118: Adult Friendships 101: What They Didn’t Teach You In School

October 19, 2020

Do you remember how easy it was to make friends in kindergarten? Do you wish it was still as simple? With the number of people we meet in-person and online, work with, and become friends with during our lifetime, learning how to be successful in friendships is a crucial life skill to have. That’s why in today’s episode, we want to do a crash course on everything that they didn’t teach you in school. Welcome to Adult Friendships 101.

In This Episode, You Will Hear About:

Why you may be feeling frustrated with your current relationships
What relational intelligence is and why it matters
The difference between doing things versus doing life with others
The four categories of relationships:
- Friends – individuals who are relational assets and not liabilities; a relationship where you can be your authentic self
- Associates – a relationship where a common interest or intersecting schedules brings individuals together. The nature of the relationship is friendly, but there isn’t a desire to go deeper into the relationship or you don’t know enough about the person to really trust them.
- Assignments – a trainee, a mentee, and/or advisee. It is a mentoring relationship where you are the mentor
- Advisors – when an individual is mentoring you for a limited amount of time

Resources Mentioned During the Episode:

Quotes and Tweets:

Relational intelligence is the ability to discern if someone should be a part of our lives and what place they should occupy. While everyone should be loved appropriately and valued equally, it doesn’t mean that we should treat everyone the same. @DhariusDaniels
Relating to people properly should not be confused with treating them equally. Although everyone is equally valuable, not everyone adds equal value to you. @DhariusDaniels
If we put people in the wrong categories of our lives, it’s not just detrimental to me, but detrimental to them also. When misplacement happens, some relationships are destroyed that were salvageable. @DhariusDaniels
Bottom line, they [friendships] are vessels for an enormous manifestation of God’s unconditional love for us. @DhariusDaniels
It’s one thing to do things in life with somebody, but doing life with someone is a friend. @DhariusDaniels
If we are frequently frustrated in our relationships, we must learn to see frustration as our friend. Frustration is an indication that some adjustments need to be made. @DhariusDaniels
Frustration is also a result of failed expectations. In the context of relationships, it means we must discern whether we are expecting someone to give what they are incapable or unwilling to give. We will stay in frustration when we continually expect someone who belongs in a certain relational category to behave like they belong to another. @DhariusDaniels