In his book, The Power of an Hour: Building Life Mastery in One Hour a Week, author Dave Lakhani presents a method for achieving what he calls “fearsome focus” – stop giggling, really! – which is spending one hour of intense, directed thought on a specific personal or professional issue.

To be concise, I found the book tried to cover too much, too quickly, without enough depth, and that it set unrealistic expectations for solving some problems. In my opinion, while an hour spent analyzing obstacles in your path to achieving a set goal might be reasonable, it’s not nearly enough to revitalize an organization’s sales department or redesign a process with proper attention to all aspects of the issue.

Perhaps I am wrong, and Lakhani really can achieve massive gains in a mere sixty minutes. If so, I hope he bills by the project and not by the hour!

My other issue with the book is repetitiveness. For each cause de l’heure, the provided “one hour action plan” is a series of questions that change little from topic to topic: figure out what you want to do, figure out the steps to doing it, identify whose help you require, set a timeline, and measure for success. Simply putting that in the back of the book as an appendix would have knocked off twenty or more pages (and, anyway, it’s essentially Shewharts’s PDCA cycle, which I will probably cover in later posts for the very low cost of free).

Now, that fault aside – and ignoring that the foreword was written by T. Harv Ecker, a man known among the tragically desperate for writing hundreds of pages on wealth best summed up as “think positive, come to one of my overpriced seminars, and at least one of us will be rich” – there was one chapter of the book I found worth mentioning: Chapter 8 – Relationships.

In this chapter, Lakhani suggests that you take an inventory of your relationships, classifying them into one of four groups: Family, Long-Term Friends, Mutually Beneficial and Supportive, and One-Sided. Below follows a brief explanation of each, as well as my own experience.

Family: sadly, you can’t choose your family, unless you’re the Baby Jesus (and if that is the case, you probably don’t need any advice Dave might hand out).

Your family can be your strongest source of support, but beware that the silver cloud can have a dark lining; I am nothing if not a master of bad metaphors! Negative beliefs from family members can usurp your drive for change, turning a supportive relationship into an inadvertently discouraging one.

For example, with every major life choice I’ve made, my mother has been a doubting Thomasina, predicting dire circumstances and woe unto me for daring to rock the karmic boat of life. In the back of my head, I hear her doubts like Catholic guilt turned familial angst. However, each choice – be it leaving a job without a new one, turning down a job offer to obtain a higher starting salary, or falling in love with a woman 4000 miles away – has turned out for the best, increasing both my personal and professional success, so far as I define it anyway.

Over the years, rather than let that little voice hold me back, I’ve learned to see it as a challenge, a call to prove I can accomplish what I set out to do. You can do the same (although if you hear my mom’s voice in your head, that’s kind of creepy and you should probably seek help immediately).

On the flip side of family support, my four year old daughter is my biggest cheerleader, but then again she also wants to fly a rocket to the sun and be a monkey doctor when she grows up.

Beggars, choosers, yada yada.

Long-Term Friends: These are the folks who, through time and circumstance, have become ingrained in your life. The high school friend you still know well fifteen years later. The former colleague that became more than a warm body in the cubicle next to yours and whom you still talk with regularly. These are the wedding, funeral, baptism, and barbecue friends. They may not understand your goals or why you want to go after them, but they’ll support you nonetheless because they want you to be happy (see below for why no one wants to hang out with unhappy people).

Mutually Beneficial and Supportive: The free market of interpersonal connections. Bonds formed on the basis of giving and receiving. Networking. You scratch my back and I’ll scratch yours. Assorted other clichés.

One website that I like to promote in this regard is LinkedIn.com. After registering, you can search for your current contacts, seek out alumni from your university, find old colleagues, and track down old friends. If they all complete a thorough profile, it becomes easy to search and find people who can help you along your path (with the understanding that you have the willingness to offer something in return, else you’re a mooch, and no one likes a mooch).

Additionally, as your contacts add contacts of their own, your potential network grows quickly. Within the span of a couple of weeks, my network grew from twenty people to several hundred to over 300,000 as of today. Granted, I will never see or talk to anything but the smallest percentage of those people, but possibilities for mutually beneficial relationships now exist where none did before.

The fourth, final, and – to my mind – most important category is the One-Sided Relationship, where the other half of the relationship tango is what Lakhani refers to as an “energy thief.”

You know the type: it’s always about them, about how anything you can do they can do better, or how down and out and sad and bad everything in their life happens to be and don’t you just feel so sorry for them? Their focus is either always knocking you over, dragging you down, or wanting you to lift them up.

That’s not to say that people shouldn’t share their accomplishments, nor should they never reach out to friends for support and succor. This is more about patterns of behavior, about continual taking without giving in return, a Janus of insecure bravado and learned helplessness.

This was something I needed to read. I realized I have long been a sucker for the helpless maiden, even the one that insists on continually tying herself to the railroad tracks. I recognize now the conflicting forces involved: the self-image reward of being the hero, the nagging guilt when thinking of turning them away. Sure, friends have pointed it out to me before – and how! - but true change occurs when the insight is internalized, when you make it your own (reference: me, fat slug).

The key to shedding these draining, negative relationships is to refuse to entertain them. As long as they receive attention, they will linger and loiter, diverting your energy from more productive pursuits. Starve them at the root and they will wither away. It’s Round-Up for relationships.

I see the light. If it happens to be on the front of a train, well, I’ve already helped those damsels off the tracks more than once. Let someone else be the hero and get run over.

So, do we have relationships that support our vision for the life we wish to create? Are we choosing the company we keep? Or do we let our company keep us down and hold us back?