Curating your People Landscape is a transformative step towards surrounding yourself with relationships that fuel your journey to personal growth and professional success.
This is the second of a series on our month's theme of Illuminated Order. It turned out a bit longer than expected, but I think you'll find the theme important.
As February continues, we transition from the tangible act of decluttering space to the more nuanced process of curating your People Landscape. In your journey to reclaiming a thriving life, this is an immediately powerful yet often completely overlooked step. People in general, and women especially, are not taught relationship-curation as a life skill; women in particular are told they have to support all kinds of unfulfilling relationships to receive social approval, which simply isn't true. Actively managing your People Landscape is an essential part of being the authentic architect of your own life, the thriving life you choose to build. Curating out those who drain your energy and hinder your growth is the next wise step to take as we enter into the next phase of creating Illuminated Order.
In this post, we delve into the practice of assessing and curating the people you let impact your life-time-energy. While most advice focuses on "find nourishing people", I'm going to focus on something that gives more immediate gains -- removing negative people. Just as clutter can obscure your physical space, unsupportive, uninspiring, obligatory and even damaging relationships can cloud -- or even entirely stall -- your reclamation of your sovereignty, and your ability to achieve. Let's get a little Rebellious Healing going and start that curation!
Navigating Your Social Terrain: The Power of People in Your Path
As noted above, typical advice often centers on nourishing yourself by "finding community" and "building nurturing relationships". But when you think about it, this is entirely backwards. You have to curate negative people out first. You can't cultivate positive, nurturing energy while you're still letting emotional looters ride into your neighborhood and take what they want. You can't build the foundations of your thriving life if every day a damaging workplace or every night a damaging partner removes every brick and unbuilds everything you've constructed, right back down to the bare ground.
Certainly, you want to find the positive, supportive tribe that nourishes you. But that takes patience and long-arc time—time to find those resonant others, time to build mutual trust, time to grow these connections into nourishing friendships.
In the meantime, let's take Illuminated Order in hand and apply a power you have the ability to action immediately. It is your own power and right to identify, curate and decisively remove draining or damaging individuals from your life and energy.
Assessment: Understanding Your Current People Landscape
The first step in illuminating your People Landscape is to take an inventory of the people whose energy you let into your life. Family, friends, partners, colleagues, each of these has the power to impact your own life-time-energy. This exercise of curation involves a deeply private, extremely heartfelt, and truthful assessment of the people whose energies you allow into your life-time-energy. Let's be honest, on some level, I'm sure you already know a few of the names you'll curate onto your list.
Approach this inventory without judgment. Every relationship has served a purpose at some point, and you may even have willingly entered into them at a time when your younger self didn't know any better. I know I did -- when I was living others' life patterns that said that as a strong woman I was supposed to support all kinds of relationship shenanigans for all kinds of supposed reasons or excuses. So, be wise and impartial, and just look from the standpoint of being the architect of your life in the now. Calmly and self-protectively begin identifying those relationships your soul has long known are stagnating, toxic, damaging, even directly blocking or stalling your growth trajectory.
Because women are so over-trained to be obliging to toxic people in their lives, I'll state it straight up: You have the choice and the right to curate toxic people out of your life no matter who they are -- and that includes family members. It is your birthright to ONLY let into your life the people you WANT in your life.
The only person who loses when you do NOT do this -- is you.
How To: The Exercise of Curation
The most simple exercise for such curation is to sit down with your private journal and just ask, and answer, this question: "Who do I want to curate OUT of my life?" Your Inner Self and your energy ALWAYS know the answer to this.
If you want more detailed prompts, look for those "edge cases" that seem OK on the surface, but leave you feeling icky on the inside. To frame it another way:
How do they make you feel?
How do they treat your time? If they are wasting your life-time-energy with their inability to be decisive, how has that delayed your achievements?
How do they reciprocate, or is the giving all on your side? Are they getting a free ride at your expense? When will you call a stop to it?
How do they regard your actions, achievements, and endeavors? Do you feel comfortable discussing these with them?
How do they uphold their own sovereign word -- do they keep their word, or break it?
How do they align with you financially, or are you carrying the financial burden for them? How is that impacting your life?
How well do they match you in ambition and achievement, or do they make fun or invalidate the things you hold most dear?
Action: Navigating the Barriers to 'People Landscape' Curation
Surprisingly, identifying the people to curate usually isn't the challenge. The real challenge is the actual curation. Dealing with the web of obligations, guilts, and the emotional turmoil that accompanies the idea of distancing yourself can really get you stuck in just leaving things as status quo. The "have-to's" and perceived duties can weigh heavily on you, creating a maze of guilt and obligation that feels impossible to alter. You're afraid of how you'll look to them and to others -- selfish, uncaring, heartless, cruel. They may even call you those names themselves. Of course -- they're getting the free ride, why would they want that to end?!
I've navigated these tumultuous waters myself. I wrestled for years with People Curation, which is why I hold it as such an important life skill. The notion that certain relationships were non-negotiable due to a sense of duty, obligation, or family relationship had been intensely indoctrinated into me, even as their toxicity, irresponsibility, immaturity, manipulativeness was holding me back across years and decades, personally and professionally.
