Friendships vs. Relationships: Building True Connections At Work

Yeah, I always differentiate, there's a difference between being friendly and developing a friendship. And I think that's a really important thing for all of us to identify, because I know I'll often have people introduce me on stage and say, and our new best friend. And, you know, and I always like, do I correct them and be like, no, we have not like done the triangle of friendship, you know, and we haven't practiced. So a friendship is any relationship where we practice the behaviors that make up a friendship. But we, you know, none of us want to be like, you're not my friend, because we don't really have enough language for all the other things, but like, there's other relationships. We can support each other. Yes. And we can be colleagues and peers and a network. And there's so many other things. But friendship is certainly a, you know, I teach it on a triangle and we can get into that in a second, but all the relationships start at the bottom of the triangle with the least, least intense relationship. And they move up the triangle toward the top of the triangle when we practice the three requirements of relationship. And so science is showing that we all have about 150 people on our triangle, so to speak, that our brains can kind of keep that information for about 150 people. And obviously we're not going to be like super duper close to all 150. And so there's going to be a degree of range and relationship that we have. And we kind of use the word friend for everybody on that triangle. Right. But we need to understand that when we talk about the definition of feeling seen in a safe and satisfying way, what I want seen at work in a safe and satisfying way will look different than what I want seen in my religious organization every week and what I want seen with my neighborhood association and what I want seen with my kids' friends. And so what's important is that all of these different relationships, we feel like we can show up and for what's appropriate in that context, feel seen. But that doesn't mean that every single relationship in our life sees all the same things and sees everything. So it's really learning that we have different relationships that serve different purposes.