Log In

65,139,461 Views

Blog Start Here Best Videos All Videos About Contact Store Book List Life Purpose Course Forum

How To Make Friends

By Leo Gura - May 27, 2014 | 12 Comments

Share 0 Tweet

How to bust your top 20

The 4 biggest sticking-points that keep you from having great friends. limiting beliefs. 120+ mins

How To Make Friends - 4 Sticking-Points Th…

À regarder plus tard Partager Download MP3s and listen
on your mobile device!

email address

No spam, ever!

Search Videos

How To Overcome How To Be More Introvert vs Extrovert How To Be Attractive

Shyness Confident

Video Transcript

Hey, this is Leo from Actualized.org, and in this video

I’m going to talk about how to make friends.

Let’s talk about how to make friends. In this video, I

want to talk about some of the problems that you
might have if you’re lacking in friends, if you feel like
you need more friends, or if you feel like you want
more from your friends. Maybe you want to get more
out of your friendships than you’re currently getting.

To do that, there’s actually some deeper insights you

need to have about how friendship works, what it is
and how you can go about improving the quality of
your friendships, and also the quantity. We’ll take a look
at all those.

Some of these things are simple, but some of these

ideas are also just things you haven’t thought about. So
many people just take friendship for granted. They’ll
say “Oh, friends. I get friends spontaneously. I just
naturally get friends. If they come, then I have them. If
they don’t, then I don’t.”

Actually, you can put some thought into how your

friendships work, and if you do that, they’ll function
much better. They’ll be much more satisfying. For most
people, their friendships just function on autopilot.
When that tends to happen, you don’t get the best
results. In fact, you might get some bad problems.

Quality Over Quantity

In this video, we’re really going to talk about that and
also how do you go out there and specifically start to
make friends. Let’s talk about that. First of all, I think a
very important idea that needs to be introduced right
off the bat is the following: Quantity of friends, versus
quality of friends.

A lot of people get hung up on this, and they’ll forget

about quality completely, and they’ll just focus on
quantity. They’ll be all about quantity, how many
friends do you have. Probably the worst example of this
is your Facebook friend count, or how many followers
you have on Twitter, or something very shallow like
that.

Your Facebook friends, those aren’t real friends. That’s

bullshit. That’s not a friend. What I want to encourage
you in this video is to start thinking a little bit deeper
about your friendships. This means instead of focusing
on the quantity, and trying to get more friends than
everybody else you know — that’s a losing game, you
don’t want to play that game.

Instead, I want you to really think about focusing on the

quality of your friends. How deep are your friendships?
The friends you’re friends with, how supportive are they
really? How much do they really care about you as you,
and not from what they want from you, trying to extract
something from you?

How many of your friends are actually people that you

meet up with on a continuous basis? How many of
them are just people you shoot one text message to
once a month? You don’t need dozens or even
hundreds of friends. I think a lot of people get this
wrong, they think that “Well, I need to have fifty friends,
or a hundred friends.”

In reality, you can’t make use of those. You can’t make

use of a hundred friends. You don’t have the time or
the energy in the day to really extract all the benefit you
can of a friendship, with a hundred friendships. It’s not
going to work.

What you really want is to focus more on the quality

and depth. If you get even two or three, or five really
high quality, deep friendships going, with people who
are really in line with your values, people that really
support you, people that are really interested in what
you’re interested, people you really vibe with, people
that really push you and challenge you, that are willing
to be open and authentic with you, people that you
actually spend some time with face to face, not just
through electronic means.

Those are going to be enough to really satisfy you. If

you don’t have a lot of friends right now in your life, this
is very encouraging. This doesn’t mean you have to go
out there and befriend a hundred new people. That’s
not necessary at all. What you’re looking for is just a
couple, a handful or really high quality friends.

Time And Energy

That’s the first idea I wanted to introduce. The second
idea is this idea hta friends require energy and time, to
get the juice you want out of friendship. You have to
invest in it. A lot of people just take friendships for
granted. You have to ask yourself “How many friends
do I really want? Not only how many do I want, but how
many do I have time for? How much energy do I want
to invest in each friendship that I have?”

