Are your top 5 people who you want them to be? - Sammi Jaeger

Hey Hey,

I have a Friday Fuel Up all about friendships for you today.

You’ve probably heard that idea from Jim Rohn that we are the average of the five people we spend the most time with. This relates to the law of averages, which is the theory that the result of any given situation will be the average of all outcomes.

The quality of our relationships, not just romantic but all of our relationships with friends, family, peers, colleagues, clients impacts the quality of our life.

✈ When I moved from Adelaide to Sydney in 2014 (my husband Nathan stayed behind for 6 months) I went through a big adjustment in all of the relationships in my life - the dynamics shifted, new people came in and people who had been around a long time left. Some in more dramatic “break-up” ways, others in slow fades and longer gaps between chats. It became apparent that I had stayed close friends with some people because we had always been friends, not because we were still fuelling each other up and adding value to one another's lives. Whereas others the physical distance really didn’t change the depth of the relationship.

As I went about making new friends in a new city, I started to really consider what I value in the people I spend my time with. My most precious resource. Who do I want to spend it with? What are the qualities they have and what are they aspiring for in life? And am I the kind of person that they would choose to spend their time with?

Somewhere I picked up the concept of having three fairly distinct groups of relationships, and having a strong background in events, this resonates with me:

Front of stage - These are the social media type relationships who see only the performance of your life
Side of stage - These are the people who see your life, know a bit about what is going on throughout the tour and what the future plans might be
Back of stage - These are your most intimate crew, the people who see the tears, triumphs, blood, sweat and tears of your life

🎟 Once I had this framework, it was much easier to see who belonged where and who had perhaps needed to be reissued with different tickets, or maybe even no tickets at all.

When was the last time you did an “audit” of those five people? Audit sounds like a very formal and rigid word but perhaps take a few minutes today to write down those 5 people, maybe you have more, maybe you have less. Now, ask yourself three questions for each person on the list:

Do I feel good when I spend time with this person?
Do they have the right tickets?
What am I going to change?

When we invest in our relationships and our own relationships skills, everything gets that bit better and we can show up as a better version of ourselves to create a better world.



Sammi Jaeger
@sammisomewhere