Last week I wrote about building real friendships. About initiation, repetition, small honesty, and the armor most high achievers wear that quietly keeps people at arm's length.
A lot of you wrote back.
Some of it was relief -- "finally someone said this." Some of it was sadness. A few people were honest enough to say they read the whole thing and still did not know where to start.
I want to go one level deeper this week. Not about how to build new friendships, but about the relationships already in your life -- and a question most people have never asked clearly.
Who in your life is actually giving you energy? And who is quietly taking it?
The Idea Most People Half-Believe
You have probably heard this before: you become the average of the five people you spend the most time with.
Most people treat it like a poster on a wall. They nod, they agree in principle, and then they go back to the same schedule with the same people and wonder why they feel the same way.
I first came across this concept seriously during my Spiritual Coaching Program at the Awakened Academy. It was not presented as a motivational idea. It was presented as a framework for self-examination -- and the exercise that came with it was simple enough to do in an afternoon and uncomfortable enough to sit with for weeks.
I recently brought it to a group talk, walked them through the same exercise, and watched the same thing happen in the room that happened to me the first time. People got quiet. Not because the concept was complicated. Because it was not. It is simple and it is effective, and simple things that are effective have a way of surfacing what you have been avoiding.
Here is what I have learned. The concept is not motivational. It is mechanical. The people you spend time with are constantly influencing your energy level, your thinking patterns, your mood, and your standard for what is normal. That influence is happening whether you are paying attention to it or not.
The question is whether you are making any intentional choices about it.
What I Started Noticing
When I was running woom bikes across two continents, I was constantly exhausted. Back-to-back meetings from 6am. Barely moving. Making decisions on fumes. I would check my step tracker at the end of a full day and see 2,000 steps. My energy was gone before noon.
I spent a long time thinking the problem was structural -- too many meetings, not enough sleep, the wrong diet, the wrong supplements. And those things all mattered. I fixed them. The protocol helped.
But there was a variable I was not accounting for.
As a founder, a coach, and a parent, I give energy to people for a living. My team, my clients, my kids, my community. That is the job. And it was only when I started tracking not just what I was eating and how I was sleeping but who I was spending time with that a different pattern emerged.
Some conversations left me sharper. I would walk away from time with certain people thinking more clearly, feeling more capable, seeing problems I had been stuck on from a different angle. Other interactions left me with something harder to name -- a low-level flatness, a quiet drain that I could not explain by what was said or how long we talked.
When I started paying attention to that pattern instead of explaining it away, it became impossible to ignore.
The relationships in my life were not energetically neutral. They never had been. And some of the most draining ones were so normalized I had stopped noticing the cost.
The Audit
What I am sharing this week is a structured exercise for making this visible. Not as a judgment of the people in your life -- as an honest accounting of what is actually happening.
It moves through five steps.
Step one: the inventory. Write down everyone you interact with regularly. Family, team members, investors, friends, mentors, advisors. Anyone who takes up meaningful mental or emotional space, whether or not they take up much calendar time. Get them all on paper with no particular order.
Step two: the sort. Move each name into one of two columns. People who give you energy -- who leave you feeling elevated, clear, more like yourself. And people who drain your energy -- who leave you feeling depleted, heavy, or diminished. This step asks for honesty that feels uncomfortable for most people. You are not ranking anyone's worth. You are not deciding who you love. You are just observing a pattern that already exists.
Step three: analyze the draining relationships. For each person in the negative column, ask: why do they drain me? Is this relationship required or optional? Can I change how we interact? What boundary could I set? This is where vague discomfort becomes something you can actually do something about.
Step four: protect and invest in the energizing ones. For each person in the positive column, get specific. What exactly energizes you about them? How often are you actually connecting? How could you increase it? Most people have more to work with here than they realize -- they have just been neglecting it.
Step five: patterns and action. What do you notice when you look at both lists together? What is one draining relationship you will set a boundary with this week? What is one energizing relationship you will invest more time in? Not a plan. Two named actions.
What to Do With the People Who Drain You
Once you have both lists, the draining column is where most people get stuck. Because the answer is rarely simple, and the obvious move -- just stop spending time with them -- is not always available or appropriate.
There are three realistic paths.
The first is removal. For relationships that are consistently toxic with no meaningful upside, stopping the interaction entirely is not only acceptable but sometimes necessary. This applies even to long-standing relationships. Even to family. Protecting your energy is not selfishness -- it is basic maintenance. And some relationships have run their course. Continuing to show up out of guilt or history is a choice with real costs that usually do not get accounted for.
The second is boundaries. You do not need to be available to everyone at all times. Delaying a response, scheduling specific windows for interaction, controlling the format and length of engagement -- these are not passive-aggressive behaviors. They are energy management. The people worth keeping in your life will respect a boundary. The ones who cannot handle one tend to tell you something important about themselves.
The third is changing the dynamic. Some relationships drain you not because the person is wrong for your life but because the current pattern is. A conversation that has never happened. An expectation that was set years ago and never revisited. A dynamic you have both defaulted into that does not serve either of you anymore. These relationships are often worth the discomfort of addressing directly. The audit will help you see which ones those are.
What to Do With the People Who Energize You
This is the part that gets the least attention, and it deserves more.
Look at your positive column and ask yourself honestly: how much time am I actually investing in these people?
For most of the leaders I work with, the answer is not enough. The energizing relationships get taken for granted because they feel stable. The draining ones get managed because they create friction. So the calendar fills up with friction management and the people who actually fuel you get whatever is left.
This is worth reversing deliberately.
Name what specifically energizes you in each of those relationships. Is it how they challenge your thinking? How they make you feel seen? The honesty they bring? The more specific you can get, the more intentionally you can cultivate it.
Then make a concrete decision about how to invest more. Not a vague intention. A named person, a specific action, a timeframe.
These relationships are not a luxury. They are infrastructure.
A Pattern Worth Naming
When I did this audit myself, some of what came up was obvious in hindsight and uncomfortable to sit with. Certain professional relationships I had maintained out of inertia long after they stopped serving either of us. Social commitments I showed up to out of obligation and left feeling worse than before I arrived. The audit did not tell me anything I did not already know somewhere. It just made it impossible to keep pretending I did not know it.
When people do this audit honestly, something almost always surfaces.
The draining relationships tend to cluster. Certain categories -- professional obligations maintained out of inertia, social commitments nobody ever formally ended, family dynamics operating on terms set decades ago -- appear on the negative side consistently. That clustering is information.
And the energizing relationships are almost always being underinvested. The mentor you have not spoken to in months. The friend who leaves you thinking clearly every time, who you keep meaning to prioritize. The person who knows the real version of you and brings something out that most interactions do not.
The audit makes the invisible visible. What you do with that visibility is the work.
One More Thing
Last week I wrote about how awareness is the starting point, not the destination.
This is the next step from that piece. You cannot build better friendships while remaining unaware of the energy dynamics already operating in your existing relationships. The two things are connected.
The exercise closes with three questions: what patterns do you notice, one draining relationship you will set a boundary with this week, and one energizing relationship you will invest more time in this week.
Not an overhaul. One move in each direction.
That is usually where change actually starts.