How to surround yourself with good influences?

People always say “show me your friends, I’ll show you your future” and I know this to be very true.

My past friendship group were go-getters who were very confident in their abilities to achieve whatever they put their mind to. They’re all in STEM courses at university right now.

My current friends are quite lazy. A “best” friend of mine expects things to just happen for her. She has called me her best friend for 4 years now. She has never worked a day in her life even though she is 21 and I’ve tried to help her get a job but she will make excuses. When I have found her jobs that would have hired her on the spot, she acts like she is too good for them despite having 0 work history. I tried to get her to volunteer and she was even acting like she was too good for that.

I think that - in reality - she just doesn’t want to work and will not admit it. She has graduated from uni without having ever made the most of the opportunities it could have offered her.

She said she has not made any friends, which I wasn’t surprised by because she commuted to uni. I told her it would be hard to make friends if she didn’t talk to her course-mates or join societies or attend events. She would just go to her lectures and then go straight home. It was really frustrating to watch in real time since she would moan to me about not making friends but then not listen to me and put herself out there and go out of her comfort zone and try to make friends.

I’M by no means an extrovert, but I know how to adapt to new environments and find a set of friends so I tried to give her doable adivce. She never did any internships or tried at all and its really annoying to watch. She plans on going into the creative industry and I told her that its all about the connections but she still doesn’t try to put herself out there, attend network events etc…

Anyways, I feel like the constant excuses and her being content with doing nothing has unfortunately normalised these behaviours and made me less of a competitive person which isn’t good for what career I want to go into.

I’ve tried to motivate her to become more of a go-getter but she doesn’t seem to want to hear what I am saying and is focused on very un-important things right now. She is also very sheltered and does not live in reality when it comes to her ambitions as opposed to what she has actually done to try and get to her ambitions.

Every time she sets out to achieve something, it “mysteriously” doesn’t work out and all the forces of nature have co-conspired to make sure she fails.

Does anyone have any advice on how to motivate her? It has also effected me because she’s a good friend of mine and I want her to achieve her potential.

Reply 1

Surnia

If, as per the title, you want to surround yourself with good influences, why didn't you keep in with your previous friends?

There's a saying that you can't help those who don't help themselves, so if you 'friend' lacks self-motivation there's not a lot you can do about it.