Who’s in Your Room?

“Who’s in Your Room?”  This was the question asked by a close friend of mine, Stewart Emery (pictured in this blog) 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.  There 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 happenchance.  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.

9 thoughts on “Who’s in Your Room?”

  1. Link: http://businessnetworking.com/whos-in-your-room/ (sent via Shareaholic)

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    “Who’s in Your Room?” This was the question asked by a close friend of mine, Stewart Emery (pictured below) 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?

    I am practically living my life in one room. I consider it my heaven however your article made me think how the state of my room reflects on one’s private life.
    Certain issues has come up and needs my immidiate attention. I have always put my work first then my personal life. Now I want quality balance in both.

    Thank you

    Tina Tahir
    Kuala Lumpur Malaysia

    Reply

  2. A few years ago I realized that I had several people in my life that were angry and demanded a lot of attention from me. When I realized how much energy and focus those people required, I stopped allowing them to be close friends. I am more careful about the people I choose to have in my life. Life is too short.

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  3. I would choose to have different people in my room as there is no one person who can be complete or fill a room. I would like to give you an example of a professor who filled his jar with stones and asked the class if the jar was full and they said yes, he then went to fill the same jar with sand and then asked the class if it was full and they said yes and he finally filled the jar with water! This just goes to show that you cannot fill a room with an individual as you cannot fill it completely! Saying that choosing who you let into the room to make it complete does make sense!

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  4. The next question, Atul, is “do we have to fill the room?” I have found that filling a room can be as strressful as not enough people or having the wrong people. This is a question that takes a lot of thought, Ivan Misner, or can too much thought be the wrong approach? I winder…….

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    1. Lesley, it’s theoretically possible to have too many people in you room but that’s really not the big problem. The big problem is not being selective about which ones to let in.

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  5. ‘You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with.’ Jim Rohn
    It doesn’t matter how smart you are. It doesn’t matter how talented you are, which skills you have, where you are born, or which family you came from. All that counts if you want to be successful in life is the people you surround yourself with. Stewart Emery’s “Who’s in your room” takes this idea to another thought level.

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  6. This reminds me of that quote about people coming into your life for a reason, a season or a lifetime Sometimes in order to grow you have to move on.
    Closed systems lead to decay.

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