How to Make Friends

Series Summary

In the contexts of sociology and popular culture, the concept of interpersonal relationships involves social associations, connections or affiliations between two or more people. Such persons may interact overtly, covertly, face-to-face or may remain effectively unknown to each other, as in a virtual community whose members maintain anonymity and do not socialize outside of a chat room. The discovery or establishment of common ground between people provides a fundamental component for enduring interpersonal relationships. Loss of common ground, which may happen over time, may tend to end interpersonal relationships. In this free video series on friendship skills, Dr. F. Felicia Ferrara, a psychologist, discusses several topics related to interpersonal relationships. She explains how to make friends, be a good friend, choose friends, assess a friendship, repair a friendship, and how to effect and cope with the end of a friendship. These skills and methods are important for understanding the social skills incorporated with building long-lasting relationships. Watch these videos and learn several friendship skills today.

Video Transcript

"Hi, are you struggling with how to make friends? Well, I'm Doctor Felicia and I'd like to share a few tips with you on how exactly to go about making friends. First, you need to take an active stance in your social life, you need to make a very conscious effort to reach out to other people. Now, how do we do that? It's very hard when you get into a rut. Maybe you're staying home, maybe you're working too much, and it's easier to just sit back and stay home alone. But then after a while that gets pretty boring. So, what you want to do is look for some mutual interests that you might have. For instance, maybe you want to take up a photography course, maybe you want to take up a graphic arts course. Whatever that is, joining groups or taking courses is a great way to meet people on kind of a medium turf. That way, no one, you can kind of look at them, observe, and see who you like to interact with, who you get along better with, and watch them when they're working under a different task. That's a nice way to get to know somebody because, usually, their personality is more natural when their busy doing something. If you're a physically active person, you might want to join a sports team, a little league team, a softball team, you might want to join the local gym. But that's certainly you need to be out there if you're going to go out and meet people. The other thing you might do is set yourself a goal so that each week your going to call at least one new person and initiate a friendship. If that person reciprocates, they're OKay. So, making new friends is not so difficult as you think, but you need to make the conscious effort to join a groups, a course, an association, or an activity that you will find rewarding and fulfilling, then you'll find a friend of mutual interest. And that's the way to make friends. I wish you good luck, God bless, this is Doctor Felicia signing out."