How To Make Better Friendships That Last For An Effective Life

Success in life depends on numerous elements.

Relationship is among them and certainly of the qualities of successful people.

Do successful people have better relationships? Is there any relation in between the art of making good friends and success?

Ways to meet people and make good friends who remain for a life time, and exactly what is success?

An artist feels successful after meticulously creating a gorgeous portrait, and an entrepreneur feels successful if the service he offers helps people while making profits.

How do our friendships impact our success?

Finding happiness and success?

A successful person is essentially a content and pleased person. Happiness implies - to feel pleased with life in most of the ways and to preserve a state of mind that is contented.

The Course in Miracles teaches, "Salvation is a paradox! What could it be except a happy dream?

The successful entrepreneurs of the world have always realized that our relationships become part of the dream of life in this world.

We will also need an art of making good friends and keeping friendships strong through-out our life if we want to prosper.

Keeping relationships, and how?

How to meet people and keep friendships that last?

Congratulate them at every success, express empathy at every loss and share delight at every success or any enjoyable event.

The role of the Internet in keeping ways and contacts to meet people:

Previously I discussed free e-books and other information on the web for manifesting the life you truly want today, where in years past we didn't have the internet to rely on.

Yes, in the earlier times, when the internet was not yet with us, talking on telephones, corresponding and meeting personally were the preferred methods of keeping in touch.

After the introduction of the Internet, emailing and chat are gradually replacing these earlier ways.

The best ways to make more impact:

Would you prefer to send out a one line congratulations mail to your wonderful friends on their birthdays, their anniversary, their promo and all such other event when they are feeling unique?

Does it make a distinction?

Stop sending plain e-mails and start sending e-cards to link with your friends on days and occasions that are special and unique.

Try it!

Is there any relation in between art of making good friends and success? How to make good-ole-pals who stay for a life time?

You are the artist of your life here in this world we call Earth, and an artist feels effective after producing a beautiful painting that people are drawn to.

We will likewise have an art for ways to meet people and make new friends for a lifetime if we want to succeed.

These are the qualities of successful people who "DART" across the finish line to a life of happiness and wonderful and true contentment.

( Please note I also suggest seeking the net for further helpful material on things like, achieving success, living your destiny, to get the life you want filled with passion and purpose and prosperity.)

To finding happiness and success!

https://ezinearticles.com/?How-To-Make-Better-Friendships-That-Last-For-An-Effective-Life&id=9983359

Networking Is A Life Skill (By Lynette Crane)

I hear it over and over again: "I can't network. I'm an introvert." "I don't know what to say." "I don't want to brag." A lot of people don't like networking, but the bulk of them seem to be introverts.

I'm an introvert, too, and I'm also an entrepreneur, having to teach myself along the way how to reach out and build that body of interested people who support and buy what I do. To make it even harder, I retired in California, moved back to Minneapolis, waited a few years, and then found I wanted to start a business in a city where I had no business contacts and only one friend (a nun).

Business coaches stymied me from the start, because they would start by saying: "First, send a warm letter to all of your friends, telling them what you're doing and asking for their support."

Oh. A fellow coach wailed that she only had 100 friends on her Christmas card list, and I was awed by her popularity. This was an exercise at which I never excelled, because my Christmas card list was five.

Introverts, whom I often call the "Quietly Brilliant," are very likely to have one or two very deep friendships and a moderate number of pleasant acquaintances. This is dangerous for many reasons, among them the fact that those one or two deep relationships, whether professional or personal, can disappear in a wink of an eye, for such reasons as:

• You lose your job
• Your company moves and you don't
• Your supportive boss - who really liked you - leaves
• Divorce - and your best friend disappears
• Marriage (of a friend who disappears into a different social circle)
• Your BFF is transferred or moves
• Death of a close friend or loved one
• You move! As I did.

And you are stricken, dealing with loss, and suddenly finding that you need to find some way to search for and find a replacement for that Very Important Person. Where do you go? How do you do it?

If you don't have a plan and haven't been practicing how to connect with others, the poorest time to start networking is when you are dealing with loss. So start practicing now.

Here's my starting point for introverts who are "socially cautious":

Step 1: Find friendly people with whom to connect. 
We introverts tend to look for reasons why it would be uncomfortable or even dangerous to approach other people. (Years of being told we're too quiet, we should get out more, we should speak up, etc., have made us wary of other people and their potential disapproval and left us with the idea that we are somehow odd and unique. In fact, we're over 50% of the population.)

