Before even touching the last part of my triangle I want to emphasize the fact that if you have the two first parts down, this part handles itself naturally with some willpower. However, describing this part might give you a sort of “jump start” in all of this and help you get moving a long the way for self fulfillment. And the last part is this: surrounding yourself with what you want to become. Bare in mind that this works in both small and huge contexts, in both easy and difficult challenges. For example if you want to get shitfaced but you do not have any money, surrounding yourself with friends who all has habits to drink a lot of alcohol, becoming drunk is probably not that big of a problem. However if you want to become a master at snowboarding you have to spend a lot of time with experts in this area and furthermore watch what they are doing with great precision for a long time, then try yourself. Fail, and do it again. And learn more, and so on. Surrounding yourself with what you want to become is usually something that people start off with when they decide to get good at something, whatever that is. First of all they are very inspired, which starts to create the vision in your mind. “Maybe I can be like this guy, imagine how cool that would be.”
Another thing that is common when doing this, at least in the early part of one's development is to take value. As you are new (in the context of learning a skill) you are not as experienced as other people and you do not have much of value to offer, so you naturally take more value than what you give. There is nothing wrong with that. And I am not telling you to go out there and suck energy from people in order to become what they are. What I am trying to do is more to create that map , as I mentioned earlier.
When you start to hang out with more people that has the same ambitions as you have, the same superficial desires and what not, early on what might happen is that you start to annoy these people. You know when you are talking to someone and you know that they want something from you, feels bad does it not? It is the same thing here, you are trying to get something from them, whether it is inspiration, tips, strategies or any other kind of value for that matter. They might even unconsciously start to see you as a threat. However instead of putting yourself down for doing this, I believe you can view it as a part of your development, although, it is not a destination you want to get lost in. You are simply doing it so you can become the person you want to become and ultimately so you one day have the capacity to offer incredible value to people, just like the your mentors.
(One thing that I love about personal development and people that are into personal development is that when it is clear that both you and the person or persons you are learning from are all accepting the roles given to them, there is no one causing anyone to be annoyed, because they are all into it because that is what they want. The mentor wants to give and the student needs to take. To me, that is the ultimate beauty of spending time with like minded people who are into self development.)
So how do you practically surround yourself with like minded people and people that you want to be like? It is easy, think about it. If you want to be good at football and your vision is to become a great football player one day, what do you do? You join a team. Let us say that your vision circles around something that is somewhat more complicated and more dynamic than becoming a football player(not at all saying that it is easy becoming an end game football player, believe me I have tried.) Let us say that you vision yourself as someone offering value to people through the Internet. You do not really have a clear option to join a team and go practice offering value through the Internet every week, but what you might find is a forum on the Internet dedicated to this. Or let us say that this forum does not exist, why not create one? In that way you are already offering value through the Internet. My point is that whatever you want for yourself, it is easy to break down how to surround yourself what those kind of people that want the same thing. And believe me when I say that there are people out there that want what you want.
Surrounding yourself with other people that enhances your new sense of self and inspires you towards further action is essentially a process. And as every process, it starts with baby steps.
Firstly you might start to post at a forum related to your passion, then after chatting with the same person on that forum for a while you decide to meet him/her over a cup of coffee and further discuss your passion together. That might eventually lead to building a completely new social circle with people WHO ARE ALL INTO what you are into. And it all started with that single forum post that “RandomDude1739” responded to. How beautiful is that?
In conclusion, consistently surrounding yourself with like minded people takes some courage and requires you to step outside of your current comfort zone. At first you might not find what you are looking for, but that just might be an indicator that your vision is not clear enough and that you are, to start with, not completely sure what you want. Moreover I believe that surrounding yourself with people that you want to be like can be great for learning to realize what your core purpose is. However bare in mind that you do not want to spend a lot of time with people just so you can rely on their identity, you want to develop your own in their company.
Lastly, surrounding yourself with like minded people that encourages, inspires, motivates, criticizes and consciously or unconsciously teaches you things is an internal experience. What I mean by this is that it necessarily does not have to take place in the external world, for example you can easily find like minded people through the Internet and imagine how much you have in common and so on. However I fully believe that the most effective and FUN way to surround yourself with people is to actually be around them as much as humanly possible.
When you are developing a new identity for yourself it is common to experience loosing connection with your friends, a few or even most of them. This, to me, along with other phenomenas related to that, is one of the biggest challenges in self development especially when growing up. However that is material for another in depth article.
To sum it up. The three parts are having a vision, being in charge and surrounding yourself with what you want to become. How these three parts collaborate, enhance or work together is up to you to find out.
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