Episode 28: How to Prioritize Your Connections (Social Orbits Technique)

In this episode,

Lizzie shares a technique called social orbits to help visualize friendships, how to prioritize the ones you want to cultivate, and how to know who to call if you're feeling lonely.

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Post-pod questions to consider

Do you think drawing a social orbit could benefit you? Who would be your Mercury and who is someone far away you'd like to bring closer?

Episode Transcript

Hey. You're listening to Midnight Philosopher with Lizzie. Thanks for tuning in. 

Today, I'm going to talk about social orbits. Social orbits are kind of a way to visualize the relationships in your life. 
Sometimes you might be thinking, I don't know if I have any friends or any connections in my life. Or you might be thinking, I'm not sure I spend the right amount of time with the right people who feel like I should be spending that time with. You know? I'm not sure if I prioritize the relationships that are truly important to me. 

And social orbits can help you try to prioritize those relationships and visualize those relationships in a tangible way that can help you with how you spend your time, thoughts you might have in your head, and just kind of generally how you view relationships. So a social orbit is kind of like a solar system, and you put yourself at the center of the solar system. 

Pretend you're the Sun. And then different planets gravitate around you at different distances. Like a real solar system, Mercury is much closer to the Sun than Jupiter. And so, a social orbit, you might put someone you're really close to much closer to you on the on the social orbit and someone you're not as close to you a little bit more distant. 

For example, I'm really close with my best friend, Ben, and so I might put him really close to my orbit in the sun. But I'm not as close with an acquaintance I know from improv, so I would probably put them a lot further away around my social orbit. A social orbit is a therapeutic tool, and it helps people figure out their feelings about current relationships and friendships and as well as potential ones. 

So in order to do this, you can literally draw it out. You draw yourself in the middle and then you put planets around yourself, closer and farther and you put friendships and acquaintances you label the planets as friendships or acquaintances as people. So the people you feel closer to, you put on planets closer to you on the drawing and the people you feel are more acquaintances you put farther away, and the people that you don't really know but you want to, you might put on your social orbit but kind of in the distance. And when you're all done, the diagram will look like a solar system. 

I've used drawing social orbits many times in my life to figure out who I feel closer to, as well as I've used them with my clients as well. I first found out about social social orbits during grad school as a social worker. I was at my internship was at which was at a therapeutic high school. And my supervisor taught me this technique to use with one of my clients because my client said he had no friends and no one to talk to. 

And my supervisor had me go through with him all the people he interacted with in his day, either at school or at his job at the grocery store. And we then placed all those people on his social orbit. And although he didn't draw any of the people very close to him, he had thought about ten people he could put on his social orbit at a further distance. And then we talked about how he might want to get to know those people a bit more and and then maybe the next time we did a social orbit, they'd be closer. 

And this technique spurred some good conversation because then my client told me that the real problem was that he didn't know how to talk to people. That is, he felt that his communication skills were lacking. So that helped us, in future sessions, work on his communication skills so that he could become closer to people and feel closer to people and have them, you know, visually closer on his social orbit. 

I'm also drawn social orbits myself. I became a bit obsessed with the concept of friendship, to be honest, because some of my struggles in the past kind of surrounded friendship. In college, I had a severe mental health crisis and that caused a lot of people who I considered to be friends to withdraw from me. A similar thing happened when my mom died. It left me doubting people's intentions and constantly reevaluating people's friendships with me. As I've gotten older, I know there is more nuance to friendship, but drawing social orbits did help me figure out who I felt closer to and who felt further for me. It wasn't necessarily who I saw the most, and that was a good revelation. It wasn't quantity so much as quality. 

And I had this friend, let's call her Maria, and I periodically drew social orbits. Over time, I saw Maria's dot grow farther and farther away from mine. I couldn't put any tangible reason for it, but sure enough, Maria and I had a major blowout over text and ended our friendship. And social orbiting helped me visualize and conceptualize the distance that was growing between Maria and me. 

And the third time I drew a social orbit was very recently. Now, this is a good problem to have, but I simply have too many people in my orbit these days. According to a theory called Dunbar's theory, it suggests you can have 5 close friends, 15 good friends, 50 friends, and 150 people in your network at any given time. And that's the capacity for people's relationships. And this has been true since, you know, since people were cavemen. 

And so, anyway, a problem for me is that I have eighty people's birthdays in my calendar. And I, for the most part, consider someone a friend if their birthday is in my calendar. Now, you know, I might remember a coworker's birthday or someone or but who's not necessarily my friend, but they're definitely my social network. So I use social orbiting to help me sort through my friendships and help me decide which ones to invest more time into and more thought into and who to create a little distance with. So, overall, doing social orbits can help people think about who they interact with and help people find people in their life they can connect with. 

The social orbit can, for lack of a better word, help you learn how to target those people you wanna get to know better. However, if you become a little bit obsessed with drawing social orbits like me, it can have the drawback of erasing some nuance in friendship. For example, you might have a friend who you're really close to in one area of your life, but not another. And, in that case, the social orbit is more an average, but it kind of gets rid of some of the details. Thinking about friendships and relationships and being intentional about them can be really important for developing communication skills. 

So how do you implement some of these skills that social orbits outline? For example, let's say you're feeling like you're hanging out with someone who isn't really fulfilling your need for connection. What can you do? Well, you could evaluate it and you could say, "Okay, this person is consistently further away on my social orbit, which probably means I don't feel that connected to them. So I have a choice. I can either figure out a way to feel more connected to them or I can let the distance grow." 

And the way you can do this is by, you know, prioritizing your time. If someone isn't giving you a fulfilling and meaningful connection, you might only see them in group settings. For example, like for me, I have friends who I'll happily see one-on-one, but I also have friends who, you know, I like them. I'm glad they're my friend, but I'd rather see them in a group setting because, just we vibe better in group settings, and that's okay. It's okay to have friends who you want to see one-on-one, and it's okay to have friends who you only want to see in group settings. And it's okay to have friends who you only want to see in large group settings. So, doing a social orbit can help you prioritize which relationships, feel more intimate to you and which ones you want to foster to be more intimate. 

And let's say there's someone you wish you were closer to and you feel that you could be, a social orbit might be like, okay, this person you're pretty close to, like, how do you want to get to know them better? What kinds of things do you want to share? Do you want to open up and be a little bit more vulnerable and see if that helps you connect? 

So, in this episode, I talked about social orbits. I talked about some of the benefits as well as some of the drawbacks to creating them. And social orbits have helped me a lot and I hope this technique will help you. 

Well, thanks so much for listening. I'm going to draw another social orbit now. If you'd like to join my social circle, you can follow me on insta, @TheMidnightPhilosopher. Have a good night.