Are you struggling to maintain your friendships while juggling the demands of a successful career and motherhood?

Are you making the mistake of underestimating the power of celebrating your friends’ successes?

Let’s dive deeper into this overlooked secret of building stronger connections in today’s episode.

🌟By the time you finish listening, you’ll learn:

• The art of positive resonance and how it can transform your relationships.
• The three common challenges that might be hindering your ability to celebrate your friends and how to overcome them.
• The incredible impact of celebrating each other on your overall health and quality of life.
  
  

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Professional Bio

Are you a high-achieving, ambitious professional working mother, feeling trapped in the whirlwind of your demanding career and family responsibilities? Overwhelmed by stress, busyness, and societal expectations? Drained of energy and struggling to find balance while silently battling guilt and unfulfillment?

Welcome to a transformative journey a certified lifestyle medicine physician, experienced yoga and meditation teacher, and a mother of three. In this immersive podcast, she provides a path to authenticity, purpose, and vitality. Through tailored coaching programs, Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer equips you with the tools and strategies to regain balance and create a life aligned with your true self.

Our listeners, our clients, are high-achieving professional working mothers who have successfully transformed their lives with life design. They’ve overcome stress, found peace within their careers and personal lives, and are thriving.

Discover how to harmoniously balance your professional and personal life, relieve stress, and find your true purpose. Learn time management techniques, prioritize self-care, and regain meaning in life. Join Dr. Libby Schanzmeyer and begin your journey towards a life of ease, vitality, and impact, where authenticity leads the way.


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Podcast Episode Transcript

Secret sauce for strengthening friendships coming up today.

Have you ever wondered how to build a strong and lasting friendship?

Join me today as we uncover this often overlooked secret to building a stronger friendship.

Join me as we delve into this underrated aspect of friendship and we’re gonna look at some of the work by Barbara Fredrickson in a book called Love 2.0.

So we all want friends and we all wanna be a good friend.

A lot of times we define being a good friend by being there in a time of need when the person is going through something really hard. That’s kind of a litmus test that we use to say, well, I’m a really good friend because I was there in this dark time in their life. I was always there for them, right?

Well, a lot of us get so busy in our everyday lives though, and when something good happens, we aren’t really there for our friends in those times because we figure, well, they’re good, they’re celebrating something. I don’t have to be there for that because they’re good. So not gonna worry about it.

The thing is we have underestimated the transformative art of celebrating our friends.

And we fail to recognize the significant impact this has on our friendships.

So in order to understand this, let’s take a step back because I really want you to understand what is meant by positive resonance, which is defined by Barbara Fredrickson in her book.

Barbara Fredrickson talked about positive resonance in her book and that is like a time when you’re with your friends and it doesn’t even have to be a friend. She talks about it can be in any context. Like you could talk to the checkout person at the grocery store, but specifically we’re talking about friendships in this show. But positive resonance is just an interaction with anyone where we feel connected and understood and we feel like we’re understanding them.

And have this feel good moment. You know, like when you laugh with a friend and you both get the joke and you’re having a lot of fun, that’s positive resonance together.

There’s actually an amazing song by Krishna Das. I’ll see if I can link it in here. But the whole song, it’s a chant, but it’s about friendship and it’s about that really amazing feeling you have when you’re like laughing with your best friend and you just, there’s not a care in the world because you’re with your best friend and it’s like the funniest thing that you’ve both ever heard. And there’s a whole chant about that. I’ll see if I can link it. I’ll link it down below if I can find it.

And it’s like you’re both laughing in the same joke or super excited about the same thing. That’s what positive resonance is.

And positive resonance makes you feel better. It makes your friend feel better. And it makes you feel like a really close connection. It feels so good. And it brings us closer together.

She eloquently wrote in her book about positive resonance. And she said positive

Positive resonance arises in a moment of connection. It is a synchrony between two or more people who are both sharing positive emotions and creating them in one another. Embracing this concept can profoundly elevate the quality and depth of our friendships.

And then another thing is, let’s define what we mean when we say celebrate. Like, what do you mean when you say celebrate? Is it like, get the pom poms out? I don’t know.

In this definition, we’re saying it is meeting their good fortune with love.

What better way for our good fortune to be met than with love from our close friend? I mean, it’s heartwarming just thinking about it. And I’m not even thinking of a specific example. It just feels so good to be met with love in a good moment.

And you know, we talk about our emotional buckets being full. Celebrating someone in their good moments is an opportunity to refill our resources and theirs, both. By celebrating them, they are more resourced, and by celebrating them, we are also more resourced, and how our emotional bucket filled with good, warm feelings.

So when we connect with someone, when we celebrate with someone,

It’s a perfect moment to recharge our resources and theirs.

One study that she talked about was about ratios of good to bad encounters. And margin, we know that we need a margin of three to one in these quote good to bad encounters, like three good things to one bad thing, like three good things where somebody smiled at me in the hallway, another one somebody liked my hair that day, and then another one might be somebody complimented my shoes, those are all very external.

And then bad thing could be a criticism that you weren’t expecting that you might not agree with.

And again, those are all external. We can do more internal things, but those are just popped into my head this moment.

So if we start realizing that this ratio exists, and I’m sure there’s some fluidity to it, but this is one of the studies that they found. If we start becoming aware of it, it’s like we start seeing it more. And so if we know what positive resonance is, and then we can start noticing these interactions that are positive, we automatically build on it, and then we’ll start to see it easier. And it’s like, you know, when you talk about a red car,

And then the next day all the cars are red. It’s your brain, the reticular activating system, right? It’s like our brain starts picking up things that it’s primed to look for, that it’s noticing.

