The founder of New Zealand’s largest women’s friendship community, and a professional ‘moraale booster’ share strategies for finding face-to-face connections in a digital world.
Most women need only one person with whom they feel a sense of belonging, to feel much happier in their lives, says Sarah Clarke.
Many of us would love to have a “precious, filter-free free” friend. “A frank conversation where someone says, ‘I think you’re wonderful; I’ve got your back’.”
However, the problem, says Clarke, is that most women don’t have that person.
It’s why the former therapist and psychology trainer seven years ago founded a women-only New Zealand Facebook community called Find Your Tribe.
The group now has almost 30,000 members across Auckland, Waikato, Bay of Plenty, Wellington, Christchurch, and Nelson, who meet up to make new friends and combat loneliness.
In the next couple of months, Clarke is launching an app that will make connections even easier: connecting women online to make new friends offline.
To help women get started, she offers social confidence training through a Confidence Club. It’s for anyone who’s been feeling shy, quiet, awkward, or been out of the social scene for a while.
An in-house survey of those who’d joined the tribe but weren’t active showed that for 83 per cent, it was because they lacked social confidence.
Tribe friendship events include everything from high tea to axe throwing. The aim is to find like-minded new friends while trying fun new things.
Clarke, 46, lives in Coromandel and has made the enterprise a fulltime business.
She says one misconception she’d like to see disappear is that it’s hard “making” new friends as adults. Rather it’s hard “finding” them.
One of the reasons for that is we can ask someone we’re romantically interested in, “Are you single?”, but “What can we ask someone we’re platonically interested in, ‘Are you friended?’. We meet someone and think, ‘Oh, she’s really neat, I’m sure she’s got lots of friends’, so we don’t ask. We don’t take that next step.
“Where the tribe is unique, is that everyone in that community knows everyone’s available for new friends, so it takes that question mark out.”
While working exclusively with women in private practice, Clarke found the same theme coming up with women: a lack of social connection.
“There was always a kind of bashful foot shuffle when it came to talking about their social network. I started to realise over the years, this was a struggle the majority of women were suffering from. Busy home, work, and life schedules meant that friendships were on the back burner,” she says, adding that women are also often encouraged to compete against one another, particularly in the workforce, meaning it’s sometimes difficult to form connections.
“It really negatively affects women, even subtly in terms of self-confidence. It’s much easier for women to feel confident and empowered when they have women at their back.”
Stats NZ Wellbeing Statistics released last year show loneliness levels had increased, with women more likely to feel lonely than men “at least a little of the time”.
Both face-to-face and non-face-to-face contact with family increased, but face-to-face contact with friends decreased.
And despite so many suffering from loneliness, Clarke says women find it hard to talk about it. “Your mum rings and asks, ‘How’s it going’? And sure, we talk about our work and the kids, but we don’t say, ‘I’m lonely’ and ‘I don’t click with the girls at work’. We don’t talk about it, and I think that’s because until now, people haven’t known what to do.”
Initially, Find Your Tribe was Clarke travelling around New Zealand hosting friendship speed dating sessions. They were popular but not effective in building long-lasting friendships, she says.
“I started to realise women need to meet each other regularly for friendships to grow. You and I can meet and have a lovely chat, but unless we’ve done that three or four times it’s not that easy to say ‘Shall we go for a walk next Tuesday?’”
So, the concept formed to meet for regular get-togethers in a “friendship series” hosted by fellow tribe girls.
Women pay a membership fee to sign up for a series of events that allows them to meet the same women regularly over time. Or, if women prefer, they can “dip their toe in” and check they click with the other women before buying tickets to the whole series.
“The tribe has been created as the anecdote to the digital world, including ‘Fakebook’, which, while entertaining, is also isolating. My goal is to get people offline in real time and make lovely new friends,” Clarke says.
And it’s worked. Recent feedback from one tribe member was:
“This group isn’t just changing lives, it’s saving them’.”
“And in many ways, I knew that was true but it was so nice to have that affirmed,” she says.
Men, too, need mates
When it comes to making mates as men, you’ve got to put yourself out there and not worry about what others think.
That’s the advice from social media star and AM Show presenter William Cribb, more commonly known as William Waiirua.
Waiirua, a former youth worker with more than 100,000 followers on TikTok and 150,000 followers on Instagram, calls himself a “fulltime moraale booster” who shares his “waiirua” (spirit and soul) with everyone he connects with.
(The extra “a” and “i” are intentional and are for emphasis and exaggeration, we’re told.)
“I’m pretty out there. I’m always saying hi to people and striking up conversations everywhere I go. As soon as you start not worrying about what others think, you start excelling.”
Being kind and showing attention to others “no matter who they are” will also work in your favour, he says.
Throughout school, Waiirua, who grew up in Kaikohe and Feilding, was a jokester and had a lot of mates. Now with busyness, he doesn’t get to see those mates as often as he’d like, but they keep in touch via FaceTime and WhatsApp groups. “There’s always a lot of banter.”
The ex-Dancing with the Stars finalist has a “handful” of close friends and then a wider group of acquaintances, but he’s always open to making new connections, of which he says there are opportunities everywhere.
For example, he met one of his newest friends, Reuben “Reubz” Zhang, owner of Auckland’s Reuben Cafe, by chance when visiting the cafe during DWTS rest breaks.
The pair now catch up regularly and Zhang makes cameo appearances on Waiirua’s social media.
“If you’d said, ‘you’ll be mates with a 60-year-old Chinese man’, you’d be like ‘what’?, but he’s a pretty good mate of mine now.”
He’s also met new friends through playing tag and basketball as an adult.
“You’ve just gotta get out there sometimes, and you’ve got to love being around yourself first.
“If you’re confident in yourself, the rest is pretty easy. Strike up a conversation and then build on that, ‘Do you want to catch up later for a coffee?’.”
Friendship doesn’t always happen organically. You really have to try to put yourself out there. Sarah’s social confidence training brings it back to basics, starting with greetings.
1) “What’s your name?” How can you reply with your name that makes it easy for the other person to remember?
2) ‘”Where are you from?” Instead of saying, “I’m from Tauranga”, add on what you love about it. What cool walk do you love to do? It’s the same with someone asking “What do you do?” How can you reply in a way that the person finds you interesting?
Having ready-made answers to commonly asked questions will help get conversations flowing. Social confidence is something that will come as a result of feeling like you’re well prepared, and this includes having five or six ready-made, open-ended questions.
Carly Gibbs is a weekend magazine writer for the Bay of Plenty Times & Rotorua Daily Post and has been a journalist for two decades. She is a former news and feature writer, for which she’s been both an award finalist and winner.