7 Tips to Maintaining Your Friendships
Our friendships are perhaps the most valuable relationships we have. You know the adage that you can’t choose your family, but you can choose your friends, and there will be times when this has been confirmed and reconfirmed to you many times over; they excite and motivate you and have broad shoulders to support you emotionally when life throws you a curve ball.
As the demands of balancing work and family life increase, it can be easy to neglect your friendships, but your friendships are vitally important – they help to maintain your sense of identity and keep your feet firmly on the ground. Whether you have a large network of friends to rely on, or just a small circle of friends that you hold dear, maintaining friendships is important but it can also be hard work if you are all living significant distances apart. Here are 7 tips to keeping friendships active.
Schedule
Whereas your friendship may have developed from a time in your life when you were footloose and fancy free when you could go out on the spur of the moment, it is more than likely that you now have increased commitments and responsibilities. As dull as it sounds, and your younger self would be shuddering at this, you need to schedule time to see each other. Whether you can afford a long weekend away, or steal a night in a restaurant, make sure that you regularly set a concrete date in your diary for your friends.
Downgrade Social Media
Social media is a great platform for staying in touch, but it can also be detrimental to your friendship. Communicate with your friends in the good old-fashioned way of talking to each other; you do not want the level of contact to be reduced to periodic likes and comments on Facebook. Make the effort to speak to your friends. The nuances of life are missed in text, you need to hear their voice to compute what is really being said.
Listening is an essential part of relationship building, and while you can have a text conversation, what should be an opportunity to support each other can feel like a broadcasted rant. Online friendships aren’t as deep or authentic as real ones.
Share New Experiences
With old friends the success of your relationship will have been because you experienced new situations or circumstances together, and so what better way to replicate those times than do something completely new? Whether you try white water rafting or even a new restaurant, the emotions that you are sharing will resonate back to the times when you were first friends without the needing to reminisce.
Celebrate Achievements
Seeing your friends overcome challenges and difficulties to achieve their goals is not only worth celebrating but will inspire and motivate you too. You will know intimately the struggles they have faced, and how their determination and hard work has enabled them to succeed. By celebrating their accomplishments, you are recognizing their efforts and resilience. Whether you honor their military record with a custom coin from MilitaryCoinsUSA, or celebrate their promotion with a bouquet of flowers, you will be able to express how proud you are of their achievements.
Go with the Flow
Occasionally friends will have to change plans or forget a birthday, and while this is disappointing, it is not a personal affront to you. Life gets in the way, and rather than being offended by any oversight, go with the flow. Good friendships can be damaged by a perceived lack of thoughtfulness, but there really is no need to sweat the small stuff. Look at the big picture!
Manage Conflicts
During all friendships there will be times when you disagree on issues. It can be incredibly hard to manage conflicts between friends, especially if it happens en masse within a group, but it does not have to be the end of friendships. You need to master the art of conflict resolution, perhaps you have come across this in a workplace setting, but the principles can apply to friendships too before the fallout reaches crisis status. You need express your thoughts concisely but without aggression – assertiveness and empathy need to be used in equal measures – and take time to listen to your friend’s perspective too.
Accept Change
A major part of friendship is that you accept each other, warts and all. Challenges arise in some friendships when people have changed, and the friends haven’t accepted it. Religion, politics, financial and marital status, and the birth of children can challenge the dynamic of a friendship. For your friendship to withstand these changes, you need to embrace the change, and enjoy the new aspect to their life.
Acquaintances are easy to come by, but true friendships are rarer and should be valued for the joy that they bring. Having said that, you also need to be comfortable with the idea that sometimes people choose to leave your life for reasons that you may not be aware of and are beyond your control. If this does happen, point 7 is the most important aspect of the friendship – you need to accept the change.
Throughout life we play many different roles: employee, partner, parent, lover and friend. All are important, but none are quite as defining as the friendships we keep. A good friend will always be there for you, accept your faults and celebrate your success, speak the truth even if you don’t want to hear it, and support you when you need it most; but like anything of value there is a degree of work involved to keep it strong and reliable.
