“Who’s in Your Room?” This was the question asked by a close friend of mine, Stewart Emery at a presentation of his that I attended a few months ago.
He posed an interesting series of questions and ideas to the audience; “What if you had to live your life in one room? Whoever you want to interact with in life is in that room. here is only one door. It is a one-way door. Whoever is in your room, stays in your room forever. Whoever comes into your room impacts your life directly in many ways. If you knew that this person would be in your room forever, would you have let that person in your room?”
He went on to ask, “If you let people in – what would your room look like? Would it be:
- An angry room?
- Chaotic room
- Happy room?
- Conflicted room?
- Would there be a lot of drama?
- Are there too many people in the room?
- Too many interruptions?”
His point was that the quality of your life is a direct reflection of who is in your room. How you manage who you let into your room (and life) is very important. How do we go about choosing who we let in? He suggested a sort of mental “doorman” who is trained on your values and your passions. It is this doorman who stops people from getting into your life who conflict with your values and passions. Nobody gets in who doesn’t meet your personal values.
He asked us to do an exercise to think about the people who are in our room now. Are there people close to us that don’t live our values? Would we have let them in if we had thought about this concept before letting them close to us?
We design the room we live in, along with the people who are in it. We can do that consciously, or we can do that by happenstance. The choice is ours. Understanding this idea now, who are we going to let in our room from this point on?
This concept fits powerfully with building a powerful personal network. The people we bring in close to us should be people we want to work with. They should be people who share our values and our passions. Understanding this simple concept can help us to understand the difference between an opportunity or a distraction. It can help us choose between a person who we think has a skill set we need versus a value set we wish to emulate.
What do you think about the concept of “Who’s in Your Room?” Knowing this concept now – what would you do different in the future? I’d love to hear your thoughts.
