Helpful Tips To Building New Friendships
Friendships are an essential part of life. They have many positive impacts— especially, healthy and meaningful friendships have a positive impact on your mental health and well-being. However, many struggle to find, make or maintain good friendships. Here are some helpful tips to help you build new friendships.
Things To Follow To Build New Friendships
What kind of friendship you’ll make depends on certain factors. Consider these factors to build a healthy friendship.
- Attitude – Don’t change yourself, and in the same way, don’t expect your potential friends to share the same attitude, beliefs, interests, and behaviour as yours. Everyone is unique, and having such friendships helps you see life from a new perspective.
- Never gossip – Gossiping never makes a good impression. If you keep gossiping about other people, your potential friends are never going to trust you.
- Don’t expect results immediately – Establishing good and strong friendship bonds takes time. It can never happen overnight. Moreover, healthy friendships need time, trust, love, and attention to survive. Do your best but don’t push.
- Treatment of other people – Treat your potential friends just the way you would like to be treated by them.
- Stop criticising – Constantly criticising other people’s weaknesses and failures to your potential friend make them feel cautious— because it’s not uncertain that you’ll do the same to them with your other friends.
- Curb the urge to spill your secrets overnight – It’s okay to share your deepest secrets with your potential friend, but just not yet because, who knows, it can drive them away. So, take it slow and share only the safe secrets first.
- Don’t be aggressive – Being too strong or assertive with people can drive them away. So, ease in with friendly conversations.
Tips for Making New Friends
Try these tips if you feel shy or lack social skills to make new friends.
- Join groups that share similar interests as yours. Talk about your passions, and it can give you the confidence to talk about things with your potential friends.
- A good way to get started with a potential new friend is to ask questions about them rather than talk about yourself.
- Smile and look into people’s eyes when you talk to them.
- Listen to what they are saying rather than focus on yourself.
- Observe from other outgoing people how they make friends easily.
- Look for people who may be struggling to make friends too in the room and approach them for a conversation.
Social skills can always be learned, so seek professional help if you need it.
