How to Foster Deeper Friendships

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I'm your host Andy Maurer, and in this podcast I share my insights as a leadership coach and former therapist. I sit down with some of the highest level leaders in business, entertainment and human performance to help you pursue wholeness in your work, life and relationships. Thanks for joining me.

Let's jump in.

Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Pursue Whole podcast here. Here at Pursue Whole, we believe that leaders have the power to change the world. But whole leaders have the power to change it for the better. If you're a leader, you can't help but influence the spaces that you're a part of. And the question is, are you bringing life to those spaces or are you bringing chaos, pain and brokenness? And that will be determined on whether you're pursuing wholeness in your life or pushing down what is on the inside. It's oftentimes the most difficult journeys that are the most rewarding and stretching for us in our life. Pursuing wholeness in our life brings freedom and joy and peace and connection, but it's an extremely difficult path to stay on. There are constant distractions for leaders telling us who we need to be, telling us what we should be focused on, and pushing us to do more in our life at the cost of what is most important in our lives. We can't pursue wholeness alone and be successful at it. This was one of the big reasons why we started Pursue Whole was because when we saw leaders, they didn't have anyone to go to to process what was on the ins, and they didn't have anyone to walk alongside with them. So as a coach, one of my primary jobs is to walk with our clients and let them know they're not alone and then to bring around a system around them, whether it's friends or family or colleagues who are going to push them forward towards wholeness. Research consistently shows that having one or two close friends is going to enhance pretty much every aspect of our health, increasing longevity and happiness. And on the flip side, loneliness has been strongly linked to high blood pressure, heart disease, obesity, a weakened immune system, things like anxiety, depression, cognitive decline, and even Alzheimer's death. Some researchers have even found that loneliness is just as harmful to our health as smoking 15 cigarettes a day. In order to pursue wholeness, we have to have the right friends and colleagues around us to push us forward, to pursue wholeness, and to stay focused on what matters most in life. As I work with leaders, they often describe having relationships that are a mile wide and an inch deep. They know a lot of people and they spend a lot of time in social settings or networking events. But those relationships don't go very deep. And they don't really have a whole lot of people in their life who are digging and asking them deeper questions about what they feel, what they struggle with, and what's actually going on in their life. Now, on the flip side, even if they do have someone to dig in, a lot of leaders will say, I struggle to know even how to answer those questions about what I feel or what my struggles are or what I need. So we need friends who are able to dig in, but we also have to do the work as leaders to understand what we feel so that when people dig in, we can actually communicate what we feel and what we're struggling with. So a lot of leaders are lonely. Friendship is extremely difficult to find and cultivate. So how do we, in the midst of families, work, team member crises, and those very few minutes we get as leaders by ourselves, find time to cultivate friendship. In order to move forward, we have to face ourselves and come to some really hard realities that we might deny often. And here's one of them. Friendship is not something you find time for. It is something you make time for. Your time and schedule is something you own. It is your responsibility. My question for you is, how long have you been letting life happen to you? Rather than taking ownership of your time and schedule to craft that life that you want? Because if you can't craft that life that you want, take ownership of your time and what's most important, every single person in your life is going to craft that life for you. And I can hear everybody right now, give me all the caveats on why their life is so busy. And someone's saying, yeah, but I literally can't squeeze in one more thing on my schedule because everything is important. Well, here's the reality. If everything's important to you, then nothing is important. The bottom line is that you can't have deep friendships if you don't make time for friendship in your life and your calendar. I believe friendship is cultivated through four primary things. Time, intensity, experience, and repetition. The first one is time. We all have long standing relationships that we've known from high school or college or that we've grown up with. And you probably have someone in your life who you've met, known for a long time. Time is a fantastic catalyst for friendship. These types of friends know you before your success and fame. Sometimes they know the real you and could care less about your success, your fame, or your shiny things that you now possess in life. They don't Treat you differently because you have things, because they know who you were before you achieved that success. These are some of the most comforting relationships for me because I know I don't have to show up on in these relationships because they can see all through that. But if your relationship is only based on time, there are a couple downfalls of this, that sometimes these people, these types of relationships, they've known you at your worst. As we live life, we mature, we grow and we develop and hopefully we become more balanced with our view of life. And sometimes college and high school were not our best selves. There were times when we were coping or we felt insecure. We're coping through drugs or alcohol, or we're using humor to deflect. And we may not have really let people see our authentic or true selves. But that's what people know of us when they've known us for a long time. Sometimes as we develop, that person doesn't develop with us. And they're constantly trying to pull us back to where they knew us at a time and a season of life. They can pull us back to where we were rather than push us to where we're going. And these friends, because they don't care much about what we have now or what we're pursuing, sometimes they don't know how to enter in and actually push us forward to pursuing more out of our life. So while time is a great catalyst and it's a great opportunity to develop friendship, it does have some drawbacks if that's the only thing you have in common. The second way in which we develop friendship is through intensity. And that is emotional depth and vulnerability. I've been in friendships where I'm the first person someone calls when a family member or a parent dies, when they experience trauma or need someone to process with. And I have specific friends that when life is really difficult, I reach out to them to be able to get on the phone or meet up for coffee or have them come over. I know they're always there for me when life gets extremely difficult. These are the type of friends you can go to to be really honest about what's going on. And