It's important to know how to navigate the influence of parents and peers for optimal personal and professional growth. Assess, recalibrate, and choose who truly supports your ambitions. Yes, you DO get to choose who you let into your life.
Navigating your life vision path means you've got to think about who you're permitting to influence your choices. We respect and love our parents and have fun times with our friends, but both can limit our growth. Parents are repositories of not just one, but two generational ideologies—their own and those of their own parents, the prior generation—each loaded with dated norms and limitations. Peers, especially those lacking in ambition or differing in life goals, can inadvertently stunt our own growth trajectories by reinforcing stagnant habits or shaming us into limiting beliefs. So, it's crucial to wisely assess these relationships, not just as people we care about, but as pivotal factors that shape our worldviews and life choices.
The Impact of Parental Relationships
Parents play a complex role in shaping who we are. Early on, they teach important life skills and values. But once we're grown, and especially in today's fast-moving world, they can also limit our growth even when they're trying to help. For instance, parents might counsel against pursuing further education under the pretext of practicality; convince you to stop seeking a salary increase by admonishing you to not rock the boat with your boss; or encourage you to stay in a damaging work situation by adhering to the dated thought that "any job is better than no job." Such advice may be offered with the best intentions, to the best limits of their worldview. But it risks ensnaring you in a tarpit of unfulfilling or even detrimental circumstances.
Parents may also intentionally or unintentionally reinforce childishness, such as routinely referring to you in front of others by a babyish name, or bringing up shaming references or criticisms that leave you feeling you'll never get out of that arena of their supposed "right to shame and put the joke on you" or their parental disapproval. These emergies can damage your advancement as your inner authority is repeatedly being eroded rather than respected.
If you're an entrepreneur or a high-performer, parental tension can be even more pronounced. Parents anchored in past paradigms of job security and long-term employment might view entrepreneurship as a quixotic endeavor, perilous with unnecessary risks. They may adhere to the antiquated narrative that aligning with a reputable company, and pushing all your energy and hustle into climbing the corporate ladder until retirement, is the definitive path to success. This dated view can clash dramatically with high-performance and the entrepreneurial spirit, which thrives on the exhilaration of creating, innovating, exploring new opportunities for growth and taking acceptable risks to scale new business ventures.
Parents may even critique your work ethic, misinterpreting your passion for enterprise as an unhealthy addiction to the workforce. They may carp at you for being the person who "never relaxes", especially if they're retired and do "nothing" all day long. Or they may do the opposite, equally detrimental, of encouraging you to constantly over-give at work through extra "hustle", claiming this is the only way to "get noticed" and be elevated in the work world. And, their advocacy for retaining a stable job, with its predictable 3% annual cost-of-living adjustments, could unwittingly deter you from pursuing potentially lucrative opportunities that align more closely with your capabilities, ambitions, and set the stage for future career success.
Peers Influence You As Well
Peer relationships also play a huge role in how you feel about yourself, and the level of growth you can achieve. Not all peer relationships evolve alongside you, especially if you're a natural high-performer, pursuing ever-higher levels of achievement, while other peers relax into a middle-aged typicality of settling back into the status quo. Peers like this can unintentionally reinforce stagnation and doubt — urging you to stay in a bad job (just as parents can), criticizing and discouraging you from pursuing further education (as I had happen to me), or simply prioritizing your old shared routines of hanging out, drinking, and aimless leisure over advancement, growth, and new opportunities.
The most challenging of these peer relationships can be those you've had for a long time. Peers with whom have long history, may also reach a point where they refuse to recognize your higher growth narrative. They may continue to reinforce you in the lesser role you may have had as a teen or young adult, especially if you were the "sidekick" to their "hero". While on the one hand you've both shared many meaningful years as friends or colleagues, when peers fail to adapt to your new narrative, they can easily disrupt, critique, or deny you the growth and advancement you've earned with your striving.
Other peers and friends, as the years go on, simply seem to have settled into a typical middle-aged status-quo life path and determinedly stay there. They may have hit the same ceiling their parents modeled for them, or they may simply not have the urgings or fire to move onward past a certain point. It's usually clear when peers end up in this, as years can go by without a significant change in their activites, job, role, title, family life, travel experiences, or any others aspects of life. They've simply stopped trying new things, while you go on planning that new business you're ready to launch.
Peers who don't grow alongside you can end up shaming your progress, installing doubt and fear in you, or discomfort and struggle with their sarcastic comments (and remember, the most toxic sarcasm is often framed as 'joking' -- and isn't acceptable either way). To evaluate, consider the feelings that arise when you communicate or interact with these people in your life. Are there aspects of your advancement or life that you repeatedly hold back FROM them, that you actively don't feel comfortable telling them, to avoid their criticism or negativity? If so, how does this leave you feeling?
Shifting the Balance for Optimal Growth
Life changes and relationships change. The need to wisely and actively evaluate sharing, relationships, and the influences and reinforcing beliefs of parents and peers, is a key skill to adopt as a high performer. If you're ambitious and driven, you might find that the way you approach life—and work—can be misunderstood by family and friends who haven't kept up while you've continued growing.
They might see your dedication as a negative, missing the point that for you, it's energizing and fulfilling. Those conditioned by traditional paradigms may may misinterpret your drive as a form of compulsive overcommitment, unaware that, as entrepreneur Alex Charfen notes in his podcast, inside yourself, you're totally stoked -- one of "the evolutionary hunters", "those among us who can't turn it off, and don't know why anyone would want to". (Go Alex!!)
The bottom line? You get to choose whose opinions matter to you, and you get to choose who you let into or filter out of your life -- INCLUDING parents and peers. As you grow and evolve, you might find that the tribe who understands and supports changes from the one that supported you as a teen or young adult.
Be wise, be loving, but also, be authentic and honest with yourself about who you let into your life and whether it's supportive for you. If you really do not want specific people in your life, it is YOUR RIGHT to move on. Go no contact, gently turn down social invitations -- you don't need to get angry or confrontational, just wise and thoughtful -- and move onward into the life of balance and achievement that awaits you. Be respectful, but be wise as well. It is your life and not only your right, but your wise and joyful DUTY to bring your best self into being for the benefit of a world that needs you.
Be proactive about whose thoughts and opinions you let into your life. It is a key factor in reaching your highest potential.
How will you review your array of relationships, using love, wisdom, and choice, as you #healworklife?
Katherine Lieber is a high-performing technology founder, CEO, and Director who enjoys driving business transformation through analytics. She specializes in crafting systems that transcend conventional paradigms in business success and technology. Also a seasoned coach-consultant, her body of work designed for Healing the Wounded Professional, offers transformative modalities that integrate wisdom, energy-based, and alternative techniques.
