Making Time For Friends

Friends are people you connect with.  They are people who make you feel comfortable enough to  fully share yourself.  You become involved with these friends because you’re attracted to their characters, energy and personality.  You choose to remain friends with them because you enjoy their company and have a mutually honest and respectful relationship. You trust your friend with your secrets, ideas, thoughts and feelings.  You feel secure with these people you call friends.  

Powerful friendships allow you to give and receive.  They allow you a place to express and share your common interests and find new ones together.  Good friendships allow you to develop your self, obtain new skills and learn to relate.  The power from these kinds of friendships is that they help to meet your needs for acceptance and let you know you belong.  

The company of good friends is a beautiful thing.  However, it can be for some people very difficult to cultivate and maintain.  If you remember back when you were young, making friends was easy.  You were exposed to people your own age who had similar interests and life circumstances - who were available to form friendships and whose only responsibilities were generally homework, hobbies and a few chores.  The supply of friendship and time were abundant and not much mattered.  You had plenty of time to have your friendships develop and blossom naturally.

As we grew and left school, adulthood arrived with its many responsibilities of paying bills, developing careers and looking for mating prospects. Friends started to go in various directions.  Creating and developing new friendships does not appear as abundant as they once were.  When you meet new people you’re compatible with, you have to schedule time to develop the relationship.  However, the general truth according to what people say is that they just do not have enough time.  People are constantly complaining about not having enough time.  However, we are are all apportioned the same amount of time-  24 hours per day.  It all depends on what you do with it.  Do you use it or do you waste and lose it?  Are you so booked and scheduled that you can’t muster the energy to make an invitation for lunch?   Do you barely have time to take lunch cause you’re running errands or working at your desk through lunch?  

Like anything you have to commit.  I have clients who are constantly telling me that they don’t have any friends and they have a hard time making new friends. However, after working with me, you discover that as you begin to align time with your priorities, your opportunities for friendship increase.  You will discover that you are the one who has to decide who you’re going to be friends with.

Trust is one of the issues that people who do not have friends are always concerned about.  However the lack of trust, I have discovered, is internal.  When self trust is developed, you start to give trust differently.  If it is friends and relationship that you want to develop, then you have to start taking risks and being approachable.  

Here are some questions that I ask my clients:

• What do you want in a friendship? 
• On a scale of one to ten, how satisfied are you without friendships?
• What do you believe that having friends would add to your life?
• What actions do you take that allow you to meet and make new friends?  
• What do you do that keep friends away?
• What do you do that pollutes your friendship?
• If you were to transform and deepen your friendships what would that be like?