What To Do If Your Friends Are Always Dragging You Down | Rich Roll

what are lower companions lower companions is another term uh from recovery As the adage goes uh as you pursue your drinking or using career uh it starts out fun drugs work right it's a good time drinking is pretty reliable it's going to produce a certain kind of effect right and alcoholics and drug addicts um they don't become addicts because it's dysfunctional on day one they do it because it's filling a need it is doing something positive in their life in my case it made me feel like myself it was like wrapping myself in a warm blanket where all my insecurities and my fears would vanish and I was able to be a social person in Social settings which was something that was very difficult for me my whole life and it functioned that way for quite some time until it didn't and then your life slowly starts to degrade you start making decisions that you rationalize that aren't in your best interest it becomes a little lonelier the chaos Factor starts to increase the negative repercussions of your behavior start to stack and escalate it starts to get uncomfortable your higher companions your good friends the people that love you who have your best interest at heart start to flee from the hills and you begin to search out other people who are vibrating at your wavelength who are not going to give you a hard time for your behavior and are more than happy to do the thing that you want to do which is to get loaded or get high so you find yourself in really compromising strange sometimes scary situations with people you would not ordinarily hang out with because you share this one thing which is you just want to lose yourself in this substance or perhaps with people who are addicted to a certain Behavior it could be gambling it could be you know it's like anything you're going to find people who are going to co-sign whatever Behavior it is and then as the addiction escalates even more you start to run through those people yeah you get lower and lower and lower and lower until there's maybe that one guy and if not you're just home alone in a dark room with the shades pulled down um and that's how it ended for me for sure the idea of lower companions although not uh super romantic I think is really useful and the first time I'd ever heard of it was from you and I think that even for people that don't have a substance addiction dependency the idea of of people who don't have your best interests at heart who don't make you show up as your better self the self that you wish that you were more of the time I think there's something to take from that and you know I met across my nightclub promoting career I met about a million people face to face stood on the front door of nightclubs three men a lot of alcoholics and drug addicts correct yeah and a lot of people that and in that position 10 P.M to 1am outside of a nightclub it's all the romance and none of the destitution right because it's full of energy they've got the girls on their arm or the their girlfriends are with them and you see them go in upright and you see them come out horizontal um who's the guy who comes out last yeah it was that guy yeah well yeah the idea of lower companions I just think there's a lot of people that listen to the show and this is one of the things like if you want to make me cry by sending me a message this isn't a request but the messages that I get that make me weep or tear up the most are ones where people say something like hey man like I'm a ice hockey player from rural Canada and I'm 23 and none of my friends understand me and when I listen to your show I feel less alone um I can't talk to any of my friends about like what I'm interested in all that they want to do is keep doing the same thing every weekend the idea of self-actualization is getting a bag in with the boys on the weekend yeah right and that is you know it's a even more in some ways maybe an even more pernicious type of lower companion because does not there's not even the red flag flying above their head do you know what I mean yeah it's not necessarily a bad influence it's just uh at best neutral or perhaps somebody who's um insidiously but very gradually undermining the quality of that contract of water life like you I also get a lot of those types of messages and it's very meaningful to me and I think what you're speaking about is super important of course there's that adage you're the average of the five people oh yeah sorry the average of the five podcasts probably right but I think it is Worthy of examination this topic because most people just end up in the environment that they're in and they never try to be in the in the Pilot chair of how they're directing their Community there's a lot of talk about mentors I want this person to be my mentor I want Tony Robbins to be my mentor or garyvee or you know choose your choose your person but the truth is each and every one of us in our community is surrounded by people that are wiser than us in various ways people that can help us and the nature of that Community can be crafted and cultivated by you with a little mindful intention people are good they want to help people I know that I feel good when I'm helping somebody that is my primary purpose as a sober person is to help other alcoholics to achieve sobriety and that is the source of um my greatest sense of self when I'm in that process so I think to the extent that you can engage with the people around you from a place of Greater mindfulness and and exercise some discretion about the people that you're spending time with and not just go with the flow because these are the dudes in the locker room or what have you I think you're you're getting yourself way ahead of the game and listen not everybody has a lot of high-minded people around them and I think it's you know important to you know note that and that's why shows like yours and podcasts that are out there I think are so important when I was your age and when I was younger I mean when I was a young man trying to figure out my way in the world and who I wanted to be there was no internet I couldn't dial up a podcast and listen to people tell stories about their careers or or how they overcame hardship or how they did what they did and and I'm a guy who's embarrassingly well educated and yet that was not available to me so when I'm creating a show and I know you do this as well I'm very conscious of that person who lacks community in their respective region um and trying to make tools available to that person that they ordinarily wouldn't have access to and