Not too long ago I realized the importance of supporting other people.  At the same time I realized how I had been (and had not been) supported in my own life. Supporting other  people can mean different things to different people, to many support means encouraging people in fulfilling dreams and goals, to others it means simply not tearing them down. 

I believe that all children need and deserve a strong support system as they grow up, unfortunately children have no control over this.  Adults however can remodel and drastically improve the quality of their support system when necessary.  Every adult can improve their personal support system by making the following four quick decisions

1. Decide to be supportive of others, the people who respond to our support and encouragement will likely return the favor and be our encouragment when we need it. Look for opportunities to support and encourage others, especially children who are still developing self-esteem.  If they are pursuing a dream or pursuing a creative effort go out of your way to support them.
2. Decide to remove people from your life who are intentionally negative or un-supportive.  There are at least two types of people in this category
   •  Optional friends or acquaintances who we can easily marginalize from your life.
   • Un-supportive family or long time friends. These people we don’t want to eliminate from our life  but there are things we should do with these people, see number 3.
3. Decide to ignore the effect of un-supportive loved-ones.  You don’t want to eliminate deer loved ones who are not supportive of you, unless they are abusive, but we do want to reduce their effect on our creativity and our life-dreams.  If we can identify the un-supportive, the competitive loved ones we can choose to not include them or ask for their input on our dreams and goals.  Chances are they will be negative so their advice, their input and their counsel is unwelcome. “Don’t argue with those who reject you that is the strategy of a fool” – James Altucher  Ignore discouragement from chronically negative people, don’t seek their advice and don’t try to change their minds, if they still want to cram discouragement and negativity into your life then begin to firmly set up a strong boundaries.
4. Decide to seek out supportive people. To look a bit deeper,  in this category there are two sub-types of people
   1. Supportive people who are indifferent to you, they are not negative or discouraging yet they don’t have the connection with you, they don’t particularly like you or feel drawn to you but are generally kind and not negative.
   2. Supportive people who love and encourage us.  These are the people that will support us, these are the people that we want in our lives. These are the people who will give us new ideas toward fulfilling goals and dreams. These are the priceless people that we want in our mastermind groups and should be willing to pay for their influence in our lives.  These people can be hard to come by but they are out there. This is the type of person that we should strive to become.

I recently have made it my personal ambition to be this type of person to as many people as possible, to go out of my way to encourage children in their ambitions and dreams and to find those core people who I can encourage and support in life.  Will you join me in this ?

I would love to help you to be more creative, to that end I am writing the final chapter in my Unleashing Creativity book, video course and creativity test.  I am looking for beta testers who would be willing to take my creativity test which will categorize you into one of the four creativity languages that I spoke about in episode 4 of my podcast. Please comment below and I will send you the test, this test still needs to written into code but the structure is there.  Please comment below or send me an email at collierak@me.com to get access.