Watch the Company You Keep: Why Become Your Best Self

Photo by Steve P2008 / CC BY

Be aware of the company that you keep and be on your toes when you are sharing your time with others.  The purpose of this writing is to get you to realize that each person you spend time with influences how you emotionally think and feel.

You should always be aware of how you feel around each person you encounter.  For example, you can perceive the feelings you have when talking with another person, such as do you feel happy, inspired, or does the person leaves you feeling sad, demotivated, and energy-sapped.  Humans have the capacity to become familiar with their emotional state to consciously recognize their reactions around the company they may be keeping.  When conversing with others, you have the ability to examine comments exchanged during each interaction.  As a result, you can study your emotions to examine your feelings in that moment.

Benefits When You Watch the Company You Keep

Personal and Professional Development

At work, unscheduled conversations and lots of small talk can derail career advancement.  Likewise, personal development takes time.  The process requires a series of focused actions and steps to fulfill your aspirations.  When you fail to monitor the mood that other people have contributed to you feeling, it takes a great deal of effort to redirect your attention and focus to work on your goals.

Financial Aspirations

You may work for yourself or you may want to earn extra income on the side.  To make money, it is imperative that you recognize that time is money.  Furthermore, working for yourself requires motivation and demands that you participate in high quality, useful activities to accomplish your business aims.


Drawbacks When You Watch the Company You Keep

Emotional drain

Poor relationships fail to improve your mood.  For example, unfocused people waste your time.  They tend to unload their troublesome situations onto you.  The sad part is they rely on you to listen, with no intention of solving the problem.

Time drain

To get where you want to go in life, you must prepare and pay particular attention to your activities.  You cannot progress toward your goals without following a well-coordinated plan.  Time quickly runs out.  So, occupy your time with people who can add value to your life, instead of depriving your dreams of the vitality that is a necessity to energize and activate your dreams.

Lack of motivation

There are people in life who lack motivation.  These people do not have specific interests.  They are not enthusiastic about anything special.  Their lack of excitement can damage your efforts to fulfill your ambition.  You must safeguard your mind and your time so that your experience, thoughts, and feelings are positively influenced by people who have behaviors and information that will be useful to fulfilling your dreams.


Ways to Improve How You Watch the Company You Keep

Willfully inspecting your internal responses as you engage with other people, gives you information, which can help you modify your involvement with individuals who unfavorably affect you.  As a result, you can take measures to lessen the amount of time you mingle with that person.  You should continuously review how you feel to protect your physical and emotional well-being.

You should be aware that keeping company with people that have an unpleasant influence on you could cause unwanted results.  For example, desires, hopes, and dreams that you want to realize, keeping the wrong company can stop you from doing what is necessary to reach your goals.

On the other hand, keeping company with people whose presence has a desirable effect on your inner-self, can energize your well-being.  These individuals tend to fire you up and elevate you mentally.  As a result, their spark triggers strong feelings of want within you to have “something” or wish for “something” to happen, that encourages your developmental growth, or you activate your increased yearning for “something”.

The focus of this viewpoint is to get you to become aware of the company you keep by understanding that the time you invest in people is consciously important and worthy of your attention, because if you fail to examine how others influence your emotional state, you will become dissatisfied with your personal or professional situations.  From my point of view, human beings must critically examine the moral makeup, behavior, and attitudes of the people they spend time with.  Using this approach enables you to become aware of your thinking and the feelings you experience around someone, whose influence may later reflect in your behavior.  My suggestion is that by taking the specific action of observation; you will reveal unknown information to help yourself understand the far-reaching consequences that result when keeping bad company because people can have a major impact on your success and each person can greatly affect the quality of your life.

To test this theory, pay close attention to the next person you encourage.  Observe the feelings you experience.  For example, do you experience a feeling of satisfaction or enjoyment?  On the other hand, you should also observe whether you feel uneasy or inconvenienced.

Becoming aware of the company you keep has advantages and disadvantages.  Another opinion is to consider whether it is okay to mix socially with everyone and allow each person to spend time with you as they see fit.  To illustrate this point, let us assume that a person named Janet, needs personal development.  This means she feels a powerful desire to increase her intense yearning to make discoveries and test the potential of what she finds.  Therefore, it frustrates her when people visit her unexpectedly, because she has to draw upon mental resources to make small talk.  For Janet, she dislikes these inconsequential talks because she feels they do not contribute to her overall success.  Furthermore, her perception is that the conversation shared by some of the people she spends time with, detracts from her ability to achieve her personal and professional goals.



When you allow anyone to squander your time, you are likely to experience failure in achieving your goals.  The bottom line is that you should be honest with yourself and pay attention to the company you are keeping.  It is virtually impossible for you to get in touch with the person you want to become when you allow any and every one to dictate how you spend your time.  Vigilantly monitoring who you spend time with, can help you find the right type of people who trigger your hunger and contribute to you working towards getting what you truly crave out of your life.