I am going to be speaking to you today about making friends. Making friends should be easy but sometimes it is not! I remember when I was little, I just used to walk up to random people and go ‘hello, would you like to be my friend?’ and for some reason, I don’t do that anymore maybe because it’s slightly socially disturbing.

We are going to discuss how it is that you can be at peace with the fact that maybe you find it quite challenging to make friends. What I’m not going to do is tell you to just go out there and make friends because my belief is that you are better off with quality than quantity and sometimes that may mean that you feel like there’s nobody, in particular, in your life and that you are a lone ranger going forward. But here’s why that can be quite useful to you. For one thing, when you learn to be with yourself, you can learn to like yourself and enjoy your own company and actually, that’s a very attractive feature such that when you have the potential to meet new friends in the future, they begin to like you because they see how comfortable you are with yourself, this is a good thing!

The second thing is that it is really important that you find your people in order for you to be kind of authentic and to really enjoy the company of others and for them to enjoy the company of you. They’ve got to be your kind of people you can’t just have friends for the sake of having friends. You want to be with people who get you, you know, who get your quirks and who understand who you are, what you like and why you like those particular things and that can take some time because if you’re a very quirky person then you might be really refining the numbers of potential friends that are out there in order to find the ones that are really the right fit for you.

If you know that you have these quirks – Start thinking about where are the other people who have the same kind of quirks as me? Where do they hang out? Are they online? Do they go somewhere in particular? They’re out there you just need to be able to reach out to them and connect with them and that is going to take a little bit of effort on your part but it is the effort that is well worth making because when you find your people that sense of connection that you get from belonging to that group and really being with those people is incredibly special, so it’s not something that you want to give up on! This is something that is worth your time and effort to be able to go out there and achieve.

Another important thing in finding your people and becoming comfortable with who you are, reaching out and making new friends is that sometimes you don’t fit with the people that you’re with because they may not be as evolved and advanced in who they are, as you are. I use this example because when we’re in school, typically, we’re in year groups with people who are of the same age as you and there’s a big difference between your age of development and your stage of development. Stage of development means where you’re at kind of mentally and emotionally whereas your age is just your number. You might currently be in amongst groups of people who are the same age as you but who don’t think in the same way as you intellectually or emotionally and that might be where your conflict is coming from, perhaps, you’re having difficulties in making friends with those people because you’re trying to make friends with people who are at the same age as you rather than the people who are at the same stage as you.

My recommendation is if you have a sense of that or if you get that kind of a feeling maybe stop, you know, thinking about “well, who thinks a bit more like me? Are they people that are older than me? Are they people that are in a specific group that I would maybe like to get myself gravitating towards?”. Where are the people who think like you and don’t just limit yourself to the pockets of people who are the same age as you because that might not be where your people are!

The final thing to mention is that your relationships will change, your friendships will change, the people that your friends with now you might only be friends with a fraction of those people in the future because these things change even as adults we go through these evolutions in our relationship. Where people that we’d maybe gravitated towards at one point suddenly go out of our lives then sometimes that’s of their choosing sometimes it might be of your choosing because you notice that maybe things are not as aligned as they used to be like you’ve started to think in a slightly different way, or you’ve started behaving in a different way.

Your interests may have changed and it’s really important that when that happens you don’t take it personally that you accept that this is just one of those things that happen in life and that you’re comfortable with letting those people go because it’s only when you’ve truly got that comfort in the letting go of them that you’ve got the space to let other people in, other people won’t come into your life if you’re still clinging on to something old that doesn’t exist anymore because there just isn’t going to be room enough for this new person in your life and the old person that used to be there. You’ve got to let go of some of your friendships at times because they maybe don’t serve you anymore or you don’t serve them in the same way anymore. But that’s okay, it’s okay to be comfortable with the fact that it happens. It’s okay, to let people go! When you do then you will start to find that the other people that could be filling in those places in even better ways start to show up and make their way into your life too. I hope that was helpful for you today let me know how your friendships are evolving in the comment section down below.

By Gemma Bailey

www.childtherapisthertfordshire.nlp4kids.org