On Purpose with Jay Shetty - 6 Ways to Be a Great Friend & Build Meaningful Relationships in 2023

Episode Date: January 13, 2023

Today, I am going to share with you different ways to strengthen your friendships. Becoming a good friend requires several key qualities such as trustworthiness, loyalty, and communication. Building relationships is always a pursuit in life, and learning how to strengthen every friendship you have can lead to having a better 2023 and becoming more connected to the people around you.To grab a copy of my book, 8 Rules of Love, go to https://8rulesoflove.com/Key Takeaways:00:00:00 Intro00:03:09 How to be a great friend?00:07:21 Tip #1: Always carry a snack00:10:32 Tip #2: Invite more people to the table00:13:38 Tip #3: Keep investing in your friendships00:17:40 Tip #4: Try new things together00:19:47 Tip #5: Go visit your school together00:21:31 Tip #6: Don’t make it about you when they’re stressedLike this show? Please leave us a review here - even one sentence helps! Post a screenshot of you listening on Instagram & tag us so we can thank you personally!Want to be a Jay Shetty Certified Life Coach? Get the Digital Guide and Workbook from Jay Shetty https://jayshettypurpose.com/fb-getting-started-as-a-life-coach-podcast/See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

The One You Feed explores how to build a fulfilling life admits the challenges we face. We share manageable steps to living with more joy and less fear through guidance on emotional resilience, transformational habits, and personal growth. I'm your host, Eric Zimmer, and I speak with experts ranging from psychologists to spiritual teachers offering powerful lessons to apply daily. Create the life you want now. Listen to the one you feed on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Our 20s are often seen as this golden decade.

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Hey, it's Debbie Brown, host of the Deeply Well Podcast, where we hold conscious conversations with leaders and radical healers and wellness around topics that are meant to expand and support you on your wellbeing journey. Deeply well is your soft place to land, to work on yourself without judgment, to heal, to learn, to grow, to become who you deserve to be. Deeply well with Debbie Brown is available now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Namaste. Everyone, I am so excited. My book, my new book, Eight Rules of Love is literally coming out in two weeks. It's on the 31st of January. If you haven't pre-ordered it already, head over to eight rulesoflove.com. And when you pre-order,

you get my free eight cliches of love workshop as soon as you pre-order on the website. So if you pre-order it already, you can claim that on the website. If you haven't pre-ordered, this will run out on the 31st of January. It's a free workshop to encourage you to pre-order, to give you a gift straight away as soon as you do. It's a really cool workshop. I break down the eight cliches about love and whether they're true or not. I think you'll really love it. And I wanted to shout this out that my tours happening. And we've already sold out in LA. There's a second show there. We've sold out in New York. There's a second show there. We've sold out the

Sydney Opera House. There's a second show happening there. We've got tickets. I think we sold out in Toronto and Amsterdam. But please make sure you look out for tickets everywhere. J-SheddyTour.com. I wanna see you. And this show is a special 90 minute performance. I think it's gonna blow your mind. It's gonna be something you've never experienced before. It's not just me reading from the book or standing there. It's really a experience in a performance

and an interactive exchange that me and my team are creating. I can't wait for you to see it. Let's get to this episode. Expanding your circle, inviting new people and new things differently can be a really healthy way to not put all the pressure on your partner or put all the pressure on yourself. And I find that a way to be a good friend

or a good partner is make sure that your partner or your friend has a great support system around them. And by the way, you know what happens when you help other people build support systems for themselves, you end up building support systems for yourself. Hey everyone, welcome back to On Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. I just want to say I hope you had a great holiday. I hope you had a great new years. I know that the first month of the year can always be slightly unnerving.

Everyone has goals. Everyone already seems far ahead. You already feel behind maybe you're judging yourself or criticizing yourself for not having it all together. Maybe you're feeling a little bit stuck and lost and it can be a really unsettling time. You've just come out of the holidays. Maybe you were with family. Maybe there's a bit of missing them.