Instead, try this simple exercise for a week or so: Suspend your sense of uniqueness and look for similarities between yourself and others. If they're similar to you, how can they be so unapproachable?

For example, I am not a sports fan. Repeat, just N O T A S P O R T S fan. But because I was a ballet dancer, I can relate to how passionate someone can become about physical performance and competition. As I was growing up, I read every history book about ballet, and followed the careers of prominent dancers, so I can relate to how concerned someone can become about athletes, teams, their history and their current challenges. Therefore, I have a basis for conversation with someone I might have dismissed as too different. I can empathize with the thought of what an injury does to peak performance (of oneself or of an idol), how draining and humiliating defeat in an athletic arena can feel, and so on.

We don't see a lot of friendly people out there because we haven't believed it. We tend to think we are unique. But they are out there, just as anxious as we are, and wanting to share their enthusiasms but don't, perhaps believing no one will understand.

Connecting personally with others is an important first step to setting up business connections that last.

Step 2: Reach out and empathize. Make a simple comment, not too personal but delivered with a smile, that shows you have some idea of what the other person is going through. For the clerk in a store: "It must be tiring lifting and scanning all those items every day." For the deliveryman, "What a lovely day for an outdoor job," or "This weather must really make your job harder." Short contacts, no further interaction required (although you'll be surprised at how often it triggers conversation).

Practice in these low-risk situations and it will become easier in situations where you really need to meet new people.

Step 3: Spread your thanks around as if they were fertilizer (because they are). Ditto for compliments.

Park the perfectionism you probably have as an introvert: keep it for serious stuff, such as your income tax return, operating heavy equipment, or doing brain surgery. It doesn't belong in human relationships. Be forgiving and empathize with little mistakes if they are not too serious.

Thank the person who stops to hold the door open for you, pauses to let you enter a line of traffic, the clerk who discovers you didn't take your small change or points out an even greater bargain than what you have selected, the person who asks about your recent health issue - all of these people deserve thanks for their consideration.

Try thanking a co-worker who completes a routine job for which he or she is paid. You may believe it's simply their duty, but anyone can become fatigued doing their duty day after day and being taken for granted.

Interestingly enough, being thankful openly makes it easier to point out those little mistakes others have made. You are beginning to develop "social capital."

These are the preliminary steps to becoming a socially confident networker; there are many more. But if you can't recognize how important this process is, and how easy it is, once you know the right steps, you will never start.

With networking, you can develop social capital, a bank account of good will on which you can draw, but into which you must make deposits. Social capital can bring you:

• Help and moral support when you need it.
• Increased inter- & intra-departmental collaboration at work.
• New business.
• A promotion or new job.
• Opportunities - more than you ever dreamed of in more areas than you now recognize.
• ... not to mention the increased warmth and ease you will feel in numerous social settings.

Networking is something we do - or don't do - all day long. When you discover that not networking takes at least as much energy as actually doing it (not knowing where to go for help or resources, dealing with anxiety over replacing a loss, and more) you are on the path to an expanded future. Because networking is a journey, not an action.

https://ezinearticles.com/?Networking-Is-A-Life-Skill&id=9479528

Make Your Life Better By Saying 'No' More Often in These 3 Areas

Life is short, time is precious and there are only so many hours in a day -- all sayings we've heard a thousand times before. But have you ever stopped and really thought about these statements and, more specifically, how they apply to you and your every day life? If you haven't, you really need to or you're going to wake up some day and be full of regret for time that you'd wasted, time that you'll never get back.

Sure, this can become a philosophical debate rather quickly, a discussion about self-purpose and preservation, but I’d like to take it more into everyday, realistic circumstances.

Here are three areas of particular importance that, as entrepreneurs, we’re confronted with regularly.

1. Say no to opportunity.

Part of the reason we’ve chosen the emotional roller coaster that is entrepreneurship is because we’re not just able to recognize opportunity, but willing to act on leveraging it to solve a problem. Well, part of the issue here is that the more you do it, the better you get at it, then suddenly you’re involved in four different businesses that have nothing to do with each other.

I know that it’s tempting and I’ve been guilty of it myself, but what you need to realize is that your time will be divided amongst your various escapades, leaving you incapable of becoming exceptional at any one of them. Instead, most of the time you just need to say no, focus on a core concept and become really good at it.

