CHAPTER 8
Shift Your Posse, because Who You Ride with Matters
The number eight is my favorite number, and creating powerful relationships is one of my favorite subjects. I love the numeral 8 because when you write it, you can’t tell where the number starts or ends. That’s why spiritually, 8 represents infinity. It represents abundance, wealth, and prosperity. It represents constant and perpetual growth, evolution, and advancement. It also means new beginnings.
Now look back over the words I’ve italicized, because I did it intentionally. Do these words correctly describe your business, personal, spiritual, and romantic relationships? They should!
Relationships should add value to your life, just as you as a person whom people relate to should be adding great value to the lives of others.
• Your posse counts.
• Your clique counts.
• Your crew matters.
• Your friends are important.
• Your associates are crucial.
• Your connections are key.
• Your peeps are paramount.
• Your tribe is transformational.
• Your entourage is essential.
The people you hang with matter and will determine with mathematical exactitude both whether you arrive at your ultimate destination in life and whether you actually enjoy the ride along the way.
It’s time that you shift your relationships into a higher gear. I believe that there are relationships in your life right now that could be responsible for changing the entire trajectory of your life and career, but that you simply are not capitalizing on.
I guarantee you that there are people in your life who are simply waiting on you to “graduate the conversation.” They could rock your world in terms of business knowledge, financial acumen, family matters, personal growth, politics, or health and wellness, but you’ve yet to tap into that aspect of them because you’re currently having very surface-level conversations—how they’re doing, how’s work, how’s family.
Have you ever had a conversation with someone in your life whom you typically would only talk about ABC with, then all of a sudden, something happens, and it forces you to talk or ask about XYZ and then boom. You say, “I didn’t know you knew anything about XYZ!” and they say back to you, “Well, that’s because you didn’t ask!” In that seminal and singular moment, you realize that your friend is a much deeper, richer, and fuller vessel from which to draw than you previously thought.
What’s worse, maybe you’ve needed something or asked a friend, colleague, coworker, or family member to refer someone to you who can help you with your need, only to have them refer you to a close friend or family member whom you already know, but whom you never knew they could help you in that way. Everyone seemed to know their capabilities better than you did. Have you ever had that happen to you before? Why does it happen? It happens because familiarity breeds contempt, and we tend to take for granted what we become too familiar with. Think about it for a quick moment. Whom have you become so familiar with that you simply take them for granted and stay on the surface with them, rather than going deeper? I know that some names are already coming to mind!
It’s time to shift into a higher gear and graduate the conversation.
Your Posse Audit
Right now, list the top twenty people in your life whom you talk, text, and video chat with the most. Next to each person’s name, simply circle whether this person is adding positive value to your life or subtracting positive value from your life. Give yourself five points for every “adding” that you circle, and give yourself zero points for every “subtracting.”
1. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
2. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
3. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
4. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
5. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
6. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
7. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
8. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
9. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
10. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
11. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
12. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
13. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
14. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
15. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
16. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
17. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
18. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
19. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
20. _____________________________ (adding or subtracting)
If you scored 90 to 100, you’ve got a great posse; continue to cultivate it.
If you scored 70 to 85, you have a decent posse, but it could use up-leveling.
If you scored 50 to 65, you really need to replace half the folks in your life.
If you scored 0 to 45, you need a complete overall of your relationships!
How do you feel about your score?
What’s your plan of action for increasing your score and improving your numbers? Because numbers never improve by themselves. Remember that. You must be intentional about growing your numbers in this or anything else you want in life or business.
If you want to go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far—go together! —Author unknown
Who Is Riding with You?
In a car, if people you ride with are acting up in the backseat, they may be annoying, loud, and even obnoxious—but they don’t impact the ride, your safety, and your arrival at your destination. The polar opposite is true on a motorcycle. On a motorcycle, who you ride with is extremely important because everything they do, and everything they don’t do, you feel it, and it impacts the weight distribution, your safety, and the overall ride. The person riding with you on the motorcycle of your life can easily cause you to crash simply by not moving when you move.
• When you lean left, they are supposed to lean left with you.
• When you lean back, they are supposed to lean back with you.
• When you lean right, they should lean right with you.
• When you shift, they should shift with you, because everything they do affects you! It’s truly a partnership during the ride.
I have this conversation with every single person who ever gets on my motorcycle. Because I feel everything that they do and don’t do with me on my bike. And if I feel that they won’t flow with me on my bike, they can’t ride. I value my life too much to allow someone else to make me crash. You should be this protective about your network and your connections.
