When I decided to change careers, a psychiatrist friend told me that I would be most successful if I “found my tribe.” At the time, I wasn’t quite sure what she meant. Eight years later, after making the transition to my new career, I know exactly what she meant.
If you’ve read my blog before, you know that I believe health and success are inextricably tied. Your success, however you define it, requires your best intellectually, emotionally and physically. We cannot be at our best and thrive without good health. It is a widely accepted notion that we enjoy our best health when we are supported socially. That’s where our tribe comes in.
The first definition of tribe in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary is “a social group comprising numerous families, clans or generations…” This is a very narrow and traditional view of tribe. The second, more expansive, definition is “a group of persons having common character, occupation or interest.” If, as journalist Edna Buchanan said, “Friends are the family we choose for ourselves,” the tribe of the second definition is the family we choose based on what we have in common.
The tribe that ultimately supports our success, however, is even more than that. This is important for everyone to understand, including students, faculty and administrators in higher education who are trying to successfully navigate the academic environment.
While it is natural for us to be attracted to those with whom we have much in common, not all of them belong in our tribe. Commonalities, however deep, can be present even in unhealthy relationships.
Unhealthy relationships are toxic to our physical health and usually are characterized by and based on feelings of fear, obligation or guilt – or FOG, an acronym coined by Susan Forward and Donna Frazier in their book Emotional Blackmail. They deplete, depress and create unnecessary stress and anxiety for us.
Toxic relationships have no place in a tribe that is supposed to support our success. The health of the relationships matter because of their impact on our physical and mental health and, ultimately, our success.
