There’s an old saying: You become who you hang around with the most.

A few years ago I decided I wanted to be the Contractor for turning my old recording studio building into two luxury condos. Okay, I was always fascinated by the “what if I could” so I did it… It took almost a year. I’ll never do anything like that again!

You see, I was dealing with sub-contractors everyday. Now they weren’t bad people. It’s just that for the most part the guys I was dealing with pushed the edge of the envelope every chance they could… One day, I had a rude awakening, thanks to my wife Gwen: “Bob, you’ve become one of the people you work with everyday”. It was true, I had become cynical, frustrated and untrusting… I went through these feelings on an almost daily basis and it was becoming a part of my personality.

So much so, that I began to see I was actually expecting situations which fit into my mindset. That’s right, things kept happening that reinforced my being cynical, frustrated and untrusting!

I was lucky.

We finished off the condos and eventually got them sold. I was able to walk away from the environment and the prevailing attitudes I had adopted in order to deal with it. Over time, I was able to shrug off those negative expectations and return to a much more joyful person… The point I want to make here is that I didn’t realize I had changed as a result of my day-to-day activities. It happened in a way that slipped under my radar… Maybe I justified the change in my attitude as being necessary to protect myself from the effects of whatever took place during that year of being a Contractor.

Could I have dealt with things differently?

Sure! As aware as I thought I was of my environment and how I was reacting to it, didn’t prevent me from rationalizing a certain type of behavior in order to “survive” the situation I found myself in.

You tend to take on the traits of those you associate with… It’s human nature.

-Bob Baran