If you're an introvert, then you naturally spend lots of time by yourself, but still have the need to meet people and make friends. Many introverts think that it's a black or white area; either you're a social star or an introvert.
This is not true at all; you can be naturally introverted and still make time for friends and fun. In this article, I want to share with you four strategies on how to make friends, without changing who you are.
The common mistake is to learn a few techniques, and only use them when you're motivated to meet people. We all know that that motivation is hard to get for introverts. What you can do instead is adopt a series of social habits that don't require a lot of motivation.
Let's talk about two habits to get you started:
Habit #1 – Go Out To Meet New People Once A Month
If you want to build a social life, you need to constantly be meeting new people. Not everyone you meet will be a good fit for you, and not all your friends will be around forever. This is why you need to be supplying yourself with new faces, but not necessarily more than what you're comfortable with.
You can dial it up or down, but don't stop it; people won't come knocking on your door to meet you.
What I recommend is to commit to helping some sort of social community that has the kind of people you want as friends. When you find a good community or group, go to the organizing team and offer to help, and get involved.
Most of them love to have more people involved, even if they don't need that much help. They just appreciate your presence and will be grateful. You'll instantly be in a position of a value-giver.
This works very well for two reasons. First, it'll be more than easy for you to meet new people; many members of that community will come to you and get to know you, as one of the hosts. Second, this commitment will somewhat force you to go out and attend their social events, which means that you won't need any more motivation to do it. It's like beating procrastination before it even starts.
Habit #2 – Do Something Social Once A Week
Again, if you have to remember to be social, you probably won't do it. This is why I suggest that you focus on building the habits, once and for all.
First, let's make sure you don't forget to keep in touch with people. What you do here is mark in your calendar an hour of time where you usually don't do anything important. Block that hour, every week, for reaching out to people, calling, sending texts, etc. Something like Wednesday at 7 pm works great.
When you make that decision, you won't have to remember to call people, you'll just do it for one hour and enjoy the week without worrying that maybe you're ignoring people.
During that hour, contact new and old friends, and try and make plans to meet with some of them. If you have one social activity per week, that's far better than having no clarity and no consistency.
To make this even easier, start introducing people to each other, even if they're both new friends. This will create a group effect, and they will start to call and make plans as well, you won't be the only one doing it.
This works because people naturally call their friends who they know in the context of a group, especially around the weekend. It's more fun to be inside a group, even if it's just a group of three people.
Wrapping Up
The keys to social success then, are: Ritualizing your social activities , instead of doing them only when you feel the motivation + Thinking in terms of groups of friends , instead of individual friends.
If you want to learn more techniques for overcoming hesitation, meeting new people, and making friends, you can get on my Free Social Skills Newsletter .
Best of luck,
-Paul Sanders
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