My twenties have been an especially interesting season of back-to-back transitions under varying levels of uncertainty. One thing I’ve learned with each transition, across school, work, cities and even relationships, is the importance of genuine friends. Many years ago while I was still a bright-eyed college student, I was fortunate enough to receive wonderful advice from a tenured finance executive at a conference. She said, “treat your relationships like a garden and tend to it”. I’ve held on to this advice since, bringing a long-term view and intentionality to my relationships.
The point really stuck with me because of the story this Wall Street veteran related to us. She told us that during her tenure at Lehman Brothers since the eighties, she made a deliberate effort to build relationships beyond her team, her firm and across Wall Street. No particular agenda, apart from learning about other people and finding out how she could help them. She didn’t need a job - she was already at one of the largest, most prestigious and fastest-growing banks globally. But when Lehman collapsed decades later amid the 2008 crisis, she recounted how a few friends at Barclays were willing to hire her. What’s even more interesting is she said she would only take the job if she could bring her entire team with her. Despite the cash crunch contagion on the Street at the time, Barclays agreed because they knew her well. But they only knew her so well because she hadn’t started picking up the phone at the time of the panic. Instead, she had tended to her relationships like a garden, season by season. By 2008, she had known them for decades. The people at Barclays were friends turned colleagues, and she had maintained the same sense of care and intention for her team during the transition.
At the time, this leader’s story and advice struck a chord with me because of my gut feeling that relationships need substance. Over the years, her counsel has continued to grow on me, aging like fine wine. Friendships, some of our most intimate relationships beyond our spouses and families, need time, care and attention to flourish. In the changing seasons of adulthood, it could be easy to leave the garden of our adult friendships unattended. This is particularly true in current times where on one hand, we navigate a swipe-first, short-form, scroll-filled world in our downtime. On the other hand, the spreadsheet, schedule and stack rank nature of our adult working lives barely leaves energy and room for spontaneity. This leader’s advice is valuable, timeless even. But how do we apply it in current times? It’s one thing to know one needs a well-tended garden. It’s quite different to actually have the tools and heart posture to garden through each season. I’ve had my fair share of trials and errors when it comes to friendships. Beyond the errors, I’m grateful to have found some meaningful, genuine friendships. These have ebbed and flowed through seasons with lasting goodwill. In this practice of tending to my garden, here are a few things that have worked for me.
Reach Out When You Think of Them
As basic as it sounds, the basics are basics for a reason. One of the basic building blocks of friendship is conversation. You don’t have to have an agenda. In fact, reaching out when you don’t have an agenda is potentially the best time. I’ve found that whenever someone comes to mind and I just reach out and say something, they might end up saying how they had also thought of me at some point. You can even literally say “You crossed my mind today”. A well-tended garden needs aeration for water and nutrients to reach the roots. Reach out and soften that soil that might have hardened.
Lead With Value And Connection
One of the things I’ve learned in this season is to lead with value and connection. This particularly shines through in the transactional nature of our current society. Value could take different forms in different seasons. In one season, it could be information; in another, opportunities. In a different period, it could be feedback on their indie film or YouTube video. It could also be reposting their content or taking and sharing pictures from the event you both attended before they ask. Closer to home, it could be helping with kitchen duties at the in-house gathering. Many forms of value don’t need money. A good number don’t need to be grand. Yet all need at least a little intention.
In a period in between roles, I reached out to a friend at a company that had an opening for an Associate position. She knew I’d been working on a company and that I love to solve problems and build products. However, a quickly shifting economic landscape had me thinking about plan Bs that were far from my purpose. She was at the firm and could offer a referral, and I would have been off into the interview circuit. When I asked her for a referral, she agreed, but asked me what I wanted to do. I talked about solving problems and meandered my way through some word slop before she gently reminded me that she joined the company because when she started at the firm, she had just graduated and didn’t know what she wanted to do. As such, she had been using her role as an opportunity to learn about various industries. She was also transparent about her day to day at the firm. I ended up not following up for a referral and instead thanking her for re-centering me. Sometimes value isn’t exactly what we expect, but it is valuable nonetheless.