Do You Need to Change Your Five?
You will become the average of the five people closest to you.
We’ve all heard it said, and research backs this up, that you will tend to earn within 10% of your five closest friends. For some of you, that’s a great thing, because you have high-earning friends. But for others of you, this is the kiss of death, because your close friends don’t earn much at all.
The point? Increase your net worth, first by increasing your network.
If you hang around five millionaires, you’ll be the sixth. —Denzel Washington
The Three Types of Relationships— Mentors, Mates, and Mentees
I want you to intentionally recruit three different types of riders to shift your posse.
Mentors
The first riders you need to recruit are mentors. Mentors are people who have been down the road that you’re currently embarking upon. They are more seasoned professionals or individuals who have wisdom and insight to help you avoid costly mistakes and get to where you want to go faster. Mentors also can do with one phone call, text, or email what years of networking can’t do. So you want mentors in your life because they can help you reach your end goal faster and more powerfully. Ultimately, a mentor is someone who started years ago on the highway that you’re on and can tell you things to anticipate along the way, because they’ve many times been to the destination that you’re seeking. Leverage quality mentors in your life.
Mates
The second riders you need to recruit are mates. These are folks who are on your journey right alongside you. They started on the highway at the same time that you did. So a mentor could be the dean of your online degree program, for example, but a mate could be someone in your cohort whom you’re taking classes with and completing assignments with on a day-to-day basis. What I love about mates is that they give us companionship for the journey. They keep us laughing, smiling, crying, feeling, learning, and growing along the way. They keep us entertained and engrossed in the process of achieving whatever we set our minds and hearts to. I’m not a political person, but this is like the “running mate” in an election campaign—someone who is right beside the primary candidate to help them achieve their goal of being elected into office. You need mates. Mates make great accountability partners, which we will talk about later in this chapter.
Mentees
Lastly, make sure you reach back and bring other younger, less experienced bikers along with you by recruiting mentees into your biker posse. Mentees are people who started their journey down the highway of success months, years, and even decades after you did. They are people who view you the same way you view your mentor. They see you as very successful already, and they just want to learn, glean, and receive from you. What I love about mentees is that mentees/protégés help you make sense out of the nonsense that you’ve gone through on your journey. For example, have you ever asked yourself why you experienced something horrible in your past? No matter how much talking, healing, or therapy you went through—it still just didn’t make sense. But then one day, a young person or someone who is less experienced than you are showed up in your life, and you were able to download your life experiences into them, and when you did that, all of a sudden your “failures’’ and “setbacks” felt more like “life lessons” and “comebacks.” And isn’t it so rewarding, refreshing, and renewing to know that what you went through created a road map of success and possibility for someone else? It’s powerful!
So I encourage you to recruit mentors, mates, and mentees into your biker club; that will shift your posse into a higher gear for sure.
Know Whom You Need . . . Now!
One of the main reasons we keep misaligned people in our lives much longer than we should is out of misplaced loyalty. Because we’ve known these people for a long time, we just keep them around. Plus, most of us prefer a known hell to an unknown heaven! It’s sad but true. We prefer the comfort of familiarity rather than the discomfort of the unknown growth possibilities. What keeps high achievers constantly growing and developing is that they are clear about whom they need in their lives presently. They don’t allow misplaced loyalty from the past to hinder growth in the future. And you don’t either. Just because someone grew up with you or went to college with you or worked at an old job with you or went to the same faith-based institution with you years ago doesn’t make them the ideal candidate for your future unless they continue to show themselves as valuable.
• At this point in your career, do you need more connected professional mentors? If yes, then know that and go pursue that!
• At this point in your spiritual journey, do you need friends who are less judgmental? If yes, then know that and go pursue that!
• At this point in your wellness journey, do you need more health-conscious friends? If yes, then know that and go pursue that.
• At this point in your parenting journey, do you need more entrepreneurial parent friends? If yes, then know that and go pursue that.
• At this point in your healing journey, do you need more nurturing relationships? If yes, then know that and go after that.
My point? Know what you need now, and go about the business of finding where your posse is and connect with them.
Here are fifteen places you can look to find relationships that can shift everything into a higher gear.
