Resilient Seeker Coaching | Ross Raymond Nunamaker

When was the last time you gave thought to who your friends are?

Maybe more important, what do you consider a friend to be?

Years ago when Google Plus came out, I was active in online marketing and researching social networks. Paul Adams was the person behind the concept of social circles as presented in his work “The Real Life Social Network”.

My thinking was heavily influenced by the concepts Adams outlined, because they made sense to me and how I interacted with people.

My friends come from a wide range of places, or circles. I have friends from high school, from college and sub sets therein. I have friends from my community, neighbors and others I’ve met who live nearby. I have friends from hobbies and activities like coaching and racquetball and for me Tolkien fandom.

We gather friends from many different places and at different stages of our life. We don’t maintain these friendships in the same way across the board and we can only know so many people, so well.

Robin Dunbar proposed 150 as the number of people an individual could reasonably know based on time to get to know someone and to  maintain the relationship and have the cognitive ability to do so.

Close relationships are roughly a dozen or less, meaningful can be as high as fifty, and beyond that are broad, upto about 150, and superficial, seemingly boundless online.

The advent of online social networks can grossly distort and cause internal confusion around the meaning and significance of friends and your relationship with them.

I have a small, trusted group of friends including family. I have many more smaller groups or circles. These circles also have tiers of close, meaningful and broad.

Some people cross circles and often individuals in some circles would not typically engage with those in others for a variety of reasons. Even within the same circles there can be broad differences, such as high school friends.

The importance is to understand the circles of friends, how they interact and the tiers of friends within them.

This is how you understand your relationships. And relationships are critical to your well-being.

It is important not to become consumed with quantity and likes, but instead to understand the value and authenticity of your relationships.

A coach can help you identify and classify your unique networks based on your social circles and help you understand how you can leverage relationships by focusing on those of value to your well-being.