I want to start off by saying this article may or may not help you but if it does or you know someone that you think it could help feel free to share it.

So let me start off by saying I don’t know everything and am completely open to input and comments. What I will be sharing with you is from personal experience. Over the past several years I have studied the field of psychology and come to realize that there are a lot of issues I’d have with myself 10 or even 5 years ago.

I’m 23 and people often tell me I am very wise for my age however I don’t think thats the right way to explain myself. I believe that I am very patient and a much better active-listener than most people my age. These are professional skills that I have developed over my years of attending college and becoming better and better at communication.

In order to respectfully and effectively communicate you have to be sure that you are either taking notes or mental notes of everything the other person is saying. Now when I say taking notes I mean writing those thoughts that come up now and then on certain things said over the course of listening to the other person speak to you.

A good conversation is worthwhile for those involved in it.

Anyways that’s for another article, this one is about doing what’s right for you. So you have some “ friends “ and what they think is often the deciding factor in what you do; that is not a friendship. Cognitive therapy often asks one to reflect upon the question of what does that do for you? It asks if that is positive or negative. Keep on reading this plays into something else.

Let me give you a scenario:

Your popular friend Bill says you make stupid choices and that you should always ask his advice before anything. Often times he will berate you openly in front of his friends that claim they’re your friends and they’ll applaud and nod as Bill goes on emphasizing in a long-winded manner how correct he is.

Now you think to yourself, if I don’t have Bill as a friend then his friends won’t be my friends anymore and I’ll have no friends.

Now let me explain to you what is wrong with this. You’ve become so reliant on Bill telling you what is right and wrong and the popular opinion of his huge pool of friends reinforcing it that you think Bill will bring you around people that are there for you.

People in general are most comfortable doing whatever they can to remain comfortable and if the way you insure that is through someone else’s means then you are denying yourself the chance to discover otherwise. What does that do for you? It makes you ignorant which in turn makes you less credible which in turn makes what you say meaningless to those that are beyond your safe space.

The opposite end of this is you having friends that are your own, only know you as you are, and don’t question that. There is so much beyond this point to a friendship. But if you can’t reach this point and take the alone time to find yourself, separate from those that question it, and make friends with those that do then you are never going to reach the next steps.

Now imagine this.

You now have the same amount of friends as you did before, though now they are different people that do not bother or hassle you with the questioning of who you are or what you think. The time you spend with them is free of such a tension, you have fun, and you’ve got that much more energy to contribute to dealing with life.

Because believe it or not, the trying to impress everyone act is exhausting and takes much more energy than you have to spend. It’s a huge waste of time and a major up-hill battle. Even now I have people that say they are my friends but they never speak to me, when we do speak it’s not as deeply as they do with their other friends, they find their own corners to cultivate and grow friendships with those that they truly want to be their friends.

This is fine and the best thing to do is not try to unfriend them or block them. But just let them be what they are and clearly define your base expectations of any friendship with anyone. If they can’t meet that then maybe they don’t make good friends; the quality of a friendship is based on how high you set those base expectations and it may vary from person-to-person.

One thing I found interesting in my online friendships is that you have to make it clear what you consider to be indisputable and unchanging requirements of a friend. If you do not communicate that and wait until later then you are wasting all that time building dead-end friendships that could have been used finding and establishing real friendships.

This is a very long post and I know that there may be some things that I didn’t go to far into detail on. If you’d like to ask any questions you can feel free to tweet them to me. I wish that I could have read this years ago when I was 18 because it would have given me several extra years of time to establish better friendships before becoming so busy in my life as I near 24/25 years old.

Thanks for reading and I hope this helps. I will be writing more better broken down pieces in the future but wanted to give you a sample of a little of this and that.