There's so many emotions at this time of year. And at on purpose, you know that I want to make you feel like this is a safe space. This is a home for those feelings and emotions. And that when I'm recording these episodes, my intention is to really tune in and connect with you and help you through what you're going through. And my team and I were discussing different areas of challenge at the moment.

And one of them was today's topic. It was how to be a great friend in 2023, and how to have a great friend in 2023 and how to have a great relationship in 2023. Now this advice I'm about to share, it applies to friends, it applies to romantic relationships, it applies to family because the ways to create intimacy and connection have a lot of similarities. And what I found really, really interesting is that the pressure on being a good friend and the pressure on having good friends has increased over time. If you think about how society has changed, we used to spend a lot of time living close to family,

living in big families, living with most of our family, right? Most people were raised by their aunts and uncles as much as their parents. And today we find us living in smaller places with smaller families, which are just our immediate family. Sometimes we're living far, far away. I mean, you know, Rady and I live a 10 hour flight away from our family. And

what I find happens in that circumstance is that we rely a lot more on our friends. And I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that. Maybe you moved city for work. Maybe you moved state for your partner. Maybe you moved country for an amazing new opportunity. And you're starting to realize that it's different when you don't have a ready made support system, right? When I moved to LA, and first, when we moved to New York, it's like, I didn't know who the best plumber was. I didn't know who was going to be around to be the electrician if something broke, right? You just don't have access to the same things that you naturally had access to when your family was around. You knew people to call upon,

and now you're starting from scratch. And when that's happening on an emotional support level, when that's happening on a personal connection level, that can be hard. And I hear this from a lot of people that finding family or making friends as we get older is harder. So the research shows that for both men and women at age 25 is when most of us start losing

our friends. And usually it's because your values change, maybe you change country or state or city, maybe your situation changes, maybe you had a kid, maybe someone moved for a relationship, right? A lot more changes and bigger changes start to happen in our lives at 25. And also, if you think about it, back in the day, you were a lot closer to your neighbor. You were closer to the people that you live next to.

And that's changed over time as we've become more and more insular. So this episode is all about making sure you have healthy friendships and family relationships and partnerships for 2023 because I find that we keep doing the same thing. How many of you have a chat group or maybe you're a dinner this week and you're like, we have to have dinner every week together or like we have to travel together this year. Like we set all these like really big, amazing intentions

and it feels really exciting. And by the way, I'm a culprit of this too, right? Like I do this too, right? I get really excited. And I'm like, guys, we have to do this this year, we have to do this. And then I'm busy and doing so many other things. And I start to realize that in the desire

to do these really huge, big things, which are beautiful by the way if you can, we lose out on the small moments of connection and intimacy, which is what we're actually looking for. I was at a dinner the other day and I was surrounded by so many people and I didn't feel like I really had a connection. How many times have you felt that way? You just surrounded by so many people but you didn't have a connection. How many times have you felt that way? You just surrounded by so many people, but you didn't have a connection. And then the other day, I was invited to a launch event

that was even bigger. And at that event, even though there was so many more people, I felt such a connection because there were people in the room that were present and really wanted me there. And there was just a feeling of mutual exchange. So it's just really interesting to see the difference. Anyway, I'm going to dive right in and here's one of the first ways to be a great friend or to have a great relationship in 2023 and it's called Always Carry a Snack.

And now you might be wondering what does mean, Jay? So if anyone ever travels with Rady, my wife, or as the pleasure to travel with Rady, Rady always carries snacks. She's a great person to be around because I'll be that person who before we get on the plane or train or wherever we are in the car, I'll be like, no, I don't snack. I'm not a snacker. Right. I'm one of those people. I'm not a snacker, no, I just eat my meals. And Rady is a self-confessed snacker, right? Rady has a snack cupboard at home and a snack drawer at home. And she's really proud of it, right? It's beautifully arranged.

