Difficult Decisions
Host: Isaac Mashman · May 24, 2021 · Episode 56 · 12 minutes
Transcribed from the episode audio and edited to read cleanly: names and terms corrected, grammar fixed, filler words and false starts removed, punctuation added. Words in [brackets] could not be made out with certainty. Wording can differ slightly from what was said; the episode itself is the record.
Yo, what is going on? Isaac Mashman here, and welcome back for another episode of Chase the Vision with Isaac Mashman, the show that is all about helping you become a more capable individual through sharing my experiences and the experiences of other people. So today I'm going to be sharing something with you that I have personally been dealing with over the past couple of weeks. Now, it's kind of strange, I will admit, because it seems like whenever you're hitting new levels, whenever you're making progress, whenever you're scaling, whenever things are really going great in your life, that is when the universe or God or whatever you want to call it will throw a hurdle in your life.
Now, it could just be sheer coincidence. It could not be anything at all, nothing pertaining to spirituality, but it could just be life's way of throwing a curveball.
But regardless, over the past couple of weeks, I have been seeing some massive success. I've seen more success in the past couple of months than I have in the past couple of years. It's like that work is finally paying off. But there have been a couple of different instances where I have been faced with these decisions that are not easy gut decisions. Now, you know what I'm talking about: whenever something goes on, you know the answer right away. You're like, yes or no. But in this particular case, I have been hit with these decisions where I have to sit down and reflect and think about the consequences of my actions and my response. Do I go forward with this or do I not? Do I keep this relationship flowing and alive?
Or do I kind of take the other way and decide to eliminate this relationship and remove this person from my life? Those calls are not easy because at the end of the day, you know that there are going to be consequences regardless of what you go for. Some of them have a little bit more intensive or worse responses or consequences, and some of them are lesser. I'm here to share with you that it is okay to do what is best for you, for your people, for your organization, for your team, and for your brand. Now, I am not talking about anybody in particular, but over the past couple of years, I've had multiple people in my life that I have had to purposely cut out or remove myself from or distance myself from, because I did not believe in what they were going for, what they were doing, and their actions in their individual lives.
Now, when you first meet a person, you have an initial perception of that individual. You have an initial understanding of their morals, maybe what they stand for, how they act around other people. But as you get to know that person more and more and more, their trust in you is going to increase, which means that they are going to show you more of who they actually are on the inside, underneath that mask that they portray on social media, underneath that mask that they portray in order to get in your good graces. At that point, you begin to see the things that might not have originally stood out.
They might not have been as evident. As you begin to see that person's true colors, you have to think to yourself, am I okay compromising my individual morals or beliefs or systems or standards to keep this person in my life because I value their friendship or I value their presence or their knowledge? Sometimes compromise can be good, but oftentimes, and more often than not, compromise in this situation is going to lower you down to a level that you should not lower yourself to.
There's this cliche that says you're the average of the five people you hang around the most. If you have one person in a group of five that is relatively low, then the other four in your circle are going to be able to see that that person is rubbing off on you. That's a huge, huge problem. If you're going to make a million dollars a month, and that is your goal, and you're hitting these major marks, or you're setting the goals for massive success on a normal and reoccurring basis, then you cannot afford, quite literally, you cannot afford to sacrifice your standards and to lower your standards.
Now, that can be perceived by the other person as a sign of cowardice, or it can be perceived as a sign of ego or narcissism. And to a degree, they're correct.
Not about cowardice, but they are correct about ego and slight narcissism. Somebody who is self-preservating, or preserving yourself rather, excuse me, I don't know if self-preservating is a word. I don't think it is, but regardless, that self-preservation is a form of ego, which is healthy. You have to do what is best for you as long as you're not directly causing physical or mental or emotional harm to another person. Now, that doesn't mean that your response, which is to pull yourself away from the relationship, won't make them feel some kind of way, and that's okay. You can't control everything. Some people have different responses to emotional stimuli, and so on and so forth.
But you have to remind yourself of who you actually are and where you're actually trying to go and where you are actively going. There are going to be pit stops along the journey where you need to sit on the sidelines for a couple of minutes, for a couple of hours, and reflect and think, is this person who I'm spending more time talking to actually good for me on a friendship level, on a relationship level, on a business partnership level, on an employer-employee level, on a [contractor] level?