Connection creates more paths towards common ground and greater familiarity. Sometimes it happens through deep conversations, but many times the light touch of a good meme, a song or a TikTok could go a long way in building a space where there’s less tension or expectation. Overall, be willing to give and receive. Gardens need water and nutrients. A steady supply of both yields green, healthy leaves, strong stems and solid branches.
Invite People To Shared Activities
Doing things together deepens ties in third places and beyond. However, this way to deepen ties will not happen if no one takes the initiative to actually plan out an activity. Be the person who steps forward and invites someone or a group of people to an activity, no matter how small. While elaborate, in-real life experiences like cookouts, dinners and concerts are effective, so is an hour of minigolf after work, a short hike over the weekend or after-hours basketball at the nearby school or YMCA. Even the internet can be a third place. I’m not the biggest gamer, but I’ve seen old friends reconnect over playing FIFA, Madden and League of Legends. Not every shared activity has to be extremely structured. One of my old roommates and I used to just connect by walking through a nearby farmer’s market on Sundays. At the same time, don’t feel bad about adding the activity in advance to your calendar or setting and sending reminders. It shows you care for the activity despite your busy schedule.
Pick Up The Phone
Adding your voice to interactions makes them richer. There’s something in tone and real laughter that can’t be entirely fit into emojis, so whenever you can, pick up the phone and call your friends. On the flip side, actually pick up the phone when your adult friend calls. Sometimes a one-hour call after many months of not speaking can regenerate patches of dried or dead soil in ways weeks of texting could not. Let calls be your organic matter as you tend to your garden.
Keep Your Phone On
I am personally notoriously offline when I’m not reaching out or responding, but I’m learning to keep my phone on outside of focus time. Keeping your phone on enables people to actually reach you. If you’re busy when they call, you can always send someone to voicemail or send them a quick text that you’re in the middle of something. Keeping your phone on creates more room for serendipity and expands your surface area for luck. Amid routine, the serendipitous, spontaneous moments end up being seeds that sprout lasting memories. These serve to deepen our friendships further. But that all starts with being available, so keep your phone on.
Practice Vulnerability
Vulnerability makes us beautiful and human in a heavily filtered world. Vulnerability means letting ourselves be fully seen by our friends. In adulthood, there’s the desire to hide our struggles behind a veneer of pleasantries and social media posts. But we need to let ourselves be deeply seen, fully seen, for our friendships to take firmer root. It is not comfortable. For some of us, initial attempts may even feel excruciating. But it is necessary for the blossoming of our garden. This doesn’t mean all our insecurities or struggles have to be shared all at once. We can tiptoe in, we just shouldn’t tiptoe around. There are many ways to be vulnerable: asking for help on a project, playing a game we’re not good at, and even openly sharing our thoughts about the career, existential or midlife crisis we’re having. The core theme here is truth-telling and creating space, space for our friends to be there for us. Friendship is not just about being there for our friends, it’s also about our friends being there for us. As Brené Brown says, vulnerability is the birthplace of joy, creativity, belonging and love.
Learn To Let Go
We might practice every technique and read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People cover to cover, but at the end of the day we need to let go of the outcome. The best friends are the ones who want to be friends with us. We can only find this out after we do our tending, not before. As St. Paul says, “I planted, Apollos watered, but God gave the increase”. What’s in our control is what we do to tend to our gardens. Also, across times and cultures, from Solomon to Lao Tzu, we have learned to recognize that there is a time for everything. Sometimes a season of one friendship comes to an end. Other times, it’s a season to look over our garden and prune. Yet the end of one season creates the space for another to begin, and pruned plants grow back fuller. Overall, what’s important is that we keep tending to our gardens.
I wish you pleasant weather as you tend to your garden of adult friendships. May you find many reasons to smile in the sunshine and in the rain.