Desert Sage
Do you have friends who call you out when you don’t follow through with something you said you were going to do?
Two kinds of friends.
The first kind usually mean well and care about you but will only tell you what you want to hear instead of what you need to hear. They are likely to support anything you do and be all lovey dovey like when you don’t follow through on something you said you were going to do.
The second kind of a friend, like most of the first kind of friends, will care about you but unlike the first kind they will also nurture you by telling you what you need to hear. If you quit on a promise that you made to yourself or anyone else they will call you out on it and try to move you to follow through on what you said you were going to do.
Sometimes we need the second kind of friend. Sometimes YOU need the second kind of friend just to challenge you with the truth about your excuses. The first kind of friendship is more like a poison really and it’s one of the most common poisons in our culture and it’s not just between friends but between spouses and family as well. The intention is good because they probably care about you. But you know what they say about intentions and the road to hell right?
Take on the challenge of surrounding yourself more with nurturing people and watch how your life turns out. A nurturing person will never support anything and everything you do. When you mess up they will let you know constructively and push you to do what you said you were going to do. They will probably push you to shoot even higher because they see value in you before you see it in yourself.
And you should pay that kind of foresight forward! When you see a friend with so much value in them that they do not yet see in themselves you should absolutely communicate that with them and challenge them to tap their potential. You never know whos life you might touch just by believing in them before they believe in themselves and then effectively communicating it with them. That, my friends, is a selfless act that should be practiced more in our culture.
– Tom
