The importance of relationships for your journey through life.

George had just returned from Inbound, where 12,000 people had gathered in Boston. His voice was shot from talking too much. It felt like a family reunion.

But when he sat down to record, he wanted to talk about something that might seem like a step back from the big topics they'd been covering. Hustle. Consistency. Boundaries. Now: relationships.

Liz pushed back on the framing. George corrected her.

"I would beg you to position your brain differently. It's less about back and more about deeper. It's a layer deeper in your life. A layer deeper in the way that you think. A layer deeper of importance."

The Two Buckets

George asked listeners to do something immediately. Take every relationship in your life and put them into one of two buckets.

Bucket one: High level. You communicate. You coexist. You see each other at home or at work or at church or wherever it is.

Bucket two: Deep level. You see each other on a spiritual, emotional level. When they walk in the door, you know something's right or you know something's wrong. Physically, emotionally connected.

"I want you to put your relationships in those 2 buckets and start to be like, oh, I'm doing awesome. Or, wow. How did I end up here pertaining to the connections, the relationships, the community."

He added another layer. Is it growth-oriented? Do you push each other to the next level? Are you striving to be better together? Or is it a toxic energy suck?

"We all have those relationships that are in our life that are toxic energy sucks. But for some reason, we aren't willing to kill them. And they need to be killed."

Cultivate or Kill

George didn't want people to misunderstand him. He wasn't saying find 10 of your best friends and be selfish and only focus on yourself.

Yes, you should find 5 to 7 deep-rooted, I-see-you, let's-grow-1%-better-each-day, high-performing people. Maybe better than you, so they're pushing you to strive for something else.

But there's another side that gets forgotten.

"Finding somebody that you feel is special, that has the makings of being, and then bring them along for the ride. You being the person that have brought them into your core. You being the person that's pushing them to the 1% better. You being the person that is driving that relationship."

He named the problem: "With relationships, we don't know who's in the driver's seat or who's in the passenger seat. If we're both in the passenger seat, that's funky."

Then he offered a new frame: "Maybe it's because some of your friends are your GPS. And maybe it's because you're the Uber to others."

Even If It's Family

George told the story of his first keynote speech. Marcus Sheridan had told him he needed to start with the fact that he was a high school dropout. George told him he was crazy. He'd been hiding from that for 25 years.

Marcus said: "Until you're willing to be vulnerable in life, you're gonna miss out on the magic moments."

So George put up a black slide with white text: I'm a high school dropout. The audience laughed. He said it again verbally. Then he told the story of his math teacher who told him he would never amount to anything. And how he believed him.

After the talk, a woman came up to him. She said she really connected with his math teacher conversation. George thanked her politely. She stopped him.

"No. I don't think you understand. For me, that was my mother."

They sat there and talked for 15 or 20 minutes about forgiveness and poison and toxic relationships. She knew that as hard as it was, at some point she had to remove that from her life so she could be a happy person, a mentally healthy person, the human she was called to be.

"Somebody in your life right now as you're listening to these words is holding you back from being the happy, helpful, humble human that you need to be on this earth. They're holding you back from having the ring or core of friends that you need to get to where you have to go. And you've gotta remove it."

He said it directly: "I'm talking about family in this as well."

Lighten Your Ride

George used a race car analogy.

"You might start the race in a 1969 station wagon, 3-seater with wood paneling on the side. But by the time you get to the point where you're really chugging along, it has to be stripped down, torn apart. It's a shell of the car that it used to be. But man, it is high performing because it has a big old engine in it, and everything that is of excess has been removed."

He pointed to how light they try to get race cars so they can go the speed they go.

"Some people in your life are weighing you down. Some people in your life are your engine. And you have to figure out who. And you have to keep what you need."

He quoted Les Brown: "If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. But if you do what is hard, your life will be easy."

Applied to relationships: If you do what is hard, kill that toxic relationship. Your life will be easy.

The Coal and the Fire

George told a story from when he worked as a camp counselor in Jewett, Ohio. He had decided he was never going back to church. Christians were the most hypocritical people he'd ever met.

He was sitting around a fire with Bill, the camp owner, and a few others. Bill asked why George didn't go to church on Sundays. George told him the truth.

Bill said: "Do me a favor. You see the coals in the fire? I want you to pull one of those coals out of the fire and just set it to the side."

George grabbed a coal with tongs and set it aside. Being in his twenties, he was impatient. "And? What's your point?"

Bill told him to just sit quietly for a little bit.

The red coal, in a matter of seconds, turned dark black.