2. Say no to mediocre friendships.

Personal relationships are just like business relationships, in that you should be looking to both gain from them and give to them. It’s like a never-ending negotiation that should end in a win-win. But we all have friends -- or maybe acquaintances -- that seem to be better at draining our energy with negativity or close-mindedness -- which you’re neither going to gain from or give to. That’s not to say that they’re bad people, just that their mindsets, motivations or priorities in life might be very different.

They say that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with, which coincides perfectly with one of my other favorite sayings -- if you want to be a millionaire, surround yourself with millionaires, and if you want to be a drug addict, surround yourself with drug addicts.

Needless to say, you are whom you surround yourself with, so do yourself a favor and say no to the relationships that prohibit or restrict your personal development and growth.

3. Say no to 60-hour work-weeks.

There is really no benefit that comes from overworking yourself, only damage to your body and mind as well as your personal relationships and family. If you find yourself in the category of "over worked," it’s time for some serious self-reflection and a possible overhaul of your time commitments and efficiency.

Stop what you’re doing and write out your average daily tasks, then use technology and/or current employees to figure out how you can automate or delegate tasks -- note that delegating and dumping aren’t the same.

If you’re working yourself to death, there’s something majorly wrong with the way you’ve set up the processes inside your business. So stop, adjust and say no to 60-hour work-weeks.

http://www.entrepreneur.com/article/247111

Why Friendships Are So Vital

Among humans, apes, or birds, social connections are crucial to wellbeing
  

A 20-year friendship between two chimpanzees, Jayson and Nikita, at India's Lucknow Zoo was in the news recently. The zoo planned to separate them because they weren’t reproducing. Indeed, the two instead were simply the best of friends. Fortunately for Jayson and Nikita, protests by scientists and the public halted this ill-conceived plan(link is external). For me, this brought up interesting questions about how friendships might be adaptive and influence your life and success, and how different degrees of friendship can be helpful—or harmful—to our well-being.

We humans know that having strong social bonds reduces stress and lowers the risk of disease; the same is true for animals. Social network analysis, which looks at how connected individuals are with one another, is revealing that all kinds of animals have buddies and, like us, certain individuals are tremendously popular. I like to think of social-network analysis as Facebook for animals, except it’s grounded in real-world interactions.

A recent study of vervet monkeys, for example, revealed that those with more social ties, or more "friends," were able to stay warmer on chilly nights, presumably because they could huddle together with more companions. And it’s not just primates. Social-network analysis of wild horses revealed that females with more friends experienced less harassment from males, a higher birth rate, and greater survival compared with females that had fewer pals. This means that friendship can have immediate benefits which, over time, may increase your survival and success.

Making friends is always tricky and can depend largely on your motivations. Sometimes you need strategic friends because, as we know all too well, it’s not what you know, but whom you know that matters. This is also true in baboon communities, where similarity in age and social status play roles in who becomes your "friend." That’s because, if a friend is going to have your back in a conflict, it’s most likely to be a high-ranking friend. If you're a hyena trying to join a new social group, you have to be very careful whom you choose as a friend. If you don’t have any friends yet and are looking to make one, the proper etiquette is to always take the side of the highest-ranking hyena in any conflict, even if they are losing at that very moment.

       

Having friends that aren’t sincere relationships can go beyond simply strategic alliances, which usually work for both parties, and into the realm of "frenemies." This type of relationship does not reflect genuine affection, but rather is a way of keeping an eye on the competition or using someone to get ahead for your own purposes (often to their detriment). We see frenemies in chimpanzee groups. Because status is so important in chimpanzee society, some individuals align themselves with whoever is most dominant, but unlike with hyenas where the hierarchy is stable, things are often in flux with chimpanzee and some individuals will readily switch allegiance and support the opposition if they see that their current “friend” is losing his position.

Just as for chimpanzees, it can be critical for us humans to be able to detect such impostors.

How can we tell the difference? The same way we know what kind of friend we are being. Lasting friendships are built on repeated actions that foster cooperation and support. These behaviours generate memories and emotions. Over time, we find, true friends are witnesses to our lives and become deeply embedded into the experiences we have along the way.

And in a very real way, our friendships may just affect our DNA. A study on African grey parrots provides some interesting insights. Telomeres, the bits of DNA at the end of chromosomes that control the stability of chromosomes and DNA, get shorter with time, which results in more DNA damage and ageing. Researchers found that the rate at which telomeres shorten in Africa grey parrots was influenced by whether or not an individual parrot was socially isolated. Essentially, a parrot kept alone aged faster and had shorter telomeres than other parrots of the same age.

