Have you ever thought about building a "winning" team of friends?

What type of people do you surround yourself with?

If you sit down and think about your friends now, would you consider them a "winning" set of friends?  When I ask that, I'm not asking "Are they great, close friends?" Obviously they are. If they were not, you wouldn't be surrounding yourself with them. But you can surround yourself with essentially two different types of friends.

One type of friend is the friend that will be there anytime you call them to "just talk", which is always great to have in your life.  However, a true "Winning Team" for living an unbroken life consists of the type of friends that when you feel like you can't do something they are behind you, pushing you to keep driving on until you get there.  A "Winning Team" of friends is the type of friends that hold you to a much higher standard than anyone else because they care about you and want to see you succeed.

My "Winning Team" is made up of sucessful people who have already achieved lots of goals in life: judges, attorneys, athletes, etc.  The reason I have chosen my " Winning Team" so carefully is because -- although you might not realize it -- after some time of being around your friends in everyday life you begin to compare yourself to them.  If you're always surrounding yourself with people who make a habit of saying  "I can't do that" or who are the the type of people who do just the minumum necessary to "get by in life," you will eventually find yourself starting to develop the same habits.

Your own "Winning Team" does not have to be totally comprised of highly sucessful and positive people.  There are going to be friends that you meet in life that you just fall in love with their personality and can't resist being their friend.  That's perfectly fine, but the key to building that "Winning Team" is making sure you diversify that team and that you have more positively influential people than you do negative ones on your team.  My "team" does consist of those sucessful people that I need to help encourage me during tough situations, BUT it also consists of a couple of that great friends that I met during high school and the short time I've been in college.  Those high school and college friends may not necessarily encourage me like some of my other friends, but my life is influenced by them just as well, although in different ways. Tthese are the friends that you can go to sporting events with just "hang out" with from time to time. Without being aware of it, you might actually be a vital member of their "Winning Team".

A good way of thinking about your "team" is imagining yourself to be the quarterback on a football team.  Would you want your offensive line made up of people that just wanted to do enough to get to the end of the play? People who want to do just enough to get off the field alive? Absolutely not! You want a lineup of people who are going to put all of their effort into blocking for you and encouraging you to become a better player, instead of convincing you to just do whatever you have to before leaving the field.

In order to truly live an "unbroken life," it's very important to surround yourself with a "Winning Team." While a mediocre team might be there to console you if you LOSE, a "Winning Team" is there to enocurage you to get back up and try again!

It's very important who you choose to be surrounded by in life!

Mark -- March 10, 2010