I would say that based on my work leaders, these are the most difficult types of friendships for leaders to find. What's so great about these types of relationships is that you can really bring your full self to them. Your messy parts and your put together parts. You can feel what you need to feel and you can say what you need to say without shame or judgment because they're in it with you and they're not there to fix you, they simply let you be. And that is a gift to have these types of friendships in your life. Now, if all your relationships are only based on intensity, one of the downfalls of that is that it can feel like a burden sometimes when you see that person or their number pops up on your phone. These friendships, friendships can be draining really fast if you don't have a balance between fun and play and connection and similar interests in addition to some of that heavy intensity. So while intensity is a great opportunity to connect at deep levels in friendship, if all we have is intensity and we don't know how to play or have fun or have shared experiences together, it can feel a little bit too heavy and monotonous. The third way in which we cultivate friendship is through experiences. And I would say that this is the easiest point for leaders to enter into friendship because their are typically part of things like YPO or Vistage or other leadership groups where people go on experiences together. They have these unique moments in time that evolved a shared experience of fun, adventure, challenge or novelty. Think of it this way. If you are one of 12 people and I brought you in a room and I broke out these groups into four different groups of four individuals, and I had a challenge before you, you could be in a group with people who have totally different beliefs than you, different feelings, socioeconomic status, or different genders. And if you work together as a team to win challenge, you would feel bonded and connected in a way that transcends all of those differences. And that's one of the benefits of experiences and friendships is it really helps us transcend the differences and helps us be part of a community and a team. This is a really non intimidating way to enter into friendship. And I think that's why leaders love entering in this way with people they know. One of the downfalls though, is if your relationship is only built on experiences and having fun with someone, when you leave that experience or leave that moment, you're not really going to follow up and check in with them throughout the week. You're not going to call them or ask them how they're doing throughout the week or even throughout the month. You're going to wait maybe a year or two years until you see them again through another community or experience. And it just creates a large gap between our ability to routinely check in with someone and feel connected. And this leads us to our fourth point of how we develop friendship. And that's actually through repetition. If we want deep, authentic, meaningful relationships, then we need to consistently meet and connect in person or virtually. Virtually, that could be every week, every other week, or once a month. And this really creates a sense of safety, accessibility, and availability. This is a really difficult way for leaders to connect as well. And leaders are more prone to transactional based relationships. So unless I'm meeting with someone to have an outcome of that relationship, why would I continue to meet with them? What am I going to talk about? What are we going to process? So we do well with it when we have projects and when we're trying to achieve things together. But when it comes to simply connecting for the sake of connecting, we really struggle with that. We often don't create repetition around those moments. So once again, there are four primary ways that we develop friendship, and that is through time, intensity, experience, and repetition. Now, ideally, you could have one or two friends that make up all of these types. But more realistically, you're going to have one key friend that you do experiences with, one key friend that you do something deep with, one key friend that you've known for a long time. And that's okay. The goal is start there and then try to add one component into those friendships. So if you've known someone for 20 or 30 years, next time you see them, try to ask them a couple different questions, deeper questions to maybe make it a little bit more intense, a little bit more deep. Or if you have that friend who's really good at sitting with you in the pain, but there's not a lot of fun and play and adventure in that relationship, ask them to come along with you and do something fun or go on a trip with you to add another level, another layer to that friendship. We need different friends for different strengths, and that's completely okay. But just think through trying to add more depth, consistency and experience to the relationships that you currently have in your life. So in summary, if you don't remember anything from this podcast, remember these two things. Friendship is not something you find time for. It is something you make time for. And also remember that deep friendship is not something you just find or easily stumble into. It's something you have to work on as a leader and cultivate through time, intensity, experience and repetition. You have to work at it. If you want something actionable that you can apply today or this week, let me give you two quick things. I want you to write down one person's name for each one of those quadrants. Who do you go to for time? Who do you go to for experience? Who do you go to for intensity? And who do you routinely meet with during the week and simply ask the question, what would it like to bring them into another category as well? So for instance, if you have someone in the experience zone, what would it look like to have a little bit deeper conversation with them next time you're with them? The second thing is what will you say no to this week in order to create space for friendship, what do you need to get off your calendar? And what relationships do you need to put on your calendar to try to prioritize your friendships? Deep friendship is extremely difficult to cultivate for leaders, but without friendship, you will struggle alone and your emotional, physical and mental health will plummet. If you struggle to know how to open up and ask good questions of friendship, you can check out our podcast on February 8th where I talked about 10 questions that you can ask someone to build better relationships. It's a quick listen. It's 13 minutes and we'll link to that episode in our show notes. And lastly, if you want to take a bigger step towards your growth and learn how to foster friendship in your life, you can always reach out to me or one of our coaches and we'll sit down with you and help you work through what it means to open up and actually develop friendships in your life. To do this, you can go to pursue whole.com and check out our coaches and their unique specialty to help you in this area. Remember that whole leaders will change the world for the better, but wholeness is impossible to foster without healthy and whole relationships. So prioritize friendship in your life. Take care everyone. I'll talk to you soon.

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