Friendship as Extreme Sport: An Interview with Kim Coutts

Friendship as extreme sport? If you're Kim Coutts, yes. After life threw her some curveballs, Coutts decided she needed to get brave about new relationships. And she's leaned into the challenge the way some of us would train for a triathalon or climb Mt. Whitney. In other words, all in and pushing to the limit. Hear her practical advice and what happens when you click yes to every Meetup out there.

Transcript:

Debra Hotaling (00:04):

Hello and welcome to the Dareful Project. I'm Debra Hotaling. Some people climb big mountains and some surf big waves. But my friend Kim Coutts, she makes new friends. She makes friends like a ninja warrior. She makes friends like you would prepare for a triathlon or you would climb Mount Whitney. In other words, she is all in. And she did this as a challenge to herself and her stories are amazing. So she's here with us today to talk about why she took on the challenge, how she started to make new friends, and what we can learn from this sort of extreme sport of friendship making. Kim, welcome.

Kim Coutts (00:48):

Thank you for having me. So fun.

Debra (00:50):

So all of us as we get older, I mean we used to have our kid friends. We would just hang out and play together. And then as young people and parents, we would be friends of college friends or we would be friends of our kids', friends, their parents. And now it's harder. It just feels harder. How do you find new friends? How did you get this way? How did you get started?

Kim (01:18):

I think I got divorced, and I think it's really easy to be complacent when you're living with another person. You never really hit that loneliness spot where you're like, oh my gosh, I have to do something huge to change this. But when I got divorced, I decided I would move out. I ended up all the way up in Portland sort of accidentally, and I was going through something and completely by myself, so I decided I needed to do something about it. And I dove. In my typical fashion, I have a tendency to overshoot things. I either don't do anything at all or I do too much. So I probably did more than I needed to, but I learned a lot and have kind of kept doing it. And I will say I listen to a lot of podcasts like yours, which are amazing. But I was listening to one the other day on goal setting and how we achieve goals and they really recommend that you can only achieve one goal at a time and you really need to focus on one thing and write down all the verbs of the things that are required to do it.

Kim (02:16):

So I definitely go through phases where I focus on other things, but I am back in a friend making mode right now. So it's definitely one of my top goals I'm focused on again at this time.

Debra (02:27):

And listeners are go, yeah. Yeah, we're all about friendships. I like making friends too. But I got to tell you guys, we are not even in the league of Kim. We were talking on the phone last week and this is how I got so excited about sharing this with y'all because she just started going down the meetup list. And keep me honest on this, Kim, but it sounded like you were just bringing up Meetup and just checking all the boxes. I mean all those weird things, all of those, I don't know if that's super sketchy things you were in, right?

Kim (03:00):

I am in Meetup is odd. It's a really amazing tool, but I also view it kind of online dating and it's a numbers game or a sales funnel as a lot of people might look at it. So I figure I have to join probably 20 meetup groups. I'll go to 10 or 11, I'll like five or six,...