Caroline Cavanagh presents the Circle of Friendships, a four-tier model to ease friendship anxiety. The tiers range from 3 am emergency friends to acquaintances, and friendships naturally shift when shared circumstances change, like moving away. Reviewing your friendship map every 4-6 months and intentionally investing in relationships you value can reduce the stress of drifting connections.
Chapters
Are friendships a source of stress and anxiety for you? I know in the past I've worried about what I might have said to someone and how they took it and how that might have affected the friendship, or perhaps felt really close to someone but then not heard from them for ages and worried about why did that happen. If that's something that you can relate to, then there's something I'd love to share with you now, but if it's something that you think, no, friendship's great, totally competent with that, then it's time for you to hit the off button. This model that is something that I've developed has really helped me over the years to understand friendships and the anxiety behind those a lot more, and it's something I've shared with a lot of my clients as well that's worked for them too. And it's really simple. I simply call it the Circle of Friendships. And if you imagine something that looks very simple to this, in the centre, Tier 1, Going out to Tier 4. So a Tier 1 friend, the acid test that I have for a Tier 1 is someone that you could call them up at 3 AM in the morning and go, help! And before they've even asked you, what help do you need? They're getting out and getting dressed, coming to help you. Most people, they may only have 1, 2, often maximum of 3 people at that Tier 1 level. We then drop down to the next tier, Tier 2. Tier 2 friend is someone that you may spend quite a lot of time with. They may be someone that transposes various contexts in your life. They're a friend in work, but they also see you socially outside of work. But there may be just one element of your life that they don't know much about. Perhaps they don't know something about your past, or there may be something that you don't quite trust them with in terms of telling them all of your secrets. Next layer out is a Tier 3. These tend to be people who are very context-specific, so they may be people that you just have a relationship with in work, or for teenagers, it's just someone that they know in their class but they kind of hang out with and it's fine. They will know you in a certain role in your life. Then we go out once more up to Tier 4. Tier 4 we just simply call acquaintances. This is going to be the largest amount of people in this tier. These are people that you can pass the time of day with, just say hello. You may know a little bit about their life, but it's very much specific to a particular, very narrow context. Maybe they're just a neighbour, or they're a particular customer at work. And the way this model rolls is to look at where various people are on that tier, on that hierarchy structure, and whether that's the right place for them. So a lot of people, for example, let me tell you a little story about where this really came to life for me. I used to live in Germany with my husband that was an army officer, and I formed a very close relationship with 3 other women. The 4 of us spent an awful lot of time together. Our husbands all worked together. We all had very young kids. We went on holiday together, spending a long weekend away. We spent a lot of time together, and I was like, wow, I have got 3 new Tier 1 friends! But within a year of leaving Germany, I hardly had any contact with any of them, and I spent a lot of time agonising. What's gone wrong? I thought, you know, this was a friendship for life and we'd be going on holidays together when we're in our 60s, but now it's nothing more than exchanging cards. Had I known now what I knew then, though, they weren't real Tier 1 friends. They were very much friends who were Tier 2, maybe even Tier 3, because they were very context-specific. Take that context away and the friendships drop down to a lower level. That may well be that in the future, if we were to meet up again, they would come back up because there would be glue there. And I love this expression of what is the glue that keeps a friendship together. And sometimes we think that there is more glue than there actually is. In my history there, the glue was all of us being in Germany, all of us having— serving our officers together as husbands, all of us having children. Take Germany away, take the fact that our husbands were no longer working together, and those friendships started to come down that hierarchy. But had I known then what I know now, is I needn't have worried about that. Because I hadn't done nothing wrong. Neither had any of them done anything wrong. It was just the glue of the friendship had changed. In my mind, whenever Sub-1 went up in that hierarchy, became a 2-tier, even a Tier-1 friend, then they stayed up there. But that's not the case. People move down as well as up. And so I now use this model And I go back to it every 4 or 6 months or so and just plot people, friendships, onto this model. Where are they? Accepting people go up and go down. And sometimes I may meet someone and think, you know, they're a really nice person. They may be a Tier 4 at that point. I met a lovely lady at a networking group and I thought, you know, there is a lot of commonality in this friendship. I'd like to put more effort into this. And so we had lunch a few times. Went out for coffee, she became a Tier 3. She's now up there at a Tier 1, and I like to think she may well stay at that Tier 1, but if we were to move away, if anything was to change, that may drop down, and that's okay. And that's why using this model can have such a big impact on our anxiety— accepting that friendships do go up and down on this particular model, but not to worry about it. It's a perfectly normal way That friendships and relationships work. So I hope that by giving you that little introduction to my model, that can help you understand perhaps how some of your friendships work. I would encourage you to use this model, as I do every 4 to 6 months. Look at who's on there. Is there people that have come into your life that you think, actually, that's a really nice person, I would like to invest some of my energy to move them up? Similarly, you may recognise that the glue on some relationships might have loosened and that friendship's gone down. That's okay, don't worry about it, it's perfectly normal. Now there's a free handout on my website carolinecavanagh.co.uk that goes through this model, that re-explains what each of those tiers relate to and how this tier can be used to help you reduce your stress and anxiety around friendships. So do, with my absolute pleasure, go and download that model. It's called Circle of Friendships, easy to recognise, and there's lots of other ones on the, on the resources page of the website too, carolinecavanagh.co.uk. So please take a look around to grab anything that you would like to take a further look at. And if you'd ever like further help from me, please get in contact. I love to chat to people, My role is to help people reduce anxiety in their life, and if I can do that for you, I would love to be given that opportunity. But for now, over and out, and I look forward to speaking to you again very soon. Bye-bye. Bye-bye.
