“I want to be surrounded by people who make me more .”
How might you finish that sentence?
Fun? Caring? Effective? Wise? Brave?
What provocative conversation would those finished sentences initiate in your organization if you dared to ask?
Our book club conversation last week covered six titles on Bringing Out Your Best. Four of them, most notably Angela Duckworth’s latest book Situated, pointed to the importance of our “situation” in bringing out our best. Not just our physical environment, although that matters (see Leidy Klotz’s new book In a Good Place for that), but also our friends, colleagues and mentors.
We likely don’t need to be told to choose our people wisely, since we become like the people we spend the most time with.
What we may need to be reminded of is to be more specific about imagining what (or who) we want to become like.
Then we engineer our situation accordingly.
In her book Find Your People, Jennie Allen reminds us that the connections we’re craving may be right in front of us — people we already know, who are open to creating more meaningful relationships with us if we would only put ourselves out there to initiative that deeper connection.
Admittedly, I’m better at articulating the concept than I am at answering my own question. In what directions do I want my people to give me a nudge? And if I feel like I don’t currently have those people in my life, could I invite them in? Or invite those already in to go deeper?
The personal applications are clear. But there’s lots of room to apply this idea to our work contexts too. I wonder how we could invite our work peers into being some of the people who make us more ? Consider this your invitation to fill in your blank, then fill in your people.
