Be a good friend to build better friendships

Before you can find the perfect friends, you need to be a better friend yourself. This is how you’re going to do it.

by: E.B. Johnson

The friendships we establish in this life can become the anchors that keep us still when the whole world turns upside down. They are a comfort and a means of support. But they also provide us with a new (and better) way of seeing the world. When we surround ourselves with people who are broken, however, the results can be substantially different.

We are only as good as the people we surround ourselves with. Though we might be striving for the stars, it can be impossible to reach them if you’re being weighed down by someone else. Our relationships — in whatever arena we build them — should be supporting, loving, and compassionate. Friends should support us, but they should encourage us too. A friend who pushes you to be better is a friend who is genuinely looking out for you. But how do we find these people when we’re surrounded by those who want to take, take, take?

We are who we surround ourselves with.

In order to build the friendship circle of our dreams, we have to know what it really means to be a friend. It’s a concept we think we’re familiar with, but most of us never give any real thought to the concept behind what it means to really be there as a friend for someone. To be a friend means to see another person as an important and valuable member of your social circle. It’s seeing them as they are and still loving them anyway. It’s allowing someone to be open with you, while you are open in return.

We are who surround ourselves with. If we want lives that are peaceful, stable, secure and filled with love — we have to find the people who bring those things to us. We cannot grow when we stay chained to specters of the past, or people whose limits seem far beyond our goals in life and in love.

Do you want better friends? Learn how to be a better friend. Cultivate trust and confidence in who you are and what you want, so that you can connect with people who do the same. Show respect for yourself, your feelings, and the emotions of others. Listen. Drop your judgements. Seek fun, laughter and joy everywhere that you can. Build the kind of life and personality that the perfect friend wants to be a part of. Better yourself, and you’ll build better relationships all around.

The core qualities of a good and solid friend.

What does the perfect friendship look like to you? Perhaps it’s finding someone who listens, or someone who wants to go on big adventures with you? Friendship looks like many things to different people. There are some core traits that all good friends possess, however.

Showing respect

Respect is a core essential in building equitable and comforting friendships that add more than they detract from our lives. We should always respect our friends, and do what we can (at all times) to respect their desires, or the things they’ve asked from us. They shouldn’t scream at us, belittle us, or otherwise make us feel small and insecure about who we are and what we want. The true friend respects your decisions and your right to make them.

Willing listener

Do you have a best friend that is always there when you call — even if it’s 3 o’clock in the morning? Are they the first one you text whenever you get in a fight? Or the first one to show up at your door with a bottle of wine and a box of tissues when the worst happens? The great friend is a willing listener and a sympathetic shoulder whenever we feel ourselves buffeted about by the winds of adversity. If you’ve found someone who listens whenever you need them to…you might have found a friend for life.

Zero judgements

There is no relationship that can long withstand the onslaught of endless judgements and the inevitable resentment and contempt that results from it. Just as we should never judge our romantic partners for their likes, dislikes, interests, or decisions — we should also reserve our judgements for our friends. Instead of leaping to preconceived notions, we must remain an open and safe space for one another to express ourselves without fear of being made to feel less-than.

A comforting presence

When you’re feeling stressed or crushed by the pressure of it all, do you find that the presence of your closest friend is enough to calm you down? True friends — those who see us as we are and without judgement — have no need to take from us. There are no ulterior motives with them. What you see is what you get, and that can be extremely comforting in regards to the relationships we build with the people closest to us in this life.

In the right corner

Our friends should be in our corners, but they should also stand up to us when we step out of line or get it wrong. Being a good friend isn’t about being a “ride or die” bestie to the grave. It’s about being present for someone and encouraging them to be happy on their own terms. When someone does wrong by you, your friend should be there in your corner ready to help you roll up your sleeves and get to work. When you do wrong, however, the good friend will also speak truth to power and help you get back on the right track.

Always tells the truth

Can you imagine a friendship without trust? It’s a horrible affair, filled with all kinds of paranoia, anxiety, and stress that does nothing except to erode our quality of life. We have to trust the people closest to us, and we do this by telling them the truth and insisting on nothing but the truth from them. Does your friend always tell you the truth? Or do you find that the things are always a bit stranger than fiction? Honesty is imperative in the blossoming friendship.

Easy laughter

While our friendships certainly offer us comfort and support, they should also offer us a great deal of fun, laughter, and smiles. There’s no point to a friendship if it doesn’t bring invaluable benefits to your life. You should have fun spending time together; fun sharing similar interests. Easy laughter is a key cornerstone in any friendship, and it’s part of the glue that holds us together through the thick and the thin times.

Loyalty and kindness

Where do you stand on loyalty? How about kindness? Again, these are two key elements to building the perfect friendship — but we often pass on them, or allow people into our life who don’t possess these qualities. We take on people who betray our trust, and individuals who aren’t even that nice to us on the good days. Why? We desperately want to be seen, heard, and loved. All of those things come to you, though, when you figure out how to be a better friend and surround yourself with a higher caliber of people.

How to become a better friend (to attract better friends).

You can’t attract a higher caliber of a friend until you figure out how to become a higher caliber of person. In order to strengthen these relationships, we have to first focus on strengthening our own views on openness, trust, effort, and compassion. If you’re truly ready to find the best friend that sticks, become a better version of yourself.

