The fundamentals of friendship: How to bring more joyful connection into your life
Let’s take a moment to talk about friendships. They’re the glue that holds our life together. They’re our chosen community—the ones who cheer us on through our accomplishments and are willing to get down into the battlefield with us when we’re wading through those not-so-fun times.
Friendships help balance our mental health and nourish our souls. But finding friends, and maintaining those friendships, takes time and energy.
Recently, I realized that it had been a little while since I took a step back and thought about who is near and dear to me. Now that we’re into month six of experiencing a global pandemic, there’s really never been a better time to take a step back and reflect. If this wild time of quarantine and social distancing has given us anything, it’s a chance to reset. After all, we’re experiencing a worldwide pause from our social commitments, our interactions, and our routines. We’re spending more time than ever before at home, alone with ourselves and our thoughts. And finally, we have some space to think about who we’re giving our time and energy to on a daily basis.
So if you’re ready, let’s talk about friends. Together, let’s take a look at the role friendships play in our lives, and how we can all create a bit more space for the ones that bring us joy.
Articulate what you love in a friend
The best place to start is with a bit of high-level reflection. Think about your favourite friendships—from your work wives to the childhood friends you’ve known forever and who always answer your calls when you need a sounding board. What patterns do you see? What matters most to you in your friendships? What are your non-negotiables?
If you’re getting blocked, here’s a few examples of qualities that are present in some of my most fulfilling friendships:
They celebrate my successes
We can have the hard conversations without either of us getting defensive
They know me well enough to call me out when I’ve lost track of my own values or shrink myself to make others feel more comfortable
I leave my interactions with them feeling like my cup has been filled
We’re honest with each other, always
Think of these as your Friendship Pillars—the beautiful qualities that exist in your most beloved friendships.
Time to reflect
Now comes the real work—it’s time to take stock of the friends in your life. If you’re anything like me, you’ve got a wide variety of types of friendships. And that’s a wonderful balance to have. As human beings, we’re all a complex web of wants and desires. We need different kinds of friends to nurture the various dimensions of our personalities.
The first place to look is inwards. Look back at that list you created, those qualities that you love about friendships, and ask yourself: Am I modelling the kind of friendship that I want? After all, changing our own behaviour is something we have complete control over—so it’s an essential place to start.
Next comes the hard part. Take a step back and look at how each of the friendships in your life align to your Friendship Pillars. All too often, we keep friends in our lives out of habit, out of an admirably fierce sense of loyalty or history—even if we’ve grown apart. Sometimes, it’s time to let someone go. And that’s perfectly okay. In fact, it’s a healthy part of honouring your commitments to yourself. You can recognize that a friend was in your life for a period of time, but that in order to take care of yourself, it’s time to part ways. Have the courage to tell them, to communicate with gratitude all of the wonderful things they’ve brought into your life, and why you’re choosing to take a step back. Look for opportunities to find joy in the sense of release.
Recommit to the ones you love
With more clarity about the friendships in your life you want to invest in, consider ways to nurture connections with those you cherish most. It doesn’t have to be a big bold declaration. Even something as simple as sending a simple text, something like "you're really important to me, and I just wanted you to know that" can make someone’s day.
Let your friends know they matter to you. Let them know why they matter to you. Now, more than ever, we need to lean on one another to move with grace through this period in our collective history as we navigate the many questions and unknowns.
Looking for some friendship inspiration?
Building fulfilling, reciprocal friendships is an essential part of bringing joy into your life. But if you’re splitting your time between too many friendships all clamouring for attention, it can be easy to feel like you're spreading yourself too thin. Taking stock of which friendships give you energy and which ones deplete your energy is going to help with that tremendously. Here are two great ways to continue the friendship momentum:
This week, I had an enriching conversation with Jillian Richardson on the JOMO(cast). As the founder of Joy List NYC, Jillian is a wealth of knowledge on how to prioritize connection in your friendships and how to build—and maintain!—lasting, fulfilling relationships with others. Give it a listen.
And, if you want to dig a little deeper, consider joining the newsletter for my upcoming digital mindfulness membership, Navigate. Over the course of your membership, we’ll explore techniques to bring clarity to your commitments that ultimately help give you more capacity for the joyful moments and relationships in your life. Sign up to be among the first to hear when Navigate launches.
