14 Day Plan – Day 11

Surround yourself with energisers, not feeders!

"The key is to keep company only with people who uplift you, whose presence calls forth your best." Epictetus

In these last few articles we are giving you coping mechanisms for the rest of your life, beyond the 14 days. Today we are looking at how to cope with people who try to get us to eat junk. There are a surprising number of people who try to do this – parents, so-called-friends, colleagues etc. The colleagues one has become so well known that we have an official term for them: office feeders.

Before we get into the people who are going to try to sabotage your good intentions and some top tips for making sure that they don't, think about the people in your life generally.

The Epictetus quotation above is an old and wise one and one to think about today. We all know that some people in life energise us and some drain us. There are family members, friends and colleagues that we look forward to seeing – they energise us, make us feel good, lift our spirits and so on. Then there are people who do the opposite – they drain us, they make us feel bad, they depress our mood and so on. Why would we ever spend time with the latter? We should actively work to make sure that our time is spent with the former.