Cleaning out the Closet‏

When you are trying to live the great life that you desire you have to pay attention to the relationships that you keep. There are two types of negative relationships that you really need to shed if you are to be able to take your life to the next level. Sometimes it is very hard to get rid of relationships that you have already invested a lot of yourself into.

As I look back into my past there have been a lot of relationships that I've dealt with as being one sided. This is a relationship that is beneficial to one party and not to the other. These people aren't bad people, they just don't give back to the relationship. These relationships can be very hard to identify because most of the time these are people who have been around along time and may have never done anything wrong to you. "Don't bite the hand that feeds you." Words to live by when you are one of these people. Some times they do things that is beneficial to them, but describe it as something that they did for you.

I personally had difficulty realizing how much these relationships were effecting me. I would make the attempt over and over to get them to realize that the door needed to swing both ways and it wouldn't happen. I would spend a lot of time being frustrated because things wouldn't change. You CAN NOT change a person, if you are spending a lot of time anyone, a friend, a significant other, or a relative, you have to remember this just isn't possible. That is why you have to sever the tie so they don't have the ability to drag you down.

I know it is hard to sever the tie with family, that is why you have to minimize the damage by removing other negative relationships completely. You can reduce the situation by limiting your exposure to those people. I'm not saying that you just don't care about these people, you just create distance so you can move forward.

The other type is the relationships you have with people who are always negative. Sometimes it is good for a friend to help you look at both sides of a situation when you are making choices, but there are times when they should just be supportive. Some people are just negative all the time and these people can really drag you down. This can be a touchy subject, because all of us have times that this happens to us. Here again I'm not saying don't not care about those people but create distance from them. You don't need someone always telling you that you can't do something that you want to do.

The negativity that can be brought from these two types of relationships can be very difficult to cope with. Don't let other people bring you down, frankly I asked people to just get on board with the things that I am doing or get off the train. That is where the title of this blog came from, I personally am not going to let people hold me back. Good friends are something that we need to gather around us and the others we need to at least hold at arms distance.

The next post I will talk about those friends, but for now it is time to just clean out the closet.