SOCIAL AUDIT
Hey, what’s up E-com Insiders? Dr. Nic here with a Mind Hack Monday. This one’s a bit more comprehensive and really important to do for your business in your life, but not necessarily the easiest thing to do. So, keep that in mind as I go through it. I call it a “Social Audit” and that’s because if you want to change anything and I mean literally anything in this world there’s three things you need to be aware of. The first one is yourself; why you’re doing it. There’s a whole range of things in here. The next thing is social and the next thing is space. You need to be aware of yourself. You need to be aware of what’s going on in your social environment. You need to be of what’s going on in your environment; your space. Those three things there are create a current. They create a flow in your life that’s often invisible to you. So, this is all about making the invisible visible.
What I’m going to talk about today is social and that’s called doing a social audit. Let me just spray this clean. I’ll take you through it. So, social audit this is the way it’s really useful to think about. In everyone’s life there is usually or there should be someone who takes on this role; a role of a coach. So, what you need to do in your life is think about who is it that is taking on this role as a coach. This is someone who knows how to help you and coach you to become whatever it is that you want to become or achieve what you want to achieve that’s the coach. So, identify who those people are. Sometimes they are paid coaches and if you’re paying for coaching inside of this awesome environment. But there might be other people in your world as well who are acting as your coach even if you don’t pay them; coaches and mentors.
The next group of people to identify is teammates. Teammates are people who are in the game with you they are literally got as they’ve got the same things at stake, on the same journey as you, they help you, support you, you might need to rely on them and it’s important to identify who your teammates are. So, coach, teammates, who are they, make a list of them. The next thing to do is to look at who your cheerleaders are. These are people who are not in the game, but they are there actively involved, watching you, cheering you on, they really want to see you succeed and they’re prepared to give you their motivation, acknowledgement, pep you up and just give you their energy. It’s important to know who cheerleaders are.
The next group is the onlookers. Onlookers, these are people who might see the game going on they might see you in the game, but they’re really not even cheerleaders. They’re not really giving you their energy. They’re not invested in your outcome at all and that’s totally okay. It’s important to know who they are though.
Then after you’ve identified who the onlookers are you need to identify this one here, opposition. It’s crucial to know not only who your competition is, but who your opposition is. So, it’s important to know who these are. Let’s go through why. The coach is someone you can go to for trusted guidance, advice and often you might tell them things in confidence about what’s going on because they’re the ones to elevate you teammates. It’s really important to know who they are and not to mistake someone who’s a cheerleader for a teammate. There’s no judgment about what they should be. It’s their own choice about which group they fall into, but it’s an important to not mistake a cheerleader for a teammate; it’s the same thing for cheerleaders here. It’s important not to think that someone is a cheerleader when really they’re just an onlooker. If you’re expecting someone let’s just say it’s a family member it’s another person at work you think they’re a cheerleader, but really they’re an onlooker. Your Facebook friends you think they’re cheerleaders, but they’re really just onlookers. If you place an expectation on them to be a cheerleader for you and there’s room for relationship breakdown just there. So, it’s important to know what who these people are. Onlookers it’s important to know you know who they are but of course this represents you know a massive amount of people.
Opposition you might think it’s your competition. You might think it’s someone that you know doesn’t want you to succeed. But very often opposition can be the people closest to you that’s why this is a tricky exercise to go through. Let’s just give an example of fitness. Let’s just say that two people want to get fit and lose weight. So, they decide to go to the gym and when they get there person A just really talks and spends the whole session talking to person B all about their problems and all sort of stuff and no workout really happens. You could make the mistake of thinking the person A was a teammate when in actual fact they’re in opposition. They don’t really want to change. They don’t want the friend to change. They don’t want to stop the other stuff they’re doing. They don’t want to stop the complaining. They don’t want to stop the victimhood. They don’t want to stop the binge eating, going out or whatever it is that they share in common. They started out as team mates before the fitness commitment came in, but really this person who’s a closest friend is opposition. That can happen in marriages, relationships and all kinds of things where the person who you think is your teammate is actually in opposition. Not even necessarily consciously, but really their behaviors are acting in opposition.
When you do a social audit like this you then have to make a choice. So, who is the coach and teammates? These are important to know who the opposition is. If you can identify that you’ve got some opposition you have a couple of choices. One is to decide to allow that opposition to remain because sometimes you can’t remove that opposition or person. They might be in a really important part of your life. They could be a family member for example. You at least become aware of it you make the invisible visible and then you decide to proceed. If you decide to proceed with the opposition still in place then that is all on you because you have awareness around that now and you have to deal with the situation moving forward. If though you decide that this is not working then you have to decide what to do about. That opposition and that could be that you remove your from metal position. That can be a tough choice to do, but it’s something that we all face because we’re all going to find this even from friends.
Let’s just get really serious about it from a drug addiction point of view one of the things that happens in addiction medicine is that you have to identify who in the circle of friends doesn’t want this person here to get out of that addiction and is really going to do whatever they can to bring them back down to keep them in that environment in that behavior pattern because they don’t want to see them get out of it. They like having this person in the group with them. So, that’s a really important thing to do because that one thing can be enough to stop that person from ever really getting out of that addiction. So, it’s one of the key things we actually learn from addiction medicine is to do that. You can see why it’s so important. So, people are faced with a tough choice.
Now it comes back to CVS to BVS and to having no judgment. Really what you need to do if we go back to where I can put it CVS to BVS is this. Here is my current situation. Here is where I want to go what things I need to do to get here. If there’s any opposition to you doing those things, they can’t be a part of what you’re doing because here is what you want to get to here’s the better version and so this is what you need to do. Move in that direction, you need to separate yourself and be very aware of the things that are posing you. We could call it a mind hack if you want. It’s definitely a mind environment and mind exercise you need to do to sit down and really think carefully about this.
Now here is one other thing you can do if you identify opposition. Imagine if you could turn your opposition into a teammate or cheerleader. Now if you are able to do that then in one move you increase the number of people here which is good and you reduce the number of people here that is good. That’s definitely a win-win outcome if you can do that. But if you try to do this and it doesn’t work and they’re not prepared to become teammates then again you have to make a choice what you’re going to do about that opposition. I can’t tell you in that case what to do it, is for you to work out. But at least going through this exercise will really bring to your awareness what’s going on in your social structure because if you can get a social structure that is aligned with your CVS to BVS you’re all going in the same direction then what you do is you create a momentum you create what I call ‘Flow’. It’s like I call it the ‘Invisible Current’. That current is now going in your direction and you know what it’s like if you’re stuck in a current even if you get tired or you stop the current sweeps you along anyway. That’s what you want your social structure to do, a support system that sweeps you in the right direction even when you get tired and fatigued. Instead of having to rely on your own willpower all the time you’ve got a social structure around you that is flowing and pushing you along in the direction that you want to go.
So, that’s my mind hack and my tip for today. I hope you dig it. Let me know in the comments below if this rings true for you and if this is a useful exercise for you to do in your life and business. I’ll catch you in another video soon.