In the end, then, not only does having a solid network of friends reduce stress and lower disease, but it will also increase your lifespan. So go ahead, make a new friend, bond with and old friend, and hug a good friend today.

It'll go a long way toward improving the quality of your life. ​

https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/wild-connections/201501/why-friendships-are-so-vital

HOW TO MAKE NEW FRIENDS AS AN ADULT

AS WE GET OLDER, IT GETS HARDER TO FIND NEW FRIENDS. HERE'S HOW TO BREAK THE ICE, AT ANY AGE.

When you’re a kid, making new friends is fairly easy. There’s school, sports, and a slew of extracurricular activities where you meet other kids and form relationships. When you’re an adult, however, the process isn’t quite so effortless. Commitments such as work and family limit free time and—unlike during childhood—it can feel awkward to ask someone, "Do you want hang out?"

"Professionals who accomplish amazing goals like starting companies often admit that they have a hard time making friends," says Shasta Nelson, author of Friendships Don’t Just Happen.

And the older you get, the fewer friends you probably have. While social circles increase through early adulthood, friendship networks peak and start to decrease as you move through your twenties, according to a 2013 study published in thePsychological Bulletin. Researchers found that the drop in friendships was often due to marriage, parenthood, and a desire to focus on closer relationships.

Unfortunately close relationships aren’t guaranteed to last; a study by sociologist Gerald Mollenhorst of Utrecht University in the Netherlands found that we lose half our close friends every seven years and replace them with new relationships.

"Life changes such as moves, career transitions, relationship changes, and different life stages bring a shift in our friendships and frequently leave us drifting apart," says Nelson, who launched the online friendship-building communityGirlFriendCircles.com in 2008. "We all want the proverbial friend whose shoulder you can cry on, but that’s an honor that is given with time."

And it’s time we should find. According to researchers at Brigham Young University, having too few friends is the equivalent mortality risk to smoking 15 cigarettes a day and is riskier than obesity.

"When friendships themselves are healthy, they relieve stress, which is extremely beneficial for health," says Robert Epstein, senior research psychologist at the American Institute for Behavioral Research and Technology. "Most people find it hard to create a deep and meaningful friendship in adulthood, but it’s not so hard if you know what to do."

MAKE FRIENDS THROUGH CONSISTENCY

For friendships to form, you need consistency, says Nelson. "When we’re kids, this is automatic," says Nelson. "You go to school, summer camp and play outside with the other kids in the neighborhood until dinner is ready. As adults, we rarely have that kind of consistency outside of work."

Nelson suggests joining groups that meet on a regular basis, such as a associations, networking groups, book clubs, classes and workshop. "When you join a group, the consistency is built in; people are already showing up without you having to invite them," she says.

The trick is that the friendship is limited to its "container"—the group—until someone initiates gathering outside of it, says Nelson. If friendships aren’t practiced outside of the container, they will most die when the activity or class ends.

"People often take it personally when they leave a job and no one calls them,’" says Nelson. "But they forget to recognize that they stepped outside of the container. If you hadn’t already initiated a friendship outside of the container, it most likely won’t suddenly happen."

While Nelson recommends using friendship containers as long as possible, the goal is to move out of them. Start small. Invite work friends out for lunch, happy hour or over to watch the game. "The idea is to practice doing other stuff together, and glue more pieces of your lives to each other," she says. "It can take six to eight experiences with someone before you feel like you made a friend."

BE WILLING TO BE VULNERABLE

To deepen relationships, Epstein says you must be willing to be open yourself up: "Vulnerability is the key to emotional bonding, without which relationships tend to feel superficial and meaningless," says Epstein.

Children are naturally put into situations in which they feel vulnerable, such as school, and Epstein says adults should look for similar scenarios.

"Put yourself in situations in which you and potential friends will feel vulnerable, because such situations make people feel needy and provide occasions for other people to provide comfort or support," he says. Volunteer or get part-time work at a hospital. Sign up for courses on skiing or salsa dancing.

And while you can’t plan for them, sometimes life circumstances lead to friendships: "A single experience—the bonding that took place between two strangers who were near the World Trade Centre when it collapsed, for example—can produce a deep friendship that lasts a lifetime," Epstein says.

While you’re building friendships, Nelson says it’s important to, work hard to keep the communication upbeat. "Be conscious about the value and joy you're adding to the other person," she says.

http://www.fastcompany.com/3038537/how-to-make-new-friends-as-an-adult