You have to make these hard calls. You have to take the time to do this difficult reflecting, because if you do not, you're going to be blindsided by things that you never anticipated, or you're going to get hit with something that you knew at the bottom of your heart was eventually going to happen. But you decided to brush it off and give it the cold shoulder because you're like, ah, that will never happen to me, even though you knew it would. That's not a great place to be in, because you just feel like an idiot at the end of the day, and who wants to feel like an idiot?
I definitely don't. So going back to some of these decisions, there were times in California when I was sleeping on the floor and I had my one core friend group that I could rely on and that I trusted.
I knew that they wanted what was best for me. But I looked at their actions, and I evaluated and came to the conclusion that although they are not innately horrible human beings, what they were standing for and their actions were telling me something other than what I was wanting to emotionally believe. Are you viewing it within an aura of emotion, through, in a sense, prescription glasses that have an emotional tie, or are you viewing it with the glasses of logic, seeing what they are actually doing and disassociating yourself from that emotional attachment you have with them? That's the difficult part, because it hurts. It stings.
It sucks. It pains like a son of a bitch. But that's what you need to do in business. Business is a lot of emotion, but business is a lot of logic. And in business, if you let your emotions get the best of you, sometimes [in] a sales situation, you can really, really put yourself in a place that you do not want to go.
The other hard thing to realize and to talk about is: are that person's actions actually matching what they're saying? What is their previous track record in the relationship? Did they make promises that they were not able to keep within reason? It's okay. Say you make a promise and you're a little bit off. There's some common sense here, like, all right, this is something small that was accidental. But if they're continuously doing the same thing, it's like the person who asks to borrow money from you. They're like, hey, can I borrow money? Then they ask again, can I borrow money? I'll pay you right back. They don't pay you back. Then they ask again, can I borrow money? I'll pay you right back. Then they don't pay you back.
Then how many times are you going to continuously give them money before you feel like you're a fucking charity? That's the same thing with relationships. How many times are they going to say that they're going to do what you're asking them to do, or what you recommended that they do, or what they say they're going to do, before you've had enough of it? You say, you know what, man, you know what, [bro], you are not somebody who I really want to be associated with, and no hard feelings, but we need to part ways because I do not see this relationship being fruitful for both of us.
Are you dragging that person along or are you two growing together? This also works in a crowd setting. This works at a job, works in a relationship. Are you growing together? Are you building together in your company or in your business? Is the team growing in an energy of collaboration and in a culture of love and in a culture of symbiotic growth? In a symbiotic relationship, things are flowing. It's synergy. It's that synergistic connection. If you're not getting that, and you notice that you're doing more to go out of your way for another person than they are doing for you, within a standard of common sense, within a standard of reason, why are you going to continuously put yourself into that situation?
Do you see what I'm saying? This can go both ways as well. Sometimes you might be on the other end of this equation, and you might be the person that another individual needs to cut off so you can get your shit together. Now, I have been in a situation like that a couple of different times, but instead of saying, oh, fuck that person because he's not doing this for me or because he cut me off, no. If they were in the right, then I'm going to take it to heart. I'm going to say, okay, this is what I need to work on. Now, that equation can also be flipped, and that person can try to make you out to be the bad guy when they just don't want to admit that they're the person who needs to change. That's not your journey. That's not your process. That's not your problem.
[Theirs to] fix. Let them fix their own life. Wish them the best of luck and move on. You don't need to continuously dwell on all of these different things. So as you go throughout your life, in your career and building out your business, if you're an entrepreneur or a business owner, be aware of these different situations. Be aware of these people, and be aware of who you're bringing close to you in friendships and significant others and in your business, because that will save you pain, hassle, heartbreak, money, concern, and time wasted in the long run. You might have to make a couple of these mistakes once or twice for you to really feel the bite, but come back and listen to this episode, and you'll be reminded that sometimes those difficult decisions are the ones that you actually need to be making, because they're the ones that are the most beneficial for you and everybody involved.
Be on the lookout for another episode every single Monday and Friday. Have some awesome interviews lined up. Until next time, make sure to leave a review, rate, subscribe, and share this with a friend. I'm not running a whole bunch of advertisements [and] wasting your damn time.