You'll get a tour of it if you're ever at home. And it's a big part of something that she loves. And so she'll be prepared and I won't. And inevitably, to my greatest pain point at some point in the journey, I'll be like, I'll be sneaky, I won't even ask. I'm one of those people, I won't even ask. I will just sneak by and they're on grab a bit of the snack.

And she'll obviously notice and give me a side with sclants glance like one of those cutting side-as. Why am I talking about this being a good friend or a great friend and what do I mean by always carry a snack? When you're seeing your friends, when you're around people you love, always carry the thing that you know they might need. It's like that's a sign of love. It's a really small thing but you may have one of those friends that's always struggling with a headache and you're carrying your essential oil. Or you have a friend who always ends up wanting tea at a time when it's hard to get tea

and you have a tea bag in your bag, right? And it sounds like a really small thing, but it's these moments that transform our connection. Why? Because you feel thought about. Most of us, if you think about why we feel lonely, we don't feel lonely because we don't have people in our life. We don't feel lonely because people don't show up to our birthday. We feel lonely because we think no one thinks of us.

We think we're not thought of. And it's hard to be thought of all the time with just a text message saying, how are you doing? How are you doing? How are you today? Right? Like people aren't going to do that all the time. But if you want to make your friends, your partner, your family feel thought about, if you're seeing them that day, if you are moving around with them that week, grab something that you know that they're always missing and just place it there. It could be as simple as one of these things. And it makes a huge difference.

That person that you care about and you love is now gonna feel like you think about them in such a deep personal intimate way. And it creates a connection like no other. Now the second principle that I wanna share with you today, and I wanna hear what yours are. Make sure you tag me on Instagram and Twitter and let me know what was yours, because I love doing what the different people in your life want. Okay. The second one is called invite more people to the table, right? Invite more people to the table.

What I mean by this, and I've been wrong with this for a long time, sometimes in my relationships, where you kind of get ownership over a relationship, and what I mean by that is you obsess over the one-to-one connection you have with someone, and you're scared of inviting other people into the friend circle because you don't wanna lose your friendship.

Now, the first thing I'll say is, if you're scared of losing your friendship with someone, it's time that you invest more in that friendship, right? If you think that inviting someone else into a group of friends is going to make you lose your connection with someone you think you have a close connection with, it's not as close as you think. So you want to start working on that if that's on your mind right now. Now, if you're confident that you have a good relationship with someone, but you realize that actually they get any different help at

different times, you're not going to be able to solve all their problems. And therefore, expanding your circle, inviting new people and who think differently can be a really healthy way to not put all the pressure on your partner, put all the pressure on yourself. And I find that a way to be a good friend or a good partner is make sure that your partner or your friend has a great support system around them. And by the way, you know what happens when you help other people build support systems for themselves, you end up building support systems for yourself.

I've seen this in my own life. When I have clients who need specific therapists or they need specific health coaches or they need specific people in their life and I'm doing the research, I'm trying to figure it out for them. And then I realize that those people become a part of my life. They become a part of my network.

It's not wasted. If your friend was looking for some particular help at home and you helped out, you now have access to that network too. So it's not all selfless and it's not all lost. It's like you're actually building a beautiful community around you when you're building community for others. Right?

Remember that when you're building community for others, you're also building an incredible community around yourself and you don't want to underestimate that. Because often we'll go out of our way to research for other people more than we do for ourselves. And so when we take that role, we actually end up finding incredible people. So invite more people to the table. Recognize that you can't take care of every need of your friend. And often we put that pressure on ourselves. We're like, I'm gonna be everything for them. I'm gonna be there for them all the time.

I'm gonna do everything for them. And that exhausts us. It ties us out. And we often end up feeling like they don't do enough for us. We end up feeling like they don't care enough. And it's really just because we've been overgivin'. How many of you are overgivers and then over-expectors?

