When I was producing a play in a high-security prison in The Catskills, I realized that most men were living with the direct consequence of long-term bad influences. It’s an extreme example, but in my coaching practice, I see people with beautiful talents disrupted by bad influences all the time, like the student who has dropped out of college or the artist who no longer creates.

Negative influences abound, and even the most seemingly trivial add up. Think how many times you’ve overindulged around people who do the same. You know it will be bad for you, but your saboteur’s voice says, “What the heck…” and persuades you that you have the situation under control.

Because being included plays a vital role in our feelings of security, external influences have this power, both good and bad. Which groups you’re attached to makes the difference between whether you are merely surviving, stagnating, or thriving. Some attachments may be a positive influence in some ways yet negative in others. But in the big picture, whenever external influences override what’s best for you, it’s damaging, while choosing positive influences elevates you.

We don’t start in this world, though, with any say. We’re born into a complex and powerfully influential mixture of economic, social, cultural, and emotional forces beyond our control, both good and bad. Growing up on a farm in England, my father’s care for our animals has influenced my entire life. But life was simpler back then than today. Parents, immediate family, and caregivers are still the initial significant influencers, but now, with our constant streams of information, outside influences are assuming greater proportions every day, and our consumer-based economy is seduced with an endless stream of potentially damaging temptations.

This brings me back to working in the prison. One of the men, who today is just one of the great friends I made there, had obtained his high school diploma and college degree during his twenty-two-year sentence. He’d also written his memoir, numerous screenplays, and poems. I asked him what school had been like before he was sentenced, at seventeen, for gang violence and drug possession. School, he recalled, was all about sex, drugs, gangs, and violence. Had he shown any interest in learning, he would have been an outcast, certainly brutalized and possibly even killed. His early influences coalesced into a gravitational spiral so powerful that any positive influences were canceled.

Once inside, in an echo of Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody, he wished he’d never been born. Besides a prisoner I.D. number, he only had the courage and discipline to seek out every positive influence available. Ironically, this choice was helped by the fact that life inside is a world unto itself, and external influences are minimized. Even in the most dreadful circumstances, he found ways to elevate himself, even at times deliberately violating the rules just enough to be put in solitary confinement, which gave him a quiet space to write.

For many of us, these choices may be more subtle but affect lives dramatically. When you need assurances of inclusion and safety from harmful influences, the trajectory can only be down because it leaves you increasingly dependent. Like a glue trap, the longer you stay, the more trapped you will become as you increasingly rely on others for your identity. As we have seen, extricating yourself from bad influences to improve your life means facing your fears and making tough decisions about who and what you choose to align with. The consequences can be stark, as the lives of Whitney Houston and Tina Turner can attest. Tina fled from her husband and music partner, Ike, at the age of forty-four when his abusive behavior and cocaine addiction threatened to destroy them both. She became a global superstar. Whitney, also a phenomenal talent, was never able to extricate herself from a damagingly dysfunctional childhood, an abusive ex-husband, and a drug addiction that began when she was fourteen. She accidentally drowned in a bathtub at forty-eight because she couldn’t get beyond her addiction and the influences she couldn’t escape.

Not only do you have a responsibility to yourself, but we all have the responsibility to be the most positive influence we can be for one another. Ask yourself, when are you a good influence, and when are you a bad influence? Because in the words of the adage, “A rising tide lifts all boats,” when we genuinely care for one another in this way, success benefits us all. In the words of Dr. Henry Cloud, "One of the most expensive things you could ever do is pay attention to the wrong people.”