The Three P’s: Purpose and People

Last week, I wrote about the “gotta haves, “ the three essentials that help sustain in living well-people, purpose and passion. Last week’s post was on passion and in September I blogged about the Power of Purpose, so this leaves people.

Study after study shows that having friends and a social life are key to healthy living and aging. Who we spend time with impacts how we think and feel about ourselves, and even impacts what we do. With that in mind, these are some ideas to consider about who is or isn’t in your life.

• Do the friend assessment: Take an inventory of the people in your life. Who do you spend the most time with? How do they make you feel? Do you look forward to seeing them? Are you relieved when they are gone? Do they help you make good choices for you? Do they bring you energy or take it from you? In her book, My Stroke of Insight, Dr. Jill Bolte Taylor talks about how to help a stroke patient. She describes the visitor that came bringing hope and encouragement versus the ones that took energy from her. In short, are you surrounding yourself with people that inspire you and are fun to be with?

• Avoid, reduce and eliminate the energy vampires in your life. There are people that always want something from you, get on our last nerve and in general zap ideas, strength and good feelings. It doesn’t matter their relationship to you, they don’t need to be in your orbit if they make you feel lousy.

• Have friends that are passionate: Again, it’s who you hang with that helps you define yourself. If your friends are passionate, it doesn’t have to be the same interests as yours, it increases the chances you’ll develop a passion if you don’t happen to have one.

• Care and invest in people. Whether it’s someone you’ve just met or an old friend you haven’t seen for a while, letting people you care about them and are willing to be there for them helps to retain friendships.

• Seek out new friendships: A very wise therapist told me many years ago that friendships are like a pail of water with a hole in the bottom. People are always leaving our lives because they move, change jobs, die, don’t want to be with you any more etc. etc. Therefore, if we want to keep the pail full, we need to continually be adding new people. So how do you meet people? Consider the following:
- Participate in a support group
- Engage in activities that you like doing-this increases the chances that you’ll meet someone who likes the same things you do.
- Attend parties and accept invitations from friends and families.
- Host a party and tell people to bring friends
- Volunteer, if for no other reason it gets you out of the house and if you are among other people, you have a greater chance of meeting someone.
-Join a church or civic organization (Rotary, Lions Club etc.)
- For more ideas, check out http://www.succeedsocially.com/sociallife