Raise your hands. I'm raising mine right now, right? We're overgivers, but we're over expectors. And I think that comes because we don't realize actually, you know what? Real support means helping someone build their support system. Okay, point number three, this is a huge one. And it's one that I really wanted you to take note of. So I read about this study led by researchers from MIT and they analyzed friendship ties in people age between 23 to 38

as part of a management class. Now the subjects were asked to rank how close they were with each person in the class on a scale of zero to five. Now zero men, I have no idea who this person is. Three means friend and five means a really close friend. The researchers found that 94% of people expected their feelings like their rankings to be reciprocated.

But only 53% of them actually were. That's huge, right? So 94% of people felt, yeah, people are gonna say the same thing as me that I said about them, but only half were right. I am Yomla, and on my podcast, the R-Spot, we're having inspirational, educational, and sometimes difficult and challenging conversations about relationships. They may not have the capacity to give you what you need.

And insisting means that you are abusing yourself now. You human! That means that you're crazy as hell, just like the rest of us. When a relationship breaks down, I take copious notes and I want to share them with you. Anybody with two eyes and a brain knows that too much Alfredo sauce is just no good for you But if you're gonna eat it, they're not gonna stop you So he's gonna continue to give you the Alfredo sauce and put it even on your grits if you don't stop him Listen to the art spot on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcast or wherever you listen to podcasts How's that New Year's resolution coming along? Apple Podcasts or whatever you listen to podcasts. for you and your goals, our podcast How to Money can help. That's right, we're two best buds who've been at it for more than five years now, and we want to see you achieve your money goals, and it's our goal to provide the information

and encouragement you need to do it. We keep the show fresh by answering list of questions, interviewing experts, and focusing on the relevant financial news that you need to know about. Our show is Choc Full of the Personal Finance Knowledge that you need with guidance three times a week, and we talk about debt pay off. If, let's say you've had a particularly spend thrift holiday season, we also talk about building up your savings, intelligent investing, and growing your income. No matter where you are on your financial journey, how do monies got your back?

Millions of listeners have trusted us to help them achieve their financial goals. Ensure that your resolution turns into ongoing progress. Listen to how to money on the iHeartRad I Heart Radio app Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. This is what it sounds like inside the box. I'm journalist and I'm Morton in my podcast City of the Rails. I plunged into the dark world of America's railroads searching for my daughter Ruby who ran off to hop train. I'm just like stuck on this train. not where I'm going to end up. And I jump.

Following my daughter, I found a secret city of unforgettable characters living outside society, off the grid, and on the edge. I was in love with the lifestyle and the freedom this community. No one understands who we truly are. The Rails made me question everything I knew about motherhood, history, and the thing we call the American Dream. It's the last vestige of American freedom. Everything about it is extreme.

You're either going to die, or you can have this incredible rebirth and really understand who you are. Come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails. Listen to the city of the rails on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, cityoftherails.com. Now this is something called the perception gap. So what I find fascinating about this is that it seems like we sometimes fall closer to people than we actually are.

And that could be for a number of reasons. Maybe they're upset about something we said or did. Maybe they have a different definition of friendship or closeness. Maybe they're feeling distant lately because we haven't seen them. But the biggest thing I find, and that's why this is point number three, is don't forget to keep investing when you're making deposits in your friendship. I think it's very easy to reach out and have requests, but it's very rare that people actually invest, right? It's very, very rare that we reach out to someone to give without wanting to receive or just to support when they need it without calculating what it means for us. Or some people are so oblivious that they'll just reach out and keep having requests without

any investment, right? And that happens so often where we're so oblivious, we're so unaware that we just keep reaching out to people making deposits. And so I want you to ask yourself about your five closest friends right now, and I would recommend that you block and a couple of people from work as well, and your family, and your partner and go,

wait, when was the last time I made an investment? What was the last investment I made in that friendship? You may find that the last investment you made in that friendship was literally like, gosh, like five, 10 years ago, especially if it's a long term friend, and you think it to yourself, wow, I've been making deposits for a long time. I asked them to help me move.

