The topic of friendship and making friends as an adult has come up a bunch lately, so I wanted to share this column I wrote on this very thing back in 2016.
Finding ourselves with fewer friends than our younger years and feeling challenged at the idea of making new friends as an adult is a thing.
Check out the latest podcast episode of Trust the Journey, we also do a deep dive into friendship, trust in those relationships, etc. Or watch this spoof movie Cara and I did making fun of a typical version of making new friends as an adult. hehehe #ridic
Read on and I hope reflecting in a similar way helps you too.
Hit me up for a Sample Sesh if you’d ever like help too.
XO
Blue Skies Magazine, December 2016
Life Coaching Column #77
The Stark Contrast
The other day I realized I have no friends.
I literally texted my one upstate-NY friend and informed him he was in fact my only friend. So I guess I have one friend. Cool.
Hahahaha obviously that’s not really the case. Of course I have friends. Duh. I would even go so far as to say I have wildly epic friends, in fact. This is not a column about feeling the feelings. As you know, I write plenty of those. Right now, I feel happy and good, but I was beginning to take notice of the fact that I have tons of amazing friends, while oddly having next to none where I actually live. Hmm…
So I started looking at it more deliberately… was I just being lazy? Was I not putting myself out there? Was I not making the effort to make friends where I actually live? In reflecting, I could definitely say I was making that effort. I had been going to Meet-up groups, entrepreneur networking events, reaching out personally to people I had loosely met a while back to see what further depth might be there to explore, etc. Yeah, I was doing the work and staying open for sure.
So what’s the deal then? Why would I still effectively have or feel like I have no friends? I mean, I thought I was cool, sh*t!
Hahaha comedy. So I have this comical yet curious observation that I have “no friends.” THEN, I had the complete antithesis occur… I had two experiences back-to-back that blew my head off they were so f*cking fun and connecting. The stark contrast was impossible to ignore. My answer about this whole friendship thing was in there somewhere…
First, I spent an epic weekend at Cross Keys. I don’t even know many of the CK peeps yet being newly back jumping, but I had so much fun I was still there Monday morning. There may or may not be some sweet comedy in that story, but I’ll leave that to your imagination for now. Hehe… ridiculously fun. Come play with us sometime for sure.
Second, I spent the weekend at the Great Spirit Farm, the literal physical manifestation of my best friend’s dream to have a farm, family, chickens, horses, and a place to help others through their own growth or spiritual healing.
Um… WHAT???!
F*cking AMAZING.
I came home from my time at Cross Keys and Great Spirit Farm a f*cking million percent renewed, fueled by the potent love, acceptance and championing we ONLY get from the people who get us and challenge us to be better than we are while fiercely accepting and embracing us for exactly where we are. People who care about cultivating depth as access to more fulfilling and rewarding friendship and the foundation for the insane amount of fun we can have when we feel that seen and free.
These kinds of people are my tribe.
Tribe.
Yeah, it’s a thing.
It’s not that we’re walking around freaking out when we’re not with our tribe, it’s just that we f*cking know it when we go too long without them.
Interestingly, I’m not even saying skydivers are my tribe. We are on one level, for sure, but deeper tribe is described by our core values. It just so happens that a bunch of us skydivers share a bunch of the same values so it’s easy to mistake that skydiving as the thing that binds us. But it’s actually not. Think about it, we all know a skydiver or two who’s a jerk. Whether someone jumps out of planes or not, if they’re a jerk, they’re not in my tribe. Period. I can send love and light their way while equally keeping them and their jerk-ness at an earned distance. Our tribe gets earned closeness.
Our definition of tribe is deeply personal as we live, grow and come into clarity for ourselves on what uniquely matters to each of us.