The greatest gift you can give anyone is your time and attention. Pick the phone up and call your friend; find out how their day is going or just to share a joke. You don’t need a reason to call, they will be happy to hear about the mundane goings on in your life just as much as the big events.
Whereas your friendship may have developed from a time in your life when you were footloose and fancy free when you could go out on the spur of the moment, it is more than likely that you now have increased commitments and responsibilities. As dull as it sounds, and your younger self would be shuddering at this, you need to schedule time to see each other. Whether you can afford a long weekend away, or steal a night in a restaurant, make sure that you regularly set a concrete date in your diary for your friends.
Downgrade Social Media
Social media is a great platform for staying in touch, but it can also be detrimental to your friendship. Communicate with your friends in the good old-fashioned way of talking to each other; you do not want the level of contact to be reduced to periodic likes and comments on Facebook. Make the effort to speak to your friends. The nuances of life are missed in text, you need to hear their voice to compute what is really being said.
Listening is an essential part of relationship building, and while you can have a text conversation, what should be an opportunity to support each other can feel like a broadcasted rant. Online friendships aren’t as deep or authentic as real ones.
Share New Experiences
With old friends the success of your relationship will have been because you experienced new situations or circumstances together, and so what better way to replicate those times than do something completely new? Whether you try white water rafting or even a new restaurant, the emotions that you are sharing will resonate back to the times when you were first friends without the needing to reminisce.
Celebrate Achievements
Seeing your friends overcome challenges and difficulties to achieve their goals is not only worth celebrating but will inspire and motivate you too. You will know intimately the struggles they have faced, and how their determination and hard work has enabled them to succeed. By celebrating their accomplishments, you are recognizing their efforts and resilience. Whether you honor their military record with a custom coin from MilitaryCoinsUSA, or celebrate their promotion with a bouquet of flowers, you will be able to express how proud you are of their achievements.
Go with the Flow
Occasionally friends will have to change plans or forget a birthday, and while this is disappointing, it is not a personal affront to you. Life gets in the way, and rather than being offended by any oversight, go with the flow. Good friendships can be damaged by a perceived lack of thoughtfulness, but there really is no need to sweat the small stuff. Look at the big picture!
Manage Conflicts
During all friendships there will be times when you disagree on issues. It can be incredibly hard to manage conflicts between friends, especially if it happens en masse within a group, but it does not have to be the end of friendships. You need to master the art of conflict resolution, perhaps you have come across this in a workplace setting, but the principles can apply to friendships too before the fallout reaches crisis status. You need express your thoughts concisely but without aggression – assertiveness and empathy need to be used in equal measures – and take time to listen to your friend’s perspective too.
Accept Change
A major part of friendship is that you accept each other, warts and all. Challenges arise in some friendships when people have changed, and the friends haven’t accepted it. Religion, politics, financial and marital status, and the birth of children can challenge the dynamic of a friendship. For your friendship to withstand these changes, you need to embrace the change, and enjoy the new aspect to their life.
Acquaintances are easy to come by, but true friendships are rarer and should be valued for the joy that they bring. Having said that, you also need to be comfortable with the idea that sometimes people choose to leave your life for reasons that you may not be aware of and are beyond your control. If this does happen, point 7 is the most important aspect of the friendship – you need to accept the change.
Throughout life we play many different roles: employee, partner, parent, lover and friend. All are important, but none are quite as defining as the friendships we keep. A good friend will always be there for you, accept your faults and celebrate your success, speak the truth even if you don’t want to hear it, and support you when you need it most; but like anything of value there is a degree of work involved to keep it strong and reliable.
The greatest gift you can give anyone is your time and attention. Pick the phone up and call your friend; find out how their day is going or just to share a joke. You don’t need a reason to call, they will be happy to hear about the mundane goings on in your life just as much as the big events.
