 Boundary is not absolutely necessary. Like if I set a boundary, it's not my job to over hours and weeks explain to you why I set it. Like this is the boundary. I expect you to respect it. I will try to make you understand it. But if you don't understand it, it's still my boundary. There's still no discussion around this. What's up everybody and welcome to the show today. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. We'll talk about this in our second sign but I just wanna give two examples that people will subtly try to manipulate you that you might not realize is happening. So if we take that example, one would be love bombing, would be showering Michael with love and telling him how much fun you have when you drink with him and how he's such a fun loving, gregarious guy when he has a couple beers and you miss that about him. You just really miss how much fun it was with Michael in the pub. Another one might be gaslighting and actually telling Michael, well you didn't say you were giving up drinking. What do you mean? That's not what you said. You told me we're going for beers tonight. And now all of a sudden they're asserting a new reality so that you start to second guess well did I say that? Was that really something that I shared? Am I sure? So love bombing and gaslighting are two ways that people will try to subtly manipulate you into believing something else, into believing that they're not controlling you, into believing in their frame as Johnny was talking about. Well I wanna add to that the last behavior that we're looking for is floodlighting where now I'm going to be extra overly vulnerable to Michael to where he feels sympathetic to not having those beers with me. And so I can give him all of my woes and problems and issues and in order to play victim so that Michael will comfort me and have those beers with me. I mean those three tools right there and if you ever see hints of any of those behaviors you should start, you should take a step back and review the relationship and review how often and the patterns of which you see these behaviors because these are three behaviors that people use continuously and in abundance in order to manipulate the situation so that they feel better. And this happens romantically, yes. socially and professionally. Yes. So don't get misconstrued by love bombing. You could have a coworker or a boss love bomb you. You could have a social friend gaslight you. So I know we've talked a lot about romantic relationships on this show but these behaviors show up in all three relationships that you have in your life. So understanding the subtle ways of people will try to manipulate you you can start to see the first sign of a toxic person or a toxic relationship. The second one is what Johnny was getting at. So now you start to realize, okay, maybe I am being controlled. So what do you do? You set up some boundaries and you say, well, you know what? It's just easier if we grab lunch for me to avoid drinking altogether. I don't like being in pubs. I don't like staying out late. I have half marathon training in the morning. Let's grab lunch. So now you've asserted a new boundary. You said, you know what? It's just easier for me to grab a salad with you at lunch and we can catch up when I could hear about everything going on with you. In a second sign of toxic behavior they will disregard that boundary. They will rally all of your friends for a night out and make you feel bad that now you're only going out for lunch with them. So you're always telling someone stop behaving in a certain way and they just continue. And listen, respecting the boundaries of others may not happen the first or second time you assert a boundary because it is a new behavior in your relationship that you are establishing. But they should make effort to understanding and respecting that boundary. If you are met with criticism over that boundary, if you are steamrolled and they completely disregard it that's a clear sign that this person is a toxic person and not helping you reach those goals or mind those values that you have. I would also like to add that understanding a boundary is not absolutely necessary. Like if I set a boundary, it's not my job to over hours and weeks explain to you why I set it. Like this is the boundary. I expect you to respect it. I will try to make you understand it. But if you don't understand it, it's still my boundary. There's still no discussion around this. Yeah, very important point. If you're finding yourself constantly arguing over the new boundary, they're disregarding it. Yes. Now the third sign is they take without giving. Now we're not saying all relationships are based on giving and you have heard us interview Adam Grant. We talked about his great book, Give and Take. We believe that being cooperative is a high value behavior. So if you find yourself in a relationship where someone is constantly taking from you, the bill comes, they're constantly underpaying. You find that they're constantly asking from stuff for you, borrow your car, let me get that PS5 game. Hey, can you cover this bill for me? And you never see any reciprocation in all of your giving? It's probably a toxic relationship. Giving and taking is part of any friendship but it should balance itself out over time. It shouldn't require a note in your phone to keep track of every dollar and cent spent in the relationship but you should feel on the whole that you're walking away as an even exchange. A toxic person is often there simply to take from you and they will take, take, take until they can move on to the next victim with no thought or concern for giving back to you. We drop great content each and every week and we wanna make sure that you guys get notified and in order to do that, you're gonna have to smash that subscribe button and hit that