Bill looked at him and said: "You're the coal sitting out of church. Now do me a favor. Put that back in the fire and see what happens."

Immediately, it turned bright orange.

Bill said: "And that's how quickly you can be on fire for Jesus."

A week later, George was still battling with this. An old farmer at the camp asked him: "Are you waiting for the perfect church and then you'll go?"

George said yes. As soon as he found the perfect church, he'd go.

The farmer said: "Do me a favor and please don't go. Because as soon as you go, it won't be perfect."

George called these "2 by 4 moments in life." Moments that knock you upside the head and demolish everything you thought was your arsenal for avoiding something.

The Relationship Nobody Talks About

Partway through the episode, George's brain took a hard right turn.

"The relationship that we're not talking about is also the relationship that we have to cultivate with ourself."

He shared something he'd been telling himself for years: "You've gotta love yourself before you love others. You've gotta love yourself before you love others."

There was a time in his life where he doesn't necessarily know if he loved anybody else. And he knows he definitely didn't love himself.

"I had to cultivate that relationship within myself. Love yourself. Love yourself. Be kind to yourself. Be kind to yourself."

He challenged listeners: If you haven't done the "I ams" of your life, the things you think you suck at but want to be great at, you need to. "You have to feed into yourself. You have to build the relationship with yourself. You have to be self aware, hear the small voice."

You've gotta pay attention to that internal relationship almost in order to do anything with the external ones.

From Party Group to Core

George shared what happened during the pandemic. They had a really big group of friends. To survive, they would go to a friend's pool and have some beverages.

Through spending so much time with people who historically they would have called friends, a divide started happening. Some people, you could look at and say: "I don't wanna be that. And if I'm around that, I am actually that. I can feel myself going in that direction."

Relationships started to filter off. Some were killed. "Hey. Yo. You just can't come back. That's unacceptable behavior. You can't come back."

They went from needing a massive party group to survive to coming out of it with what they call the core.

"The core is where you wanna get. The core is where you actually find those conversations that matter. The core is where you find the road maps or the person that you can lean into and say that you're having a hard time. The core is where you find lack of judgment. The core is where you find love. The core is where you can just be uncomfortable but feel safe."

You can't get that out of a big group. You can only get that when you shrink it down.

"What's interesting is you actually, especially with the relationships, many times you'll get something larger if it's smaller."

The Spark at the Airport

Liz shared how she and George first met in 2017 when Impact acquired The Sales Lion after acquiring her agency. They were in a big crowd of people. Both felt equally alone. But they were sitting next to each other. And they looked at each other and thought: "This isn't the end of this."

Years passed. Surface-level contact. Then last spring, Liz happened to get an earlier flight because she was nervous about missing her Delta connection. She was sitting in the airport with hours to go.

Who comes walking up but George B. Thomas.

They were both at the exact same moment in their lives. And now their entire year would have looked completely different without that relationship.

George's takeaway: "I heard in my brain, there's something here. There's something here. I don't know what. I don't know when. But there's something here."

He connected it back to the coal analogy.

"If you go back to our coals analogy, there was a spark. I would beg that you would pay attention to the sparks in your life because the sparks are what will ignite the fire. The fire is what will create the coals, the bed of hot, warm coals of humans that you end up being part of."

"We are always looking for this grandiose moment. We're always looking for the big sign of life. When it comes to relationships, pay attention to the spark."

Quotable Moments

"The core is where you wanna get. The core is where you find lack of judgment. The core is where you find love. The core is where you can just be uncomfortable but feel safe."

"Some people in your life are weighing you down. Some people in your life are your engine. And you have to figure out who."

"Maybe it's because some of your friends are your GPS. And maybe it's because you're the Uber to others."

"You've gotta love yourself before you love others."

"If you do what is easy, your life will be hard. But if you do what is hard, your life will be easy."

"We are always looking for the big sign of life. When it comes to relationships, pay attention to the spark."

Questions to Sit With

1. Take every relationship in your life and put them into one of two buckets: high level or deep. What does that reveal about where you're investing your energy?
2. Who in your life is weighing you down? Who is your engine? And are you the GPS for anyone, or are you the Uber?
3. When's the last time you made a deposit in a relationship? When's the last time you reached out and invested in building something up?
4. What sparks have you noticed recently that you might be ignoring?

Press play above to hear the full conversation. George shares the coal and fire story that changed his relationship with church, the woman whose mother was her obstacle, and why the core group you end up with is more valuable than the party group you started with.