14. Leave Your Group: Yes or No?

You are the average of your five closest friends

About half of the population is obsessed with the idea of growth.

The other half? They want stability. Growth means change and any change terrifies them.

I believe real growth is "you become more yourself." Life is a quest to become yourself. That means continual change.

The Gravity of Your Peer Group

However, when you embark on this quest and successfully change, it becomes evident that you were not fully yourself throughout your previous life.

During this untrue time, you made friends with people. They come to know false you. They liked false you.

If the change is substantial, these friends won't know how to relate to you anymore.

So there's a push-pull here.

You want to grow, and you need support, but your friends expect you to behave like you always used to.

Creative Relationships

Not all dynamics are this way.

The best kind of relationships and group dynamics actively foster positive growth and change. Not because they have an agenda to make you a certain way but because the basis of the relationship is dynamic — the foundation is a co-creative one.

These groups are less common.

The Crabs of Your Expectations

Most peer groups expect you to be a certain way.

What's even weirder? You expect yourself to be a certain way. You only accept yourself when you show up as this kind of person.

The "dump them and get new friends" approach won't work in this case. You'll take the problem with you.

It's you, bub.

Real growth is hard. It's doubly so when you try to do it all by yourself.

My Imaginary Crab Buckets

During one summer in graduate school, I traveled around Europe. At one point, I was on a 2-day boat ride to Corsica and spent the entire day — morning to night — writing out my goals over and over again, on and on. It sounds insane, right? For most people, writing a goal might start and stop with:

Lose 25 pounds, get a promotion, and learn Swahili

I didn't want just to write things. I wanted to whip myself into the frothy state of being as if I'd already accomplished them, to look at my life, describe it, and explore what needed to be done to get from A to B. Most importantly, I wanted to air out any emotions and judgments that came up. They're there in my psyche, I might as well unearth them now.

My big goal at the time was to start a business leading creative retreats.

One concern I had when I wrote these goals was that the academic crowd wouldn't like me doing wellness things.

It bothered me. I valued how I fit into the academic community. I believed that if I changed, they would light torches and chase me out of the village.

Well, this was all a self-created limitation.

I achieved my goals, and nobody shunned me. I got scholarships for several of them to attend a retreat.

If anything, it was a giant net positive for everyone involved.

Growth is like that.

But, I don't think you can ever realize it at the time.

I feared being different, even though no one expected me to be a certain way.

Those friendships were sufficiently growth-based that they evolved. There was space for me to change, and we could still hang out.

No pitchforks and torches.

Actual Crab Buckets

I wasn't aware of the crabs in a bucket phenomenon until recently.

The story goes that if you catch crabs and put them in a bucket, you don't need to worry about them escaping as long as there's more than one crab in the bucket. If one crab tries to get out, another will grab it and pull it back with the others.

Oof.

As the saying goes...

if you want to go fast, go alone

if you want to go far, go together

Just make sure you're not in a bucket full of crabs.

In my example, I was stopped by the crab bucket phenomenon even though it was self-imposed.

Business Crabs

This happened again a few years later.

I was having lunch in Chianti with some fancy retreat center owner, a guy who had sunk millions into renovating an old monastery. He, of course, didn't do the renovation work himself.

He was a former business executive and wanted to hear about my business model.

I gave my hippy answer. I said I wasn't doing it for profit. I did the retreats to cover my costs.

That was the wrong way to do it, he advised.

Months later, when he reached out if I was interested in hosting a retreat at his place, I was in the middle of building my own off-grid house by hand.

The fact that I would seek out doing something like this shocked him. He didn't know how to respond to me.

He was giving me the crab bucket treatment. His business executive crabs couldn't reconcile humble hand-building.

Audience Crabs

The fact that online content is ranked by an algorithm incentivizes people to lock themselves into little categories.

Write about something for a long enough time, and you amass a following. So they say.

Change your topic or style, and you'll alienate some people. You'll lose some followers (and gain others).

We have been trained to judge people by their follower count.

If I had 100M followers, and it "totally didn't matter to me," if that number dropped to zero, it would impact my self-esteem. I would no longer believe in my ability to sway opinions. The world would seem less safe.

Power can be power. It can also be just a desire for safety.

Sorting Crabs

If you're at Hogwarts, you get sorted into 1 of 4 houses. That single choice will shape the values that get encouraged in you.

Slytherin? You'll be rewarded for your ambition.

Gryffindor? You'll be rewarded for your courage.

Some guy named John Turner did research that developed self-categorization theory. In one famous study, a bunch of strangers were put into arbitrary groups. The researchers watched their behavior.

Conclusion: Each individual aligned their behavior to the attitudes they perceived as the norms for the group.

Mind you, these are strangers. They don't have any rapport or prior bond with any of the other people. After the study, they went on to become strangers again.

Repersonalize Yourself

Membership in a group gives you a sense of identity.

This happens in any group: at work, in families, in intimate relationships, and in friendships.

Hold in mind one group that you are a part of. Look to see if there are ways you depersonalize yourself:

• How do you feel secure based on your relationship with a given group dynamic? Note that this does not mean the dynamic needs to feel supportive. Plenty of group dynamics are formed around feelings of not fitting in.

• Can you discern yourself as different than how you feel yourself to be as a member of the group?

• What would it feel like if you were not a part of the group?

We Need Creative Groups

Here, at the end, I come around and make it clear that I'm pro-group.

Community is precious. I believe that doing this work of discernment helps a person gain a clearer sense of themselves so that, ultimately, they can co-create groups with others that foster peace, creativity, truth, and a better world.

Watch out for crabs.