If you only want to invest five minutes, then what can

you expect to get back? All you can probably expect to
get back is a Facebook wall post on your birthday.
That’s it. What else can you expect? If you want to invest
more time, if you’re willing to invest a couple hours a
week into your friendship, then you can expect a lot
more from it.

Ask yourself why do you need these friends? Do you

need these friends just to look cool? Do you need these
friends just to outfriend somebody else that’s in your
social circle, just so you have a little more status, a little
more prestige? Those are all silly and stupid reasons.

In the end, you want friends because friends give you

deep companionship, you can have interesting
conversations with them, there’s stuff they can help you
with, you can help them with, you can learn from each
other, you can push each other, you can grow together.
That’s why you really want a friend.

If that’s the case, you’ve got to think “OK, that means I’ll
probably have to put in a little more time into each
friendship. That means I’m going to have fewer
friendships. Then I’ll put more energy into them, but I’ll
get even more out of them.”

This is actually really nice, because I think a lot of

people unknowingly get very frantic and busy with their
social life. They’re so busy because they have all these
friends hitting them up, and all these activities they
want to be doing, but then you’re not doing any of it,
you’re just kind of hitting your friend up once a week or
twice a week with a text message.

It’s a very shallow interaction. What happens is that

you’re wasting a lot of time communicating, but you’re
not really building anything long lasting or deep there.
Instead of wasting so much time communicating,
writing little stupid messages back and forth that mean
nothing, why don’t you actually get one or two good
friends, start meeting with them face to face, and start
having richer interactions, actually doing interesting
activities together, growing together.

Then you can not be so frantic with all this messaging

that’s going back and forth. You can just focus on a
couple of people. It’s much more sane. It’s a minimalist
approach to friendship building. I think it’s better to
focus on just a few.

Let’s talk about some of the problems. If you’re

watching this, you don’t have very many friends. Maybe
you don’t even have a single friend. You want to make
some. How do you go about doing that? Let’s take a
look at, first of all, why this is happening. Why do you
not have any friends? How come you’re not able to
create friendships?

Four Key Problems

I think there’s four key elements to why people have
problems making friends, so let’s cover those, and then
we’ll go into each point in depth. One is not socialising.
You simply don’t go out. You don’t interact with people.
You’re sitting at home, or you’re cooped up at work, or
you’re doing something where you’re not out and
about, and you can’t physically interact with anybody.

If you’re not physically coming into contact with people,

of course you’re going to be very limited with how
many friends you can have and make. It’s probably the
biggest hurdle people have, when they don’t have
friends.

Hurdle number two is the following: you don’t have the

time and the energy. This goes back to what we were
talking about earlier. How much time do you have for
your friends? How much energy? If you’re working ten
hours every day, and you’re really focused on your
career, then how many friends can you expect to be
able to have, to maintain?

How much energy are you willing to invest in the

friendships? Or do you just expect the other friend will
do all the work? Are you going to invest time and
energy into setting up meet ups and coming up with
activities, and rounding everyone together and being
the leader ofthe group? If you’re not willing to do that,
then be honest with yourself and say that you have
more important priorities. Maybe you do.

There’s nothing wrong with that. You don’t necessarily

need friends, but if you want the benefits of having a
friend or a circle of friends, then you need to be
cognisant of the investments that will be required, both
time and energy-wise. If you don’t have the time but
you do want the friends, then you have to ask yourself
how can you make some time.

You have to start to reprioritise some things. Maybe

you shouldn’t be working so much. Maybe you should
cut out some of the TV you’re watching all the time.
Maybe you should cut out some of your internet
browsing time, or whatever you’re doing that’s wasting
a lot of time in your life. I guarantee you’re doing stuff
that’s totally useless and wasteful. Cut that stuff out
and spend it with your friends.

Missing Opportunities
Point number three is: you’re ruining opportunities.
This means you are coming into contact with people.
Maybe you even have friends in your life, but then
you’re losing them. It’s like you’re actually doing
something to repel people.The reason that is is because
you’re ruining the opportunities for building lasting
friendships.

Why is that happening? Ultimately, it boils down to the

fact that you’re very judgemental. You’re too
judgemental of people. For example, for me, I’ve never
really had a problem with building friends on this point.
I am introverted, and I tend to be in my own shell. I
don’t socialise that much, I don’t go out that much
when I’m really working and focused on something
else.

