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My aim is to provide motivation and inspiration so you can create a high-performance lifestyle, nourish your body, strengthen your mind, and develop your spirit. My hope is that you use the knowledge, tips, and inspiration to improve your life, those in around you, and have an impact on the world.
But it all starts with you!
Having said that, the most important thing for making a difference is how you feel. That is why I consider different angles when working clients. Some people benefit most from improving their health, energy, and focus, others from getting a deeper understanding of themselves, and some from creating relationships that support them in their personal and business goals alike.
This post is about relationships as a crucial part of our well-being, which also impacts your performance, both mental and physical.
Importance of relationships
No matter how healthy your body is, how mentally strong you are, how skilful and successful you are, if there is nobody else to share your success with, your life will be incomplete. Interpersonal relationships (relationships between people) have the power to multiply your results, good or bad.
Great relationships, therefore, have the power to make your successes double the effect while blunting the negative effects any setbacks and struggles you encounter on your path.
Bad relationships have exactly the opposite effect. They make your success seem not as important and bring you down, exhausting you in the process.
As these effects compound, you will more and more likely lose your motivation, inspiration and vision to move forward and start focusing on surviving.
Just like interpersonal relationships, you require to develop and nurture your relationship with yourself. If you don’t care about yourself, don’t love yourself, don’t set healthy boundaries, why should others treat you better?
At any time, we show people how they should treat us. We give them an example of how we treat ourselves. If you tolerate when a person behaves badly with you, they will keep treating you badly. Would a person who has a self-respect keep around people who treat him or her badly? No!
By nurturing yourself, your love for yourself, you remove people who treat you badly from your life. Some of them will stop when they see you don’t tolerate it. Some of them won’t. You need to release them from your life. It might be scary at first, especially if the person in question is somebody close to you, but there is too much at stake – your life, your well-being, and sometimes even mental sanity.
To sum it up, what you need to do is to:
- Nurture your self-love and self-respect, develop your self-esteem;
- Remove negative people from your life and keep the great people in your life. What doesn’t grow dies.
How to create connection with people
When I was younger, I experienced a frustration that led me to where I am now. I wanted to get a girlfriend. I was desperate. The craving allowed me to search for the information about how to get a girlfriend, part of which was starting a conversation with a woman.
While the information I got to was not very good to my standards nowadays, it definitely helped me to shape my mindset and grow.
What I want to focus on now, is to provide you with information and strategies that you can use to create more impactful connections with people you meet, right now!
Be Present
Your attention is often the greatest gift you can give to somebody.
The connection happens even before you start speaking. Most people focus on what to say, while the most important part is how you say it.
Just look at your experience from the past.
You can clearly distinguish when you hear an unsincere “Hey, how are you?“. As if they don’t even want to know. The answer is not expected, it is more of an act of politeness, like saying Hello.
So to get back to my original point, your energy dictates how you feel about it, and what energy you bring into a possible conversation.
When you meet eyes with a stranger, when you smile or when you frown, this is when an exchange of energy happens. And if you are present, you can feel the energy of the other person, you can feel into them, you can notice how much attention they give you.
To get their attention, it is important to establish an eye contact with them, and then you say hello. This is how you make your hello count. People will start responding to you much more and you will be able to create a conversation from there.
I have coached guys who ask me “Daniel, but how do I start a conversation?” or “How do I keep a conversation going?”. My answer to that is very simple: you look them in the eyes, you say hello and maybe ask a question. And you wait for their answer. If they don’t answer, it is perfectly O.K. but in general, they will answer because you had established an eye contact before and you got their attention.
On top of that, when you add a smile to it, it will make you come across as a friendly person. That is something that nervous people need to pay attention to because when you are nervous, you don’t smile, or have a creepy smile, and it ruins the impression. There is nothing wrong with being nervous but I want you to own it!
To sum it up:
- Get their attention.
- Smile.
- Say hello.