I asked them to help me do that, or maybe you're feeling that way about your friends who've been doing that to you. And we all know we don't like feeling that way. And if you don't like feeling that way, it's so important, A, that you said an example in your own life, but reflecting on this helps you realize, okay, I don't want to keep investing in that relationship if someone keeps making deposits from me either. And you may speak to them about it.

And I think that's what this study really shows is that often people are just not sharing how they're feeling and we just keep going on. And what I find uncomfortable about that is that it's almost like mold developing in a house. I hate to compare it to that, but it is kind of like that where something that is deteriorating and disintegrating is happening. It's happening in a way that you can't see it, but it has a long-term impact on your emotional stability and their emotional stability, or actually instability, I should say, that it creates. And it always ends up coming out. And when you discover it, it's so much worse than if you talked about it. And I just feel like putting things under the carpet or sweeping things under the rug and hoping that they'll just go away

or we like to complain about them. It gives us a bit of familiar pain to connect to that being removed changes everything. Step number four, my thing here is, it doesn't matter if you can't paint. Actually, it's better if you can't paint. What do I mean by this? We need to do more things with our partners,

our friends and our family, where no one knows what they're doing. Try a new food that you've never tried before. Try a painting class, go and try a pottery class. Like literally there are so many things to run about to read a list that I sent to a client the other day and I said, an animal sanctuary, a salt course in the trees, about to read a list that I sent to a client the other day. And I said, an animal sanctuary, a salt course in the trees, a local getaway, there may be a bike path

you've never taken, a dance class, a salsa class, a food making class, right, whatever it may be. Like go and do something with your friends. I think often we get together in ways that don't create intimacy, right? Often we will go to a restaurant or we'll go to a movie and it doesn't build a sense of intimacy. It doesn't build a sense of learning.

It doesn't build a sense of like, I'm doing something new with you and I'm learning something new about you. And we're just being fascinated by each other right now, right? Oh, we're doing the thing we always do. And we're both on our phones and the night's ended and at least we planned a date night, right? Or at least we planned a friend's night. And so finding active things to do together actively builds your relationship. When you do things that are passive together, guess what, your relationship becomes more passive.

When you do active things together, your relationship becomes more alive and active. And I find that most of our times with our closest friends, closest partners, closest families are truly just passive, right? When you see people who are constantly on their phones, they're dinner or you see people on their phones, even other movies are at a game or, you know, you see people who are constantly on their phones, they're dinner or you see people on their phones,

even other movies are at a game or you see people on the car and they're not talking to each other. And we're like, yeah, okay, sure, we can't talk all the time about everything. Like, we don't have to have something to talk about. But when you find that that's a recurring pattern, it can be really, really challenging. I've got two more for you. This one is called Go go visit your school together. And what I mean by this is go and take a trip down memory lane. Take a friend that you really value, your partner, and go on a trip down memory lane.

I don't often encourage this. I often talk about making new memories, but sometimes to restrend then we have to go and relive an old memory that was really special. I caught up with a couple of my former team the other day and it was one of the nicest things. It was so nice to go back, sit down and reflect and hear what they remember from working together, what I remember from working together. And it was just such a beautiful thing to do. We haven't worked together in like three years and to sit together over some lunch

and just talk about the fun we had, the different things we did. Like it was just amazing. And I was thinking to myself, I wanna do that more often. I was just back in Christmas for the holidays with my friends and I was going to all the places we used to go to, and there was nostalgia there, which again,

I'm not usually a promoter of nostalgia because it can kind of keep us stuck in the past, but I think it's a beautiful way to strengthen relationships this year that are important to you. And so if you've had a relationship that you haven't strengthened for a long time, that you need to pull from a place of closeness, do that, right? Do that.

