FRIENDSHIPS - Making them
April 9th, 2019
There are many good reasons for making business connections and cultivating them.Successful business executives place a high value on who they know and what are often the resulting benefits of collaborations. They also recognize that friendships, even in business, involve some amount of expertise, take work and an investment of time.
Making friends, business or social, isn’t easy. Moreover, there are no guarantees that every personal interaction will be successful.
Borrowing some tips on the subject from “Psychology Today Magazine,” here are some suggestions that might make it a bit easier:
It simply isn’t possible to make a friend without investing the time. You’ve got to make the effort and SHOW UP in person. So far, there is no app that can adequately replace the quality of a face-to-face meeting.
The frequency of having contact will likely improve the chance of a reciprocal friendship. You will like a person better and them you, the result of REPEATED EXPOSURE. In the case of building friendships, it’s not “absence makes the heart grow fonder.” Rather, it’s more like “out a sight, out a mind.”
Invest the TIME. Failing to take the time to discover, develop and sustain a friendship may well be the most significant reasons people lack friendships. While true that most of us will say we lack the time, the reality is, however, that we find discomfort in making the time.
It helps when making it a habit of SEEING AND SAYING NICE THINGS about others. Like the expression “you are what you eat,” in the case of friendships, “you are what you say and how you are viewed by others.” This psychological phenomenon is referred to as “spontaneous trait transference” where traits that are ascribed to others are unintentionally transferred linking you to those positive characteristics.
Like all that is “work,” more can get accomplished when SETTING A GOAL. Have a strategy and expectations of making a specific number of new friends will likely result in a better result.
A good place to begin this journey is networking; befriending the friends of friends.
Every friendship, whether personally or business based, is best when based upon trust and reciprocity. In a book, “Give and Take: Why Helping Others Drives Our Success,” the author found that “givers” were more successful in establishing friendships and benefiting from them.