1. MeetUp.com
4. Your local chamber of commerce
5. Your local professional association for your industry
6. Your local Rotary, Kiwanis, or Business Networking International groups
7. Toastmasters International
8. The NextDoor app for your neighborhood
9. Your local gym, spa, or fitness/wellness center
10. Your local church, synagogue, mosque, temple or spiritual campus
11. Dating apps
12. The pool of your friend groups (Good people know other good people.)
13. Facebook groups based on your interests, likes, and profession
14. LinkedIn groups based on your interest, likes, and profession
15. Local, state, national, and international conferences and conventions
These are just a few of the places you can look to find whom you need at this stage of your life.
A Powerful Question with a Revealing Answer
I don’t think it takes that long to realize whether you’ve got the right biker posse. In many of my keynote presentations, I ask audiences one question that helps them quickly reveal this answer. I ask,
“If I handed you $100,000 cash today to start a business, would you hire your closest friends to help you run and grow that business?”
Most people say no, hell no, or something to that effect. So my follow-up question is,
“Well, if you wouldn’t trust your current closest friends with $100,000 to start and grow a business, why on earth do you blindly trust them with your priceless and potentially multimillion-dollar life?”
Ouch . . . you can hear a pin drop. Why? Because most of us just allow people whom we’ve outgrown to remain in our lives for years, for no reason.
I can honestly tell you that if I were given a large sum of money to start or grow a business, I would 1,000% hire, contract with, and retain many of my closest friends and colleagues to grow that business. Absolutely! Hands down! Why? Because I’ve chosen to have very smart, resourceful, accomplished, and connected friends . . . on purpose.
And I want the exact same thing for you!
Accountability Partners and Mastermind Groups
According to a recent study in PR NewsWire, nearly 80% of Americans say that they don’t drink enough water on a daily basis to maintain good health and hydration.1
I bring this up because for many years, I didn’t drink enough water. I’m still not the biggest fan of water, but it’s necessary, so I drink a lot of it every single day. But I knew I couldn’t achieve my goal of drinking one gallon of water each day if I didn’t have some support. I needed an accountability partner. I needed someone who would drink one gallon of water with me each day. So I found my person and invited them to the challenge. Then I bought a motivational water bottle that breaks the gallon up into small, manageable sections. Then I took the bottle with me everywhere, and I checked in with my accountability partner about eight to ten times per day to see how their water drinking was going and report how mine was going. Those check-ins were always helpful. (To be totally transparent, I still fall short some days. But I drink a lot more water now than I ever had before, and I’m much healthier for it.)
My point? If you really want to go far in life, find some powerful accountability partners to accompany you on important journeys.
• I wrote the manuscript of this book with an accountability partner (one person).
• I started going back to the gym with an accountability partner (one person).
• I changed how I managed my business with an accountability partner (one person).
• I grew my retirement accounts with an accountability partner (one person).
• I learned to take more vacations because of an accountability partner (one person).
Again, as I said earlier in this chapter, if you want to go fast, ride alone, but if you want to go far . . . ride together! Find someone to “do life,” “do business,” “do self-care,” “do achievement,” “do weight loss,” “do parenting,” or “do vacation” with you.
Finding an accountability partner can be as easy as writing a post on social media about what your desires are and asking serious people who want to do the same thing to inbox you, message you, or comment. Once they do, you decide whom you want to work with, and start the relationship! You don’t need a lot of people. Just the right person.
Can you have more than one accountability partner? Absolutely! You can have several if you want, and together form an accountability group. However, there’s another term for accountability in groups. When you want to succeed as a collective, you really want to form a mastermind.
The Best Biker Posse Is a Mastermind
At my Full Throttle Experience conference, I break the entire audience into small groups and make them form small biker clubs with the goal of turning them into a mastermind team of support for each other during the four days of the conference. By the end of the event, these folks have connected in a way that leaves everyone transformed and bonded for life.
According to Wikipedia, a mastermind group is a peer-to-peer mentoring group used to help members solve their problems with input and advice from the other like-minded and like-hearted group members. The concept was coined in 1925 by author Napoleon Hill in his book The Law of Success and was described in more detail in his 1937 legendary personal development best-seller, Think and Grow Rich.
I believe that masterminds have three main purposes, and that’s to
• Shorten your learning curve
• Accelerate your results
• Gain access to connections by association
For the last twenty years that I’ve been in business, I’ve been a part of about seven different masterminds. Each one of them have indeed accomplished all three purposes for my personal life and my professional success. Oftentimes meeting on a quarterly or monthly basis, either live or virtually, masterminds are extremely powerful for so many of the people that I know—and I’m sure they will be very powerful for you as well.
