A healthy friendship mindset is rooted in an abundance mentality, mutual trust, and emotional security. It prioritizes quality over quantity, releases expectations of perfection, and allows relationships to evolve naturally without keeping a rigid scorecard of favours. (Author – Authentic connections)
In the world today and its changing scenario, emotional quotient, relationship value and friendship are making a comeback. Especially with the Zoomers, they value friendship above other quotients and flourish in work and home environments where the human being’s matter, developing the Friendship Mindset is important. In fact, most readers who already have this mindset in whatever intensity, should celebrate.
Today’s friendships are transactional; the friendship ends usually when the transaction ends. Look back at your childhood days when friendships were real. In that generation particularly with Baby Boomers born 1946-1964 and the Generation X born 1965-1980, there existed friends for life. Family friends were also popular. These relationship pillars were unconditional, and reliable. Sometimes such friends were as close as family.
The Friendship Mindset inspires emotional connect and trust, whether in your work life or your own personal life. Here are a few fundamental elements of the Friendship Mindset, you can use them to either cultivate or re-cultivate the way your mind is set.
The timeless friendship framework
Friendship is a basic nature of all living beings as we are all social, especially us human beings. In western countries for example there are etiquettes where one human being respects and acknowledges another human being. One simple such gesture is smiling when you come across a human being, even a stranger and receiving a return smile. In the Seychelles where I was fortunate to live for 14 years for example, it was common you flashed your car headlight when you saw a fellow friend’s car! (Author)
Human beings essentially like their presence to be acknowledged. But all this is the surface, the friendship magic happens with people you interact with on a regular basis. Let’s look at the three pillars of friendship as defined by Aristotle. These are utility– friendships that help you progress. Could be your networking friendships for example, pleasure – friendships around for sharing of interests or even co-sharing of problems and even fun, virtue – friendships that are deep and have common interests, core beliefs and those that help each other grow.
Define your Friendship Mindset purpose and strategy
The Friendship Mindset you want to cultivate must have a clear-cut purpose and strategy. Start with a self-audit to see how friendly you are and decide how friendly you want to be. Then identify the categories of friends you need. If these come from existing friendships, do you want to intensify them or do you need to cultivate new friends. Or do you want your top attitude to be friendliness? (Author)
Are you serious by nature? Do you make friends easily? Are you rich in your EQ? Are people comfortable with you? Ask these questions, to your own self and some trusted friends, family members and well-wishers. When you average your findings you will get your own self-image reflection. The first step is to see for yourself if you have the capability to cultivate this mindset. Then the changes you will need to make to your existing mindset to evolve to a Friendship Mindset.
And then move forward, with periodic reviews of your progress.
Friendship helps in building a relationship bank and in business
Today, friendship functions as a highly strategic business tool that drives sales, improves employee retention, and accelerates networking. Businesses actively build brand loyalty through peer-to-peer marketing, while companies leverage workplace friendships to boost team productivity and wellbeing (Author- Bruce Crumlev- Inc)
Developing The Friendship Mindset- especially in the world of today surely opens up many doors, in your personal space but also propels and eases various human connections in the workspace. Business leaders with this mindset prioritise building authentic relationships instead of short transactional relationships. A workplace culture of friendship builds internal trust and retention. Loyal customers become brand ambassadors. The list….is endless
You can make more friends in two months by becoming interested in other people than you can in two years by trying to get other people interested in you.
Dale Carnegie
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