For most of us, it’s really difficult to meet people and make genuine relationships in adulthood.
We grow out of people, grow into others, leave jobs, leave schools, have kids, and lives simply change - so inevitably our friendships and our needs in friendships do too.
But most of us are poorly equipped with the emotional awareness and communication skills to make friends from scratch and build them into genuine relationships that fill our mental, emotional, and intellectual cups.
A result of this, is we stay in relationships that drain us, cross our boundaries, or simply have nothing in common anymore.
If you’re starting from scratch with making new relationships in adulthood, it comes with so many more nuances, so I’d like to address some of them.
Here are 4 tips when building relationships in adulthood:
1. Address fears of getting it going
Take a deep breath and address any fears you have about the outcome of this interaction- before the interaction.
How would you want to be spoken to? Fearful and jumpy or calm and confident? The fears of how introductions have gone in the past don’t have to haunt you and tarnish future interactions, they have nothing to do with the present interaction. This must be addressed in private, in your own mind.
Action item: Use the emotional regulation technique box breathing (read instructions here) to address the stress and fear emotions making it difficult to introduce yourself with confidence and a clear mind. See technique instructions here.
2. Ask meaningful questions
The first thing to think about is what is meaningful to you right now. What do you want to connect with people on? What kind of questions are you asking yourself about life? What kind of questions do you enjoy answering? Once you’ve answered those prompts for yourself, you can move on to the second part of asking questions, which is listening.
Asking meaningful questions moves the conversation forward, but it’s got a lot of moving parts. Listening well is required to ask meaningful questions. In order to listen well, you need to be present. Presence requires understanding your distractions. Understanding your distractions comes from building a relationship with them - through mindfulness.
Action item: Build a mindfulness practice (journaling, meditation, or conscious observation) to begin understanding what distracts you, so you can more readily bring your focus and attention back to the present when it drifts. Reminder, it’s NATURAL for attention to drift.
3. Share about yourself [appropriately]
It’s probably rare that you have ever gotten the tip to “share about yourself appropriately” but here’s what I mean: If you are aware of your surroundings (present) and have proactively addressed fears of the interaction (emotional regulation and introspection) then you can now share about yourself in ways that are both comfortable to you AND relevant to the conversation without all the mental chatter.
This is something that is rarely addressed when learning communication skills. We often get told to “be ourselves” but find nothing but discomfort or end up spinning our wheels, insecure about what we should say, have said, what they’ll say, etc.
Action item: Identify your comfort level with the person you are interacting with (expressive intuition), set an intention for yourself with the interaction, and stay centered (emotional regulation) so you don’t stray from the intention. Examples of this could be simply getting to know them, learning about their business, etc.
4. Release expectations on maintaining the connection
Lives change, people change, circumstances change, blah blah blah. Lord knows that’s why you might have opened this blog post and read it till the end. Change is inevitable and important for the growth of all relationships. So I believe a good deal of flexibility is in order to maintain genuine and functional adult relationships.
Action item: Identify what you expect out of the friendship early on, and be honest about it to yourself. Releasing these expectations will give the new friendship room to evolve naturally, symbiotically, and naturally stand on the foundation of the previous 3 steps.
So…none of these things are easy but they are simple.
I find this work to be incredibly painful most of the time - but in equal parts rewarding and priceless beyond measure.
We need people we connect with as we are now, and as we change. We don’t need unnecessary headaches, miscommunications, misalignment of values, accosted boundaries, fear of reactions and consequences of telling the truth, and relationships that we’d rather not be in but don’t know how to make new ones.
Creating aligned and functional relationships at any stage in life requires intention and communication skills.
I hope this blog post helps and thanks for reading!
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