1. Be open and encourage openness

It’s impossible to attract open and honest people if you don’t first demonstrate those qualities yourself. While you are only as good as the people you keep around you — the quality of your friendships is a direct result of your own attitudes, decisions, behaviors, and beliefs. If you’re looking for friends you can trust and believe in, then start being more open and looking for that same openness in others.

Be a more honest and open person, and start with yourself. Stop hiding from your deeper truths, and the things you want from the close relationships that you build. Strive to tell the truth when it matters and when it doesn’t. Hold yourself accountable and make it your commitment to see (and comment on) the world as it really is.

Once you’ve mastered this brave new self-honesty, branch out. Look for people who live their lives openly and without fear of being judged. Look for people who know their truths and live in them every day; people who know what it means to share something in this life with someone else. Open up a little more every day and learn slowly how to be vulnerable to those people who also want to be vulnerable with you.

2. Put in as much as you get back

Just as our romantic relationships can get thrown off-balance, our friendships too can become disjointed and one-sided. When we forget to find the harmony in the give-and-take of our connections, we can find that we become greedy (or even the endless taker on the other end). Friendships are only slightly different from romantic relationships. We still have to be careful not to overstep our bounds and take more than we put in.

Take a step back from your friendship and consider the full scope of it. Do you both go out of your way to help one another? Are you there to listen and offer advice whenever the other person is struggling, or dealing with a particular challenge at work?

Put as much into your friendship as you get back. Ask questions. Be interested in what’s going on in the other person’s life. Don’t just focus on your own struggles, and your own stories. Make room for theirs too and invest in the images they share with you. If your friend asks for help, help them. If you see them struggling, reach out. Stop waiting for the perfect friend to chase you, and start putting in as much care, affection, and joy as you get back.

3. Leave room for integrity

Have you realized that you’re surrounded by people who have substantially different values from your own? Do your friends seem to follow paths you don’t understand? Or venture into aspects of life you have no interest in seeing? More often than not, this occurs because we lose touch with our integrity and those parts of self that touch most on our values. In order to build friendships that add value to our lives, we have to break away from the ne’er-do-wells, and leave more room for integrity.

Ditch those “friends” who run you down, keep you small, or otherwise encourage you to be less than you are. Our friends should cherish us, and they should want us to reach authentic happiness — no matter what form that happiness takes. We have to choose friends that align themselves with those values, though. And we have to look for people who value the quality of their futures.

If you’re wasting time with people who are just wasting their own time in life, it’s time to cut the cord. Choosing people who match your values and ambitions can unlock new and unknown avenues in this world. It can also reveal deeper parts of self that you never encountered before. Rather than settling for those who tear us down, we must seek new ways to connect with those who build us up. Look for them in shared pastimes, new endeavors, and through mutual connections with those who no longer fit the bill.

4. Know yourself and your direction

Choosing anything for ourselves in this life — be it a friend, a lover, or just a general direction in life — is a difficult process, and one which can muddy the waters when it comes to choosing friends. We have to know who we are, you see, inherently and without the input of others. To pick better friends, we must genuinely come to know ourselves better and look to our futures for a beacon of light and guidance.

Who are you? Who do you want to be? These are important questions when it comes to building social circles that suit us. Stop listening to the opinions of others. Turn down that cacophony of misery that every waking second of news has become. Instead, take a few quiet minutes each day to simply listen to your deepest and most pressing needs.

Branch out from this point. Once you have a clearer picture of the future you want to build, work backward and re-discover the friends you need to help make this dream a reality. Make no mistake, our lives would be nothing without the friends and chosen family that help us through the low moments. Know who you are, and within that know what type of friends compliment this journey of self-discovery and happiness that you’re on.

5. Find others heading the same way

Why are you digging for friends in the past when you aren’t heading that direction? Try as we might to hold on to those who once knew us, they are not always the right companions for where we’re at in this life. Just as things grow at different rates in the garden, we also grow and change at different rates from those around us. Who you were friends with in high school is not always the person you need with you 20 years later, and that’s okay.

Allow yourself to move on. Give yourself permission to find friends who are heading the same way in life. You have a right to be happy, and you have a right to be surrounded by people who are striving to understand the same type of journey that you’re on.

Moving on from friendships that don’t suit is okay. We are allowed to outgrow our old lives. It’s not good or bad, it just is. Embrace the course of life and don’t feel as though you have to drag someone along who doesn’t want to be there. Find people in your environment that are heading the same way in life. Look for people who can complement your time on this planet, rather than hindering it. You deserve to be nurtured by that kind of friendship.

Putting it all together…

The friendships that we build can last for lifetimes or just for a little while. Some of them run deep, and some of them run incredibly shallow. How we decide to shape these friendships is entirely up to us, but we should be smart about how we select the people we allow into our inner circles. After all, the people we choose to stand beside us as friends are also those who have the power to build us up or tear us down.

Be open (with yourself and others) and look for that same openness in the friends you choose to surround yourself with. Without mutual honesty, there can be little mutual respect. Select friends who put as much into the relationship as you do and ensure you’re getting as much back as you’re putting in. Leave room for integrity and seek out those who values and expectations on things like life and love match your own. Know who you are and allow this deeper knowledge to push you out into the waters where you can find those friends who complement your journey. You don’t have to settle for relics of the past. You have a right to be surrounded by those who see you and value you for who you are. This will begin when you reshape the way you see and understand friendship.