notification bell. And if you've gotten a lot of value out of this, make sure you give us a like and share our videos with your friends. Also, we have to understand our natural tendencies to wanna get attention, appreciation and acceptance for ourselves. That allows us to feel good. So this brings us back to how are we going to get those things for ourselves. And because that is so ingrained in us because we are herd animals, it's the first thing that we look for. I go to a networking event and my first thought is who here can serve me and my needs and what I have going on. If I'm going out on a date, it's my first thought is how does this person benefit me? How does this person make me happy? Now, that is a low value way about going about things and it's also, it gives you a low resolution view of how the world works because you're focused on yourself. It's making you very selfish. However, I don't have to live my life that way. And of course, then when I have those thoughts or understanding living it life at a higher consciousness, I go to a networking event and I'm going to flip the script rather than thinking about who here can serve me? Who here can help me reach my goals? I'm now going into it thinking, how can I help those around me? Who can I help here? This flips the script. Just because I have a natural inclination to want things to be selfish, I don't have to move that way. And what we're doing is flipping it. Now, there are many ways that someone can be giving. So I want to bring this into the conversation because just because you are giving with time doesn't necessarily mean your friend is going to reciprocate exactly with time. So we can be giving with our money. We can be giving with our time. We could be giving with our relationships meaning introducing you to other people in our network or we could be giving with other resources we have. So physical goods and items outside of money. So when you think about giving and taking you can't just think about it on one dimension. Someone might not have much time but they will happily give you a beautiful wedding gift. Someone might not actually care about gifts at all and we'll find it much more valuable to give you their time on a long hike and that emotional support that goes along with it. So when you think about giving and taking I want you to think about it a little more holistically. Just because you show up in one of those four dimensions in your relationship or maybe two or three doesn't necessarily mean that you're gonna get that exact reciprocation back from the people in your life. But on the whole if they're looking for you to constantly give on those four dimensions without any thought appreciation of what it is that you've given and it's consistently taking then it's time to start asking am I in a toxic relationship? Now the fourth sign they're always right. Always right. They're gonna find ways to be right even when they're not and they're gonna go back to those three tools that we talked about of manipulation, gaslighting, floodlighting and love bombing to get you to see that they couldn't possibly be wrong. That they didn't make that mistake. They rarely if ever admit they messed up, miscalculated or misspoken. They showed responsibility onto everyone else in their need to feel right. AJ have you ever met any of these people? I'm thinking about each one that I've cut out of my life and we'll talk about what to do with these people a little bit later, but certainly have been there. And here's the other thing through the work that I've done on myself and with a therapist I've realized that I've showed up in these ways in past relationships. In my 20s I had this need to always be right and I would fight people to the bitter end on it. And I'm sure some of those friends who've moved on and are no longer friends with me would label me as toxic in those situations because I wasn't mature because I hadn't grown to an understanding that it's okay to be wrong and there's not this need to be right. But that was ingrained in me from a young age. So that battle was raging inside of me through my 20s, definitely. It's a difficult thing to learn and to use it in a music, a musical context. When you get into a room with a bunch of other guys and you're creating together, you're collaborating you want the best ideas to prevail. And there's an old mantra that we would always use that it's not about any of us, it's about the song. The song takes on a life of its own and you want it to be the best that it could be. So then everyone starts contributing and it's not about you making sure you get your time or your part gets picked. It goes to, well, it's not about whose part is best. It's whose part is best for the song, which gives it a hierarchical way of looking at it. And then you want to contribute it to it. But with that, you have to be okay that what you brought in doesn't make the cut. And that wasn't easy when I was young. I always wanted it to be my riffs and the things that I had brought in. But as you get stronger and as you get better you realize that there's better parts and people are bringing in different things and that you become okay with that. And that's why in a collaborative setting I feel very comfortable because I've been working in some capacity of that for most of my life, but it's not always easy. And if you work up an idea and you bring it into your meeting and you've been transfixed on it all evening about how it's the right decision, how it's the best idea and you go in and that idea gets destroyed which happens when you work in a collaborative competitive environment. You can feel compelled to fight tooth and nail because of how attached you are to that idea. And this takes time to detach yourself, to be able to be creative, to bring in ideas and be okay that it doesn't make the cut.