Create Your Best Support Team

How to create your best support team? A support system is a collective of individuals who not only know you but also your values and goals.

These communities are meant to positively influence us. When facing trials or challenging times, a proper support team can be the motivation and strength you need to endure and ultimately overcome.

Create Your Best Support Team

If you don’t already have one, or maybe if you are just curious as to how you can better cultivate the one you have now, follow these 10 tips to create the best support team you can. 

Venture outside your comfort zone. 

Friendships often occur naturally with those who already exist in the environments we inhabit. It makes sense that we would gravitate toward others at our job or even our school. The downside of this habit, at times, is that it can create an echo chamber, of not only similar strengths but also similar weaknesses. 

Take a chance and look for some people who don’t fit into your normal comfort zones. In doing this, you expose yourself to a network of varied individuals with potentially vastly different life experiences than yourself. 

Dig deeper with who you have. 

Likely, there are people in your life already. You might not necessarily describe these relationships as deep or necessarily supportive of your short and long-term goals, but the initial steps of comfortability have already been done. Consider digging deeper with these people. Find out more about the connections you have. You might be surprised by the number of friends who also are desiring a strong support system in their own lives. 

Meet a friend of a friend. 

Sometimes we are looking for a specific type of support, someone who shares a particular aspiration or life stage as us. Don’t be afraid to ask your friends for their help in connecting you to the right people. These friends already know you, potentially how you work and who you meld well with and might be able to pick a couple of individuals from their life that would be a perfect fit for your exact needs. 

Join a new community. 

Not unlike venturing outside your comfort zone, joining a new community, even if it is within your comfort zone in some fashion, can be a great way to meet new faces. If you’ve been working out at a specific gym every Tuesday, consider trying a different gym on another day of the week. 

This way you can ease yourself into a new environment you already have some experience. When you find a community of those who are seeking similar things as yourself, be willing to learn from them and be encouraged by them as you discover their stories. 

Assess current unhealthy relationships. 

In the same way that some relationships can pour positivity into your life, others can introduce negativity. Unhealthy relationships become dangerous to your aspirations when they make a habit of taking your time and energy without giving anything in return. 

Attempting to juggle these types of connections while trying to form new ones can be exhausting, both physically and mentally. Assess the relationships you have in order to determine what ones you might have to let go of if you truly want to move towards a more supportive team of people. 

Have a plan. 

If you’re unsure of what type of support people you need in your life, then you could use a plan. Working backward from your goals and priorities, you can figure out the type of support that you might need in order to make progress. As you begin to form these profiles of individuals, you’ll have a better idea of where you might be able to find them in your life.

Consider professional support. 

Support comes in many forms. While much of the support in your life will come from colleagues, friends, or family, some support is meant to be professional. As the stigma against mental health slowly begins to fade, more people are questioning whether or not they could benefit from someone training in behavior or psychological sciences. If you’re wrestling with something especially deep or traumatic, or even if you’re not, consider seeing a professionally trained individual help you work through your more complex thoughts, emotions, and experiences. 

Have patience. 

A support team isn’t going to appear in your living room overnight. The best connections we make, often take some time to form. Definitely be willing to make a strong effort to meet and connect with others, but also be ready to wait a bit for the right ones to come along. 

Avoid negative influences. 

A negative influence might be someone with a poor attitude, a sour outlook on life, or even someone who promotes negative or destructive behaviors in your own life. Many negative influences aren’t bad people, but these people may not be the best for your specific needs. Likewise, consider your influence on those whom you support. Are you promoting positivity in those around you, or tearing them down? 

Prioritize your support team. 

When you have something good, make sure to take care of it. You can find the best of the best that this world has to offer you, and still squander it if you don’t make an effort to cultivate these relationships. Be sure that you’re giving as much as you’re getting, pouring into the lives of those around you so that they might make it through their struggles and repay the favor.

To create your best support team is about finding those who are ready and willing to support you. These tips can be a great way to start looking. Remember that the people you might need may look different than those you’ve had in your life so far. Too often, we can enclose ourselves, shutting off potentially powerful supporters simply because we fear what we don’t know. 

But when we allow others to come into our lives and breathe positivity into our journey, we can experience the full richness of true relationships as we collectively work towards our individual goals.