As an entrepreneur, speaker, author, and coach, I mastermind with people who earn more than I do, and less. I mastermind with authors who have written more books than I have, and fewer, who have sold more books than I have, and fewer. There is something powerful you can learn from everyone.
Seven Quick Tips for Creating a Successful Mastermind
1. Be in a spiritual, mental, emotional, and interpersonal space to show up to a mastermind ready to serve the group. If you show up with a “taker mentality,” neither you nor the group will succeed.
2. Find four other like-minded, like-hearted, and like-industried professionals who want to add value and grow using a mastermind group concept.
3. Decide on the overall goal of the mastermind. Is it to invest together, lose weight together, build business together, travel together, parent together, do internet or affiliate marketing together? What’s the overall goal?
4. Decide how often your group will meet (monthly, quarterly, annually) and via what platform (live or virtual). Make sure that everyone is committed to the meetings, as they would be to a doctor’s appointment. Require it to be taken seriously.
5. During your meeting, give everyone equal time. With five people in your group, each person should get fifteen minutes of thought partnership from the group about their challenges, struggles, issues, and stuck places. Each member should also have five minutes to share what’s working, wins, successes, and accomplishments. So, within two hours, each person gets their chance in the hot seat. Pro tip: Your group could decide to go thirty extra minutes and make each member teach the others some skill set—that only they in the group know how to do—for six minutes. So, in the extra thirty minutes, the group shares five mini lessons on five different topics.
6. Before you end the mastermind meeting, each person takes two minutes to recap their own biggest personal and professional take-aways, and they set a goal for the action they will take between now and the next meeting and commit to that goal verbally to the group.
7. Once you’re done committing to your goals, you all mutually agree on the place and time for the next mastermind meeting and wish each other well until then.
According to a recent Forbes magazine article, developing and participating in a mastermind can be one of the most important power moves you can make in your life and business. It will completely shift everything you’re doing into a higher gear. Here are some of the benefits that masterminds can provide:2
• Accountability
• Regular connection
• Networks beyond your own to tap into
• A trusted circle of colleagues to help you make decisions
• A chance to learn from other businesses and leaders
• A confidential space to discuss challenges and problems
• A laboratory to learn and experiment
• A reflection of your own wisdom and expertise as you help others
• Potentially long-term friendships and connections
Your Most Important Riding Partner . . . You!
Remember this: the common denominator among your money, your career, your family, your goals, your vacations, your accomplishments, your kids, your wealth, your failures, your connections, your significant other, your retirement, your business, your physical health, and your personal fulfillment is always you!
You are the common denominator among all the various interconnected aspects of your life. You can’t remove yourself from the equation; therefore, although we’ve spent an entire chapter talking about your relationships with others, always remember that the most important relationship is the one you have with yourself.
This entire book is about you, but again, I just want to highlight that none of this stuff (accountability partners, growing your five, or masterminds) works without you bringing the best version of yourself to the table.
If a biker can’t take care of themself on a ride, they certainly can’t take anyone else on the ride with them. Before you add people to the bike, make sure you are good. Be great at riding solo before you ask others to join. Work harder on yourself than you do anything else, and everything else will work out great!
Use everything I’ve taught you in this chapter to take the already amazing version of you to the next level, but please don’t add these elements to a poorly developed you. It just won’t work. For others to ride with you, you must first be a strong rider yourself.
Five Ways You Can Shift Higher and Tune Up the Motorcycle of Your Life
1. Since 8 is my favorite number, this chapter is a super-important one for you! It means prosperity, wealth, abundance, wholeness, and new beginnings. If you don’t describe your personal and professional relationships using these words, you need to make some adjustments.
2. With whom do you need to graduate the conversation? You can shift into a higher gear quickly, simply by going deeper with some of the people you already have in your life.
3. You should be very intentional about developing relationships with mentors, mates, and mentees. If you want a successful biker club, add these three types of individuals to your personal and professional community.
4. The next time you want to achieve a big goal, you don’t want to let everyone in on what you’re doing. Instead, find one powerful accountability partner, and they will help you get 1% better every day on the way to that big goal.
5. As Forbes reminds us, one of the best power moves you can make in your career and in your personal life is to be a part of a mastermind team. Find your tribe, and together you all can take the road trip of your lives. Just wear really cool matching leather jackets, please!