In the end, I learned to make a choice, and most importantly, I realized I HAD a choice. Think of it this way: Is it worth continuing to sacrifice yourself, stunt your advancement, deny your growth, limit your options, stress and guilt yourself, and give away years of your life-time-energy, knowing that in the end, most of these individuals don't even care you're doing it? Only you can decide which choice is most kind and protective to YOU. The decision is entirely yours.
Curation doesn't mean you have to drop a bomb into their lives and announce "I'm curating you out of my life! So there!" Quite often, it can just turn into a withdrawal from their presence. But, with others, they may push back as you hold your boundaries. That's a key sign that curation is the right choice, because while strong people respect it when other people hold strong boundaries, toxic people resent it and get all blamey on you. Use your own wisdom as you begin to extricate them from your life.
If you're caught in the web of a narcissist, realize there's only ONE way to curate them out. That's to step away entirely. Honest, open conversations—the cornerstone of resolution, if you're approaching this through dialogue—are futile in a narc dynamic. Narcissists will do anything to avoid genuine dialogue. They'll shift topics to bewilder you, blame you as if it's "your" problem, flare up to drag your dialogue out of rational discourse and into fiery emotional realms of drama and feigned betrayal, and more. Curate them out for good. Step out, step away, and don't believe them when they try to charm you back.
If you've got family members on your list: YES, you can curate out family members. There is no requirement to you to ALLOW others to be toxic, manipulative, draining energy-vampires to you and around you just because they're blood relations. Again, this is YOUR life, your energy, and your self-respect in setting strong and well-defined boundaries.
If you're in a truly abusive situation, that is beyond anything we're talking about here. Please seek professional sanctuary and assistance.
Transformation: Living The People-Curated Life
Living a people-curated life means moving with intention and purpose in your interactions, creating interactions that mirror your values and aspirations. This transformation doesn't need to happen overnight. It's a gradual shift towards a more authentic and aligned existence. As you begin to live out this curated approach, you'll notice a profound impact on your personal growth and career development. Opportunities for collaboration and advancement seem to arise more naturally because your energy is no longer being wasted by "bad actors on the threat landscape", to use a cybersecurity phrase.
Curation of your People Landscape is an act of courage and self-love. It's about asserting your right to choose who you share your journey with and recognizing that your emotional and mental well-being is paramount. As you navigate these barriers, remember that the peace, growth, and fulfillment you gain from a carefully curated circle is immeasurable—a sanctuary amidst life's chaos.
This selective process allows you to focus on strengthening the foundations and connections that support the life you aspire to build. It's about reinforcing your beams with trust, filling your spaces with joy, and ensuring every door opens to possibility and progress. Celebrate this new phase of life, where the relationships in your People Landscape contribute to a symbiotic exchange of inspiration, challenge, and support.
Action Steps
Conduct a Relationship Audit: Take stock of your current relationships by writing down the names of people you interact with regularly. Next to each name, note how you feel after spending time with them—energized, neutral, or drained. This will help you identify which relationships are beneficial and which are not.
Set Clear Boundaries: For relationships that you find draining or unfulfilling, begin taking up your sovereign right to set clear, non-negotiable boundaries and expectations. This might involve saying no to requests, limiting the time you spend together, or you requiring their decisiveness and commitment to things you plan together (i.e. that they don't waste your time through ongoing indecision). Remember -- people worth having in your life actually respect someone with strong boundaries. People who hem and haw and get all dramatic about losing the right to invade YOUR boundaries, don't deserve you.
Increase Quality Time with Yourself: Make an effort to spend more quality time with those who support and uplift you, but if you've attracted a lot of toxic relationships, you might not have such people in your life yet. So put deep, intensive quality time into time with yourself, doing that which you love best. Also, the more toxic people you curate out, the more time and energy you get back to do what YOU crave to do.
Work With Your Increased Energy Flow: Actively look for opportunities to flow your newly reclaimed energy into all the things you love best. Let nothing and no one put bounds on your achievement. Plan that trip. Start that business. Design that new GPT. Follow your joy!
Reflect and Adjust: Regularly revisit your People Landscape to assess the quality of your relationships. As you grow and change, your social needs also evolve. Be open to making adjustments, whether that means deepening certain connections, distancing yourself from others, or welcoming new people into your life.
In this journey of your life-path, you are both the architect and the curator, with the power to design a life that reflects your highest aspirations. It's a process that requires patience, insight, and sometimes the courage to make difficult decisions. But the reward—a life filled with meaningful, supportive, and enriching relationships—is immeasurable.
As you move forward, carry with you the understanding that each person in your life plays a unique role in your grand design, contributing to the balance, beauty, and function of your personal masterpiece.
This is often a highly charged and personal area to work with, so be kind with yourself as you do. :)
How will you explore your People Landscape as you #reclaimyourwildness?
See you in the next post!
Be well,
Katherine
