The KPI for determining who belongs in your life

Recently, when I was out with some friends, we were conversing about how our lives had changed.

Disclaimer: We had purely hang out to catch up, however, how our colloquy deviated from boys to businesses, real estate, startups, and books is definitely a story for today.

So, to get to the bone, Mary, Rose and I found ourselves consumed by books and things like sentence structures, inverted pyramids, and all these nice literary devices, and given that I’m a big fan of these things, I just found myself carrying the tune. I couldn’t stop myself; this was my house, and I’m always fluent and smart, but I was remarkably brilliant at the time. I was on a roll, and these girls were periphrastically helping me dream-up my future and make my enormous goals seem like a picnic.

Quite analogous to my recent ex’s conversations.

Pete was positive vibrations. For example, he disregarded words “impossible, ridiculous, or too clichè,” because it all depended on the source of the message and how tenacious they were. Meaning, it’s only infeasible if we decide it is, it’s only goofy when inconsistent, it’s only cliché if you choose not to tactfully work on it… Do you get Pete? I did get Pete, and in just a few moments with him, his philosophies somehow always triggered some positivity in me. He got me thinking big and in-ordinary more like my friends. Huh.

Some people just bring out the best in us, don’t they?

Have you ever found yourself in situations where you didn’t recognize your usual great-self? It’s a scenario of you’re usually happy and great but with these people… oh, you suddenly become broad-day dull, toxic even or a little conforming and marginally ugly due to all the discomfort?

For the longest time in my self-discovery journey, I thought there was something wrong with me. Yeah. I thought I was self-sabotaging even… For when I met some people, I could fail to stop myself from identifying everything wrong with them. Something was definitely up with me, me thought!

I also tried to lure myself into considering having multiple personalities; well, perhaps I acted differently with different people because it was two of me in one or whatever the multiple personality concept meant…

Until I realized it was just me. Just me. Acting accordingly. Just me, studying the room and indentifying that I don’t belong with a certain group of people. Just me having boundaries and values. Just me choosing to be myself over what was expected of me. Just my gut knowing what’s right for me.

I didn’t have to fault-scrutinize myself or urge myself to fit in all the time. Some people are just not meant to be in our lives, for one simple reason; they bring out the worst in us.

So our personalities or how we come across really boil down to one thing: the nature of the environment.

The people we associate with either bring out the best or the worst in us, and this, for me, is the Key Performance Indicator (KPI) in all types of relationships.

Consider meeting someone; your life has probably been blissful until this point, when it becomes a battlefield or full of grumpiness due to a simple verbal or nonverbal connection with this individual…

If, on the other hand, you meet someone who effortlessly fills in the space, supports you in progressing to the next level, and simply makes your life better directly or indirectly, this is the type to keep.

People inspire you, or they drain you. Pick them wisely — Hans F. Hansen