Diversify Your Influence
What you see is all there is.
If you want a Big Bold Mindset®, deliberately, specifically and consciously curate your influences.Chapter 5, The Big Bold Mindset®
Are you the average of the five people you spend the most time with?
The science correlates with the popular wisdom. A 2020 study found CEOs in mastermind groups saw better business performance, and a 2021 study linked positive co-worker relationships to higher satisfaction, engagement and performance. We become more like the people we spend the most time with, so curate them deliberately.
New crewmates, leg after leg.
In 2000 I was one of 18 crew racing around the world. Twelve of us sailed every leg. The other six places went to “leggers” who sailed one or two of the seven stages.
Every crew change shifted the boat. Driven people brought focus on results. Kind people brought a gentler touch. Comedians brought humour. Living at the extremes, you notice it straight away.
Years later I binge-watched all five seasons of Breaking Bad in about two weeks, and felt dark and angry for the fortnight after. At the extremes, the influence was obvious. How many influences sit just below your awareness?
Who and what is shaping you?
Who are the ten people you see most? Does each one lift you up, leave you the same, or leave you worse off?
Who and what fills your social feeds? What's on the walls in front of you every day?
How much of what you hear comes from people who think differently to you?
We become like the people around us.
Psychologist Daniel Kahneman called it "what you see is all there is". We make decisions on what's in front of us, and rarely look for what isn't. So it pays to choose what's in front of you.
What the research points to
Peer groups
Leaders in peer and mastermind groups report more support, learning and growth.
Colleagues count
Better relationships at work go with higher satisfaction, engagement and performance.
Not an echo chamber
Curate for challenge as well as support. Different views sharpen your thinking.
Make sure you're nowhere near the smartest person in the room.
Melanie Perkins: a peer network
Perkins is a member of the Entrepreneurs’ Organization, where she takes part in a mastermind group with other CEOs. She has credited much of Canva’s success to the advice and guidance she has received from her network.
Steel sharpens steel. Exposure to curious, bright minds grappling with hard problems is one of the fastest ways to grow your own thinking.
Steel sharpens steel.Choose who you spend time with
The influence audit
Three columns on a sheet of paper: positive, neutral, negative. Audit everything that can influence you, then run experiments to dial the good up and the bad down.
Do more of it
Can you spend more time with these people, or add more of this?
Swap and experiment
Try swapping one thing for something that might lift you.
Cull the crosses
Can you remove all, or nearly all, of these?
Your ten
The people you see most, at work and at home.
What you scroll
Who you follow, what you read, watch and listen to.
What you see first
Put images and words in view that create the feeling you want.
Remove one cross, add one positive
List the ten people who influence you most, then your feeds and what's in your line of sight. Mark each positive, neutral or negative. This week, remove one cross and add one positive.
Curate the team's influences
Teams have influences too: the voices in meetings, the data on the screen, the stories they tell.
Run this with Caspar in the room
The 20-minute version above works on its own. With Caspar in the room it goes further: he brings the stories behind Diversify Your Influence, then takes your team through the exercise live, so everyone leaves with an experiment they have chosen themselves.
- Creator of The Big Bold Mindset®
- Leadership keynote speaker: events in over 38 countries, for over 400 organisations going through change
- 2x round the world sailor
- Former CFO (multiple exits), with a background at KPMG
“Truly inspiring! The audience was captivated throughout. Post-conference feedback showed it was ranked the best session of the two days. The teams are still positively referencing it to this day!”
Caspar has worked with organisations including BAE Systems, Burberry, GSK, Intuit, INEOS Styrolution, Johnson & Johnson, Nuffield Health, Pearson, Sage, Suntory and Thales.
Questions about Diversify Your Influence
How do you audit the influences in your life?
Draw three columns: Positive, Neutral and Negative. List 10 people you see most often and place each by whether they lift you up, leave you the same or leave you worse off. Then do the same for social media, surroundings, books and TV.
What does “what you see is all there is” mean?
It is Daniel Kahneman’s phrase for how the mind relies almost exclusively on the information immediately available to it. If your decisions depend so heavily on what is around you, it makes sense to pay attention to what is around you.
Should you only surround yourself with people who agree with you?
No. Your influences should include people with different views so you are exposed to a wide range of ideas. The distinction that matters is between views that challenge and make you think, and negative ideas that take you away from your goals.
- Influence audit
- Scoring the people, feeds, surroundings and media around you as Positive, Neutral or Negative, so you can see what is shaping you and run experiments to change it.
- Cull the crosses
- The follow-up to the influence audit: remove all or nearly all negative influences, swap out some neutral ones, and increase the positive.
More from Caspar on this
Short reads that take this principle further, with the stories behind it.
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This is Chapter 5 of The Big Bold Mindset®
The full chapter has the whole story, the research and more leaders who lived it.
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