#506: Friendship Mastery: Cultivating Meaningful Connections for Personal Growth

Tim said, I really struggle to meet new people. I'm a naturally shy person, and I just don't understand how to connect with people, how to network, how to make friends, you know, in a normal way. He said, I haven't met a new friend for God knows how long. And how do other people seem to do it? It looks like other people can do it well, and it's just a skill that I really want because I think it matters in every area of your life that you have the confidence to meet new people. Hello, and welcome to the Self Belief Chief podcast. You're here with David Holman. If you haven't subscribed already, please make sure to do that so you can catch up with the latest episodes, the latest science, latest research, more client stories, more experiences. Every so often we have interviews and live coaching sessions, so you'll get to hear the other person as well. So make sure to subscribe to listen to all of those. Otherwise, let's begin. So Tim is really struggling with his kind of social anxiety of meeting new people. Now, I can talk in lots of different, you know, directions or lanes in terms of how you build confidence, but actually there's something really simple I wanted to show Tim that I think he'd completely missed the boat on. See, Tim's going, david, how do I go from, I don't know, someone to develop a really meaningful relationship? And I said, that's a good goal to have, but it's sort of the wrong question. See, the reason why you can't go from I don't know, someone to developing a meaningful relationship, why you can't make that jump is because no one can. No one can make that jump. That's way too big a jump, and we don't have the confidence to make that jump. People who really struggle with this sort of thing, they think they've got to go from, I don't know, someone at all to meaningful relationship, best friend, whatever you want to call it straight away in one jump. And that's not what confident people do or think. What's really helpful is you think of it in five stages. If you break it down into five stages, then actually you don't put yourself under too much pressure to develop a meaningful relationship all in one go. There are actually steps in between, and it makes it simpler and smaller and you can measure where you are. There are five stages to developing a meaningful relationship. Stage one is that they know of you. They know of you, so they didn't know who you were, and now they know of you. Stage two Is that they know you, right? So they know who you are as a person. Stage three is that they like you. So we got know of you, know you, like you. Stage four is trust you. And stage five is help you. We can use those five stages with Tim so that instead of thinking he's got to get to the end goal straight away is actually all he's ever got to do is get to stage one first, right? Just get to stage one, that they know of you, that you can introduce yourself, that you can connect, that they're aware of your existence and your presence. And you don't have to get to stage three, four, five straight away in that one conversation. You can build that over time. You might get to stage three in one conversation that they like you, but you don't need to get there straight away because confident people, that's not what they do anyway. They don't just immediately build trust and get help from everywhere. They just go through the first few stages and then they go back and keep developing those stages. And then another point in the future, they develop those stages even more. So I said to Tim, all we got to do is get to know of you, right? So we work out ways that we can get those connections. We work out ways that we can reach out to people and connect with people in an authentic, organic way. Then the following stages. Know you. So then we can work out how do we go from know of you to know you, right? How can they get to know you? How can you get to know them and connect in that way? At later point, we can work out how do you go from know you to like you. How do people cross that bridge? And because it's a much smaller bridge, we go, if I've crossed that bridge previous to that one, I can probably cross the bridge from no of you to like you, because we'll know you to like you. Because if they don't know you and we try to get to like you, you might struggle to have the confidence to think you can do that. But if you're already at stage two and stage three is like you, then you go, I've probably got the confidence to just make that small jump. So I'll take action. And that gets past some of the social anxiety, is that confidence that I'm close enough to the next step that I can take action. So the steps between know you and like you in the future, we can go from how do we go from like you to trust you, right? How can we go from like you to trust you in the future? We can work out how we can go from trust you to help you. So we can create small steps to get between each of those stages and we don't have to jump too far ahead. We cross one particular stage and once we've got the confidence of having crossed that stage, we feel more confident to then cross the following stage and then the following stage, etc. And that's how Tim could get past some of that social anxiety is just breaking it down into smaller stages with smaller steps and actually reducing the expectation of that have to love you straight away to something much smaller. And he could relax a bit and be more comfortable. And if he's more relaxed and comfortable, how helpful do you think that is to developing meaningful relationships? My name is David Holman. If you change today, today will change your life. So enjoy the rest of your day. Enjoy the rest of your life. 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