In that sense, I won’t have a lot of friends because of

those points, but I won’t have a problem with meeting
someone new and clicking with them. That’s because
I’m very open minded. I’m not judgemental about
somebody when I meet them. When I meet somebody,
I’m interested in that person and that person has
something just going for him and I’m not going to judge
him.

Like, “He’s wearing something stupid”, or “I don’t like his

ideas”, or this, or that. If you’re very judgemental and
picky, of course you’re going to be bumping into a lot of
people, but then you’re going to be judging them so
harshly that you’re not going to want to be friends with
them.

Instead, what you’ve got to do if you’ve got this problem

is open yourself up. There’s stuff you can learn from
other people, and you don’t necessarily need to
become that person. You can just be around that
person, be a friend to that person. If you don’t mesh,
value-wise, at all, then you probably won’t be good long
term friends.

You won’t be growing together, but you’re still going to

be a loose acquaintance with that person. Then if you
do click, then you can really go deep. A lot of time, you
don’t know who you click with until you spend a little bit
of time with them, and see and really get to know them.
Don’t judge a book by its cover. Don’t be too
judgemental with the kind of friends you keep.

Have all sorts of friends around you. Have friends of all

sorts of different beliefs and different ideas. This will
make you more open minded. This will expose you to
all sorts of new influences.

Have Confidence
The fourth point is the reason that people don’t’ have
friends is because they’re very shy, and they’re very
unconfident in social situations, even if they’re out and
about. They’re just very shy, in their shells, or they are
fake in their conversations.

If you fake all the time, or you’re so shy and scared to

talk to people that you have trouble introducing
yourself, or trouble opening up a conversation, or
trouble introducing the conversation to topics you’re
interested in — if you have trouble doing that, then of
course it’s going to be hard for your to make friends.

You probably don’t have very many friends, because

you need to take the initiative, especially in the
beginning, when you’re trying to build a friendship, you
have to be putting energy into it, and so does the other
person.

You can’t expect the other person to do all the work for
you. You have to share yourself too. You have to put
yourself on the line. You have to take your own ideas
and the things that you love about life, and you have to
share those. The other person can’t read your mind.
They don’t know what you’re into.

If you never talk about what you’re into, in a

conversation, then they might not ever know about it,
and then you miss an opportunity to click with them on
anything. If you’re always very reserved, or you’re trying
to be fake, and you’re trying to put on this fake facade
when you’re around people, then of course that’s
creating a problem too.

In the end, no one really wants to be friends with a fake

person. What they really want to do is see the authentic
you. Authenticity, that’s what’s attractive and magnetic.
When you’re being fake, people usually see through
that very quickly, and then they will not want to have
anything to do with you. That’s something you want to
work on, if you have that sticking point.

Those are the four points. Ask yourself where you’re

really having trouble. I think that, for most people,
they’re having trouble making friends, or have zero
friends at all. It’s really because of point number one.
They’re not actually going out and being around people.
You need some ideas for how to do that.

Your life right now, it’s like this pattern, this habit of just
going to work or going home, or doing stuff that’s very
isolated and insulating. Instead, you want to open that
up. That means you need to go join some new group.
Join a club, join an organisation. Go hang out with the
people that are at work.

Organise a work event where you’re going out after

work and socialising in some way to a bar or club, or
restaurant, or some sort of event you’re doing together.
You’ve got to do that. Maybe join some sort of sports
team, or sports league. You can go to Meetup.com,
there’s tons of meetup groups you can — basically find
a meetup group on any topic in the entire world that
you want to, and join that.

Surround Yourself With People

You’ve got to do a little bit of research and figure out
where you can place yourself, where you’re literally
surrounded by more people. This is probably the
biggest thing. If you do this, the other points will tend to
autocorrect. This idea about being shy and fake — if
you’re around a lot of people all the time, then this shy
and fake thing will eventually dissolve.

Eventually, you’ll just break through it. You’ll bust out of

your comfort zone if you’re around a lot of people. But
if you’re never around a lot of people, then that’s never
going to happen. You’re going to remain shy and fake. If
you’re always judgemental about people, that too. If