it's incredibly powerful it's such a gift there's an enormous library of people sharing their stories about how they did what they did or why they chose this career and why it's important to them and and how they think about their relationships and and what it means to you know be a man or be a woman and and you know walk the planet with integrity and those are the things that I'm always thinking about in terms of the conversation that I'm having like I want to put out that high vibration but to your point choose your companions wisely and if your friends are not raising the vibration of what you're trying to achieve or they're just giving you [ __ ] and making fun of you and whenever you're Earnest and share a goal or a dream they put you down it might be time to upgrade and that's harsh uh and there's gracious ways of doing that but I think it's important to seek out people who support you and find older people who are a little bit further down the path who can say here's how I did it or I see where you're struggling um plenty of those people are around and it doesn't have to be one person I think everybody should have a board of advisors or a council of directors like I don't call um when I'm having a an issue in my marriage uh I will call one person but when I'm having a professional issue or an issue around sobriety that's going to be an entirely different person everybody comes with their own unique set of experiences and and wisdom and you know accrued knowledge as a result of how they live their life and these are not famous people they're just people in my community they're friends that I've chosen simply you know in many ways because of the vibration that they carry and and the way that they hold themselves out into the world and I can tell you as somebody who's been practicing that for a very long time it's improved my life in ways I couldn't possibly tabulate like it is incredibly important who you spend your time with I uh tweeted this a little while ago saying I'm in the very fortunate position where most of my friends are also my role models and that's not that my role models are my friends right it's the other way around it's that the people that I have I'm friends with in the UK in America people that are Beyond mundanely normal do things that on a dinnerly basis I look at and I go that's extraordinary like the way that they dealt with a difficult conversation that they had to have the way that they made a an awkward decision with regards to their business where somebody wasn't fitting and they said it in the the right way early with courage and bravery uh you know right up to my housemate had his uh a clip from his YouTube channel shared on Rogan a couple of days ago so like he's fired up for that I'm like you know each of these different people like extraordinary in some ways and unbelievably normal in many many more ways um and I understand you know if this is if you're listening to this and it's triggering a little bit of something inside of you going well it must be nice you know living in Austin Texas or Calabasas or whatever and you're surrounded by all these people and you know you've got interest in blue ticks knocking on your door asking to be friends I got I I do get that but the bottom line is that you will devolve to the lowest common denominator amongst the friend group that you're in and if you have the luxury of being able to sit and listen to pontificating podcasts for like two hours you are probably built to take charge of that situation and I would bet you that there are a really non-insignificant number of people that live within three miles of you who all would love to do the same thing and yeah I met about a million people across my nightlife career and had a handful of friends um that's because a lot of the guys that worked with us came and went they moved on to different careers Club promo isn't a typically a long-term career um and I realized that my funnel exposure to conversion friend ratio was off your funnel to conversion friend ratio so think about how wide that's such like a bro science term welcome welcome to my podcast welcome to my podcast Rachel um the size of people that I was reaching compared with the number of friends that I had I understood was so I couldn't believe it right and I was like okay something's up like this is the I something is up and what it was largely my fault and the reason that it was my fault was that I was behaving in a way that I thought would make other people like me and what that meant was the people who did like me I didn't actually truly like in large part and the people who I would have liked saw this person that wasn't any yeah you become you're unlikable to those people yes I'm unlikable to the people that I would like right for precisely the reason that I'm playing this Persona right um water rises to its own level and you can't transmit something you haven't got another recovery adage which basically means it basically means if you're trying to befriend somebody because they have something that you want and you try to pretend that you're at their level to say whatever it is you think they want to hear from you so that they feel comfortable befriending you it's very uh transparent that that is a false and shallow gesture right like you can't if you're sitting behind a microphone and you're pontificating about a whole bunch of [ __ ] but it's not a result of earned experience in your own life then it's not going to have the resonant effect that you think it would have because you didn't earn it right so in recovery it means walking your talk basically and when you walk your talk and that talk and that walk is integrated with a value system that is slowly improving your life then the water in your glass raises and the level of your companions will raise in lockstep with that so I think it's important that if you want to attract a certain caliber of person into your life then you have to live your life in accordance with the kinds of values that would be attractive to that person and as somebody who's spoken a lot about dating like this is the same thing with relationships right you're not going to attract that mate who is living a more aspirational life than you until you can level up your own life in other news this episode is brought to you by element element is a tasty electrolyte drink mixed with 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flavors with your first box that's drink lmnt.com modern wisdom thank you very much for tuning in if you enjoyed that clip with Rich then press here for the full episode in all its Glory