask, "What do I need to do differently?" 19:13 Ask yourself, "Who am I becoming?" Then ask, "Who is ahead of me? Who is beside me? Who am I reaching back to help?" 19:23 Because your future is not only being shaped by the decisions you make, it is also being shaped by the conversations you repeatedly have, the standards you repeatedly see, the attitudes you repeatedly hear, the behaviors you repeatedly normalize, and the people you repeatedly walk beside. 19:42 Choose your five carefully. Evaluate them intentionally. Refine them continually. Do not expect perfection. I certainly do not. I am still working on mine. I have made major changes. 19:56 I expect to make more, and I intend to keep assessing this year after year, because as I grow, my relational environment will need to grow with me. Move toward people who stretch you. 20:09 Create distance where wisdom requires it. Walk closely with people who are building alongside you. Reach back and help somebody behind you, but do not confuse helping with carrying. Do not confuse caring with rescuing. 20:25 Do not confuse history with alignment, and do not believe you can want to grow for someone more than they want it for themselves. Look for people who want to go. Look for people who want to grow. Help them. 20:41 Encourage them. Challenge them. Walk with them, and keep asking yourself the question underneath this entire conversation: "Does my relational environment support the person I am trying to become?" 20:55 Because if the answer is no, changing your life may eventually require changing your proximity, and just as importantly, become somebody worth having in someone else's five. 21:07 [upbeat music] As we close, remember, you do not have to have everything figured out, and you do not have to change every area of your life today. 21:15 Take what stood out, think about where it applies, and identify the life domain that may need your attention right now. Maybe your next step is a decision. Maybe it's a conversation. 21:25 Maybe it's trying something, learning from it, and adjusting along the way. 21:29 That is how much of my own growth has happened, not through getting everything right, but through learning, testing, failing, reflecting, and continuing to move forward. 21:39 The goal is to keep moving toward greater alignment, deeper fulfillment, and an impact that reflects who you are, not who someone else thinks you should be. 21:49 Wherever you are starting from and whatever your purpose, calling, gifting, or current season may be, there is always room to grow and become more intentional. For additional tools and resources, visit 22:02 www.wired4impact.com. That is the number four. Wired4impact.com. Keep growing. Keep learning. Keep taking the next step, and remember, you are now wired for impact.