Events don’t always translate to good feelings. So the interaction at the grocery store with a checkout person might not translate to one of those good events until we start going through it and noticing, oh, that was a good event. So you start keeping better track of the good events in your life, which can really add up and enrich our lives.

And this is interesting and this is cool. You’re gonna like this. People that start noticing these things, they’ve found that they get more emotional upliftment from a hug. Like if two people are hugged, one person has been noticing these good events, the other person hasn’t been paying attention to the events. The person that has been noticing the good events, person A, we’ll call them person A, person A is noticing good events, person B,

Not paying attention, just stumbling along in life in our default mode. Person A will have an actual measurable emotional response more positive than person B, because they’re primed for good things to happen.

They will get more of an emotional uplift from a hug. Person A that has been keeping track of good events, they will have a hug and they will be more uplifted than person B at going through the exact same thing, getting a hug. They won’t have as much of a positive emotional upliftment. Isn’t that amazing?

And that all sounds great, but, There can be some challenges to this. Sometimes it’s hard, and I think that’s why it feels so good for someone to genuinely celebrate us, because there can be some challenges. in her book, she recognized three challenges.

That sometimes we face when we’re trying to celebrate other people.

Number one, there might be some resentment or envy in the other person’s good fortune. 

Number two is self-diminishment. Like we don’t think we’re worthy of the good fortune that they’re having. And that might be difficult to celebrate someone else if we don’t even think that we’re worthy of something similar.

And then the third is just indifference. You might not even notice, might be indifferent to what’s going on with other people. And there’s different causes. You might just be overwhelmed. You might be busy. You might have something going on. You might be oblivious, who knows what’s happening. But that might be a reason that you don’t just automatically celebrate. You’re indifferent to what’s happening.

But we can learn and develop this skill for celebrating others. And I like this idea that

Celebrating others is a generous cousin to gratitude. Isn’t that beautiful? That’s from Barbara Fredrickson’s book. Celebrating others is a generous cousin of gratitude.

And celebrating others isn’t just for us. Gratitude is something that’s silent for us and we might write in our journal and we might meditate on or think about or pray about. However you experience gratitude is wonderful, but celebrating someone else is like gratitude on steroids. It’s like you get to have appreciation for something amazing happening, but it’s like with another.

And it’s unending. There’s something all the time going on good with other people. We just have to look around and find it and we can appreciate it. And then we can dwell on that as a gratitude for others, not just ourselves.

Cherish the good fortune of others, we amplify the opportunity for gratitude basically.

Which in turn increases our ability, our reception of love and happiness.

We know that social support can be such a lifeline for us and others. And we usually think of it as support when times are hard.

But there is actually

This shocking research, I think this is shocking, that when we are able to celebrate with someone when things are going right, that more efficiently builds our friendships than being there when something’s gone wrong. And that builds trust so that when something does go wrong, they know you’ll be there. But when you’re celebrating with someone, it’s a different level of trust.

They really do know you’ll be there in the good time and the bad.

So if we don’t celebrate our friends when things are going right, it really can hobble our friendships. We don’t have the same level of trust and connection with people that are not able to celebrate with us and celebrate our wins as much as theirs.

It can lead to a sense of emotional disconnection even.

So I encourage and challenge you to infuse your friendships with celebration around each other.

It’s a shared joy.

It’s a shared joy that creates this positive resonance.

That makes our day wonderful and builds close, nurturing, bonded friendships.

And the cool thing is, and challenging at the same time, is that in order to be a person that truly celebrates our friends,

We’re going to have to let go of those things in order to truly celebrate and cherish the good fortune of our friends.

In other words, you can’t be a small person to truly celebrate the wins of your friends.

So – enriching. By embracing this practice of celebrating each other, we are paving the way for more positive and enriching friendships.

This will create a fulfilling, supportive, nurturing network of friends.

Not only will you be contributing to their wellbeing, but this gift you give to them will be giving to you because anytime you give to others, the best gift we can get back is when we give to others out of our heart.

So I would love to know if there’s a time that someone shared a celebration with you or you with them, and it was really impactful to you. I’m so curious, come join us over in our Facebook group, Living True by Design, and share with us a time when you celebrated someone or someone celebrated you. And it was really meaningful. I would love to hear about that.

And here’s your challenge for the week. This week, try to notice at the end of each day, if you can remember, think about if you had just even one, one positive interaction with someone where you were able to celebrate for them. And when you did that interaction, when you had that interaction, did it feel positive? Did you feel connected? And was it meaningful?

Here’s your challenge for the week. If you go through and notice one time a day that you have celebrated someone and when you make that connection with them, this is part of the positive resonance practice.

And we’re specifically using this practice for celebration. So if you can celebrate, find one small thing a day to celebrate, see how you feel at the end of the day when you go back through this experience.

And during that event of celebration, did you feel in tune with the person?

And did you feel close to the person? Those are two really key points to notice about the interaction. Did you feel in tune and close?

Those, that assessment, that practice can literally be life-changing. It’s recommended to use in the context of just positive resonance throughout the day, but this is a smaller little practice of small celebrations throughout the day. Just notice if you feel close and in tune with the other person.

So besides scientific research, it’s really intuitively obvious that celebrating each other builds strong, close, connected friendships.

Beyond that, it can be good for our overall health and quality of life.

Come join our Facebook group. Like I said, leave a comment, come join us. We would love to be part of your positive resonance. We would love to celebrate with you and be connected with you over there in Facebook.

Don’t miss out on our next episode. We will be talking about fun and how having fun can make you super successful

We’ll see how fun isn’t just for playtime.

And how having fun can make you healthy, wealthy, and wise.

And remember to show up, focus, and shine as you live true by design.