A wise woman...surrounds herself with people who are good for her.
I remember the first time I gave conscious thought to the whole notion of friendship. I was at a conference and the keynote speaker talked about how much we're impacted by the people around us, and reminded us to be deliberate and intentional about who we spend time with. I came home from the conference thinking non-stop about this message and how it applied to me. Over the next few months I found myself giving serious thought to who I was spending time with, and more importantly, how I felt when I was with them.
I remember the first time I gave conscious thought to the whole notion of friendship. I was at a conference and the keynote speaker talked about how much we're impacted by the people around us, and reminded us to be deliberate and intentional about who we spend time with. I came home from the conference thinking non-stop about this message and how it applied to me. Over the next few months I found myself giving serious thought to who I was spending time with, and more importantly, how I felt when I was with them.
For me it came down to two basic questions. Does this person leave me feeling good, or not so good? What I discovered is that there were many friends who left me feeling positive, happy and energized. Woo hoo! There were other friends however, that left me feeling negative, down, and a bit of the life sucked out of me.
While I felt loads of gratitude about the friends that I thought were good for me, I was at the same time questioning why I was spending time with people who weren't making a particularly positive impact on my life. These were my "glass half empty" friends - the ones who have good hearts, but also gave me the distinct privilege of listening to them constantly vent about what was wrong with the world, and for whom things never seemed to go right. Ugh...
This realization prompted me to do something rather bold. I brazenly sat down and wrote a list of the characteristics of the kinds of friends I was looking for - and lo and behold...they started to appear.
While I could wax eloquent about the cognitive psychological reasoning for my ability to identify these new friends with my desired characteristics - the effortless reason is - because I was deliberate and intentional about identifying what I was looking for.
My big "ah-ha" with this experience was that in the past I had been very unintentional about creating my social sphere, and that in order to be good to myself, it was important to make friendships with deliberate intent versus by default.
I still love my glass half empty friends, I just choose to appreciate them in smaller doses.
But here's a question for you Lauri: I believe that are sometimes when we just have to let friends go. How do we let go gently when perhaps the other person doesn't want to let go? This is something I'm dealing with now and I really am a loss as to how to proceed. When you realize you don't have much in common with a friend anymore, and being with them doesn't "speak" to you or fill your soul, then how does a wise woman help the friendship fade away with kindness?
ReplyDeleteI fully agree. Sometimes after consciously assessing our social circle, we may indeed find it important to let a friendship fade away that is not longer a fit for us. In fact it is important to give ourselves permission to move away from these relationships if that is what feels right for us. To continue on with the friendship as it always was when it's no longer a fit,will only create feelings of resentment. It's also not fair to the friend if we're not being honest about how we feel.
ReplyDeleteIf you think about it, we have unwritten 'contracts' with the people in our lives. "With this person I am the listener, this is the person I tell everything to, I trade childcare with this person, I check in with this person each day, I laugh a lot with this person, I have Friday night dinners with this person etc."
When we feel that a frienship is no longer a fit for us, what we're really saying is that we want to change the contract we have with this person. Sometimes we may want to cancel the contract all together, and we have that right. We are the experts with respect to knowing what's good and healthy for us. Sometimes however, we may only want to change certain aspects of the contract - and that's okay too.
No matter what changes you choose to make,there are many ways to handle this delicate situation with grace, care and kindness. And when you have the best interests of your friend at the forefront of your mind, it won't be possible to do it any other way!
One way to approach the situation is to simply let nature take its course. Over time, as you continue to behave differently with your friend, you can trust that her intuition will sense that you, and the situation, has changed. Time will take care of things and eventually you'll both create new rhythms, habits and patterns.
If, as you have expressed, your friend resists the changes she's seeing in you, the best way to handle this is to have an honest conversation with her. As difficult as this may seem, most of us appreciate honest communication. Let her know what's going on for you in terms of your needs, goals and learning opportunities. Make it more about the changes that are happening for you than about what she's not able to fulfill in your friendship.
Either way, because it's important to you to help the friendship fade away with kindness, you'll do everything in your power to accomplish that, and at the same time honour your feelings and be true to who you are and what you need.