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The Secret to Navigating Friendships & Personal Growth
How to attract, release, & shift friendships during a period of reinvention
You’ve probably heard the adage that you are the average of the five people you spend the most time with. Your friendships play a tremendously important role in how you get along and evolve as an individual.
While your friendships offer support and camaraderie, they can just as easily keep you stuck or cause you to unwittingly play small.
In my role as a mindset coach, I frequently work with clients who are in the midst of a personal uplevel or reinvention. Perhaps they’re pursuing a drastic career change like a shift to an entrepreneurial venture, a spiritual awakening, or a massive lifestyle change such as electing to go alcohol-free.
Whatever the case, they all come to me with one common block: the fear that they’ll become a social outcast if they make a move that suddenly makes them appear as “different” than their current friends.
Maybe you’ve been there. I know I have and I can attest to the level of anxiety I felt when I let the fear of rejection creep in. Let me share a bit of my story for context.
Nearly four years ago, I’d started to sense that my relationship with alcohol was no longer serving me. I was on the verge of a massive uplevel in many areas of my life. I was being nudged to step into a new career path which would require a lot of drive and attention. I was also feeling called to pursue a deeper spiritual connection and study. When I did the math, it seemed quite simple that my social life was holding me back from stepping into the life my soul was aching for.
While I felt the desire to make a shift deep in my core, I was also irrationally afraid to do so because I knew it would mean stepping away from a lifestyle that I’d built much of my identity around. My entire social life was built around happy hours, late nights, and boozy brunches. I could not fathom how I’d be able to maintain my friendships if I elected to become sober. Furthermore, I saw little hope of meeting new friends in a world where the only model of socialization I’d been shown involved alcohol.