Connect
This brings me to another point, which is about keeping the conversation going. Again, a very frequent question I get from the younger guys and it has a lot to do with connection.
Listen closely because this is super-important.
You cannot sincerely connect with everyone and you cannot force a connection.
People new to networking, people looking for advice on how to get a specific person into their life, and people, in general, don’t understand this critical point. You cannot force a connection. You can create it, but to create it, you sincerely need to be interested in that person, whether it is a friend, a business partner, or your next date.
I am talking about deep connection.
Like we discussed before, you want to keep and bring people into your life, who support you and make your life purposeful and fulfilled. People who bring you down or are in the neutral territory don’t have a place in it. What doesn’t grow, dies. Your relationships, connections, energy, your business.
Keep your eyes open and see things for what they are. Often, we want to see that person, that opportunity to live up to our ideals. Like when a man sees a beautiful woman and he gets all the ideas about how perfect she is and maybe even start imagining how their relationship together would be and when they start talking, the conversation is unfulfilling.
For your overall happiness and well-being, you require the best people in your life.
Being Vulnerable
Another critical part of connecting with people is being vulnerable. We have a tendency to put different masks to protect ourselves from harm. Most of the time, the possibility of harm is not even real, but important is that we might feel threatened and that is why we do it.
To create deep connections and fulfilling relationships, you need to be willing to put away that mask, strip down your clothes and be vulnerable. It allows the energy to flow between you and the other person.
You also give the other person an example, you lead them to open themselves. When you open you open yourself first, they will feel safer to open themselves to you.
That was my secret to deep connections.
Attracting the Right People Into Your Life
Let me tell you how I understand the law of attraction when it comes to meeting and attracting the right people into your life.
At any time you attract certain kind of people (and situations) into your life. Most people are unaware of it, and it seems to “happen” to them. They are uncoscious about what they do, how they do it, or why they do it and so it might seem really random to them. From time to time they meet a great person and they might be even unawere about it.
When you take a look at your friends, the kind of people who add you on the social media or the kind of people you meet on the streets during your normal day, you will be able to see certain patterns emerge.
As you grow as a person, the quality of the people that you meet and pay to attention will rise as well. There will always be people who just want to use you, abuse you, or parasite on you and it is your responsibility to notice them and get rid of them relatively quickly.
If you don’t they will bring down you to their level.
For example, at one point in my life I noticed that people who I bring into my life keep struggling in one way or the other. I did not like it because as much as I wanted to help them, I could not. Then I realized that it is me being dependent on their struggle. I wanted to be useful, I wanted to be helpful, but since these people did not want to be helped I ended in depression. I had a perfect recipe for disappointment!
Later, after I let go of the need to help these people, to save them, this kind of people removed themselves from my life. All they wanted was a person they could be co-depended with, in a victim-savior kind relationship and when I said to myself “Enough, I don’t want drama in my life.” they disappeared and found somebody else who they could be unhappy with.
If you keep growing and stay open to people, you will be able to notice that you meet more and more of great people. And you will even ask yourself, where were these people hiding all that time?!
The truth is, they have always been there, but you were so focused on different things, like trying to save the wrong people in my case, that you did not notice the right people. And even if you would, they would not be attracted to your state at that point.
The reality does not change. Out of 100 random people, there will be two or three people who are amazing. But suddenly, it will seem like there are 10 of them in any group of 100. That is because you attract them, you notice them more often, your senses get sharper or you simply start a conversation with them without fearing the outcome and that allows you to connect with them.
So no, it is not any magic! You develop a different set of skills, traits, and behaviours that allow you to notice the right people at the right time.
That’s it! My understanding of how the law of attraction works in social relationships.
If you are unsatisfied with the kind of people and situations that keep repeating in your life, you can always do something about it. It all comes down to your level of self-esteem and how you act in alignment with it, i.e. you don’t tolerate drama so you consciously make a decision to keep the drama queens out of your life and guess what?! You will notice that the number of drama queens in your life is sudenly zero!