circle of 5

Jim Rohn, the famous business philosopher/ personal development sage, had this as one of his 12 pillars of success. Your circle of 5 is the 5 people you spend most time with in any activity. This is where the popular bumper sticker wisdom “it is hard to soar like eagles, when you hang out with turkeys” comes from. He would break it down into groups-positive, neutral and negative.

 The positive people, you want to spend more time with them. The neutral people you can give or take away time that you spend with them. And the negative people do your best to limit your interactions with them. When you apply this to your training, think about the people in your group-are they striving to get better and willing to work hard/study new ideas or are they content to repeat the same old, same old? Does your group make you step up to the plate or do they listen politely to all your excuses and commiserate with you?

What about your coach? Does he hold your feet to the fire? Does he/she have the velvet rope policy? If you continue to “excuse” your way out of missed workouts, is that really doing you any good?

So, take a hard look at your training group and your coach, are they helping you to improve and holding you to high expectations or are they letting you drift along? You have a choice about which group you can belong to. Coaches have an obligation to hard workers in a group to ask the less motivated workers to train with a different group.

Remember, train smarter.