That's the way to do it. Take a trip down memory lane, but actually go there. Don't just sit there and talk about it. Go to that physical place. Go to your school. Go to that nightclub that you have crazy memories around. I'm not saying go inside, go outside. Whatever works, like go there and do that. Now point number six is

don't make it about you when they're stressed. Now, I have this study to share with you that really made me highlight this point. So according to the stress management society, when we are experiencing extreme stress, our ability to communicate diminishes massively. We experience lack of clarity, confusion, brain fog, and rabbit in the headlight syndrome, all of which make it very difficult to communicate effectively during times of stress.

On average, they write, when we're under low levels of stress, we can process about seven different messages at a time. When our stress level increases, that can drop to just three messages at a time, meaning we're more likely to misinformation that someone's trying to share with us. Now think about it, how often, when your partner's stressed and they walk through the door, do you share important information with them and expect them to be alert? How often in our friends groups, when they're going through pain, do we make it about us and our pain? Recognize that when your friends are going through stress,

they're actually more likely to be less clear, harder to deal with, more difficult, more challenging. Now, of course, if you have friends that are always going through stress, you may be like, well, I'm always dealing with my friends going through stress and they're never able to be present. I think that's a really important conversation to have with someone. Say, hey, look, I'm really happy to be there for you when you're struggling and when you're experiencing stress. But I just don't feel comfortable that I don't ever feel hurt.

And it's really interesting when you say something like that, before you say it, you're going to have to reflect on whether that's really true. I've found that I feel that way about people sometimes, but when I sit and think about it, I'm like, wait a minute, I wasn't there for them, for them for that, I didn't do that. Okay, you know, it's pretty equal.

And so before, that's why starting a difficult conversation is so important because so often you will answer the question before you start the difficult conversation. But if you don't choose to have the difficult conversation and you're always complaining about someone, it's really hard to figure out that actually you may not be as right as you think you are. So I hope that these principles help you be a great friend and build great relationships in 2023. Remember relationships are at the core of everything we do. One of the biggest investments I made when I moved to LA, I mean,

and Riley talk about this all the time is I made a very conscious effort to say that I'm not only here to build my work and my purpose. I'm going to simultaneously build relationships and and my purpose, I'm going to simultaneously build relationships. And people often say that LA can be a lonely place, but I'm really proud of my friends here, my community here, the people that I'm surrounded by. And it all comes because it was a separate initiative. It was a separate pursuit. And I see it that way.

I see building relationships as its own pursuit in life and I wish you all the best in 2023 with your relationships. I'm here for you to help support you and I am so grateful for the incredible on-bubbous community that we have right now. Thank you so much for listening and thank you for all your and I'll see you on the next episode. The World of Chocolate has been turned upside down. A very unusual situation. You saw this tax-appasion in office. Chocolate comes from the cacao tree, and recently, Variety's cacao, thought to have been lost centuries ago, were rediscovered in the Amazon.

There is no chocolate on earth like this. Now some chocolate makers are racing deep into the jungle to find the next game-changing chocolate, and I'm coming along. Okay, that was a very large crack it up. Listen to obsessions while chocolate. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I heart radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. Hi, I'm Brendan Francis Nuneum. I'm a journalist, a wanderer, and a bit of a bond vivant,

but mostly a human just trying to figure out what it's all about. And not lost is my new podcast about all those things. It's a travel show where each week I go with a friend to a new place and to really understand it, try to get invited to a local's house for dinner where kind of trying to get invited to a dinner party, it doesn't always work out. Ooh, I have to get back to you.

Listen to not lost on the iHeart radio app or wherever you get your podcasts. When my daughter ran off to hop trains, I was terrified I'd never see her again. So I followed her into the train yard. This is what it sounds like inside the box cart. And into the city of the rails, there I found a surprising world, so brutal and beautiful,

that it changed me. But the rails do that to everyone. There is another world out there. And if you want to play with the devil, you're going to find down in the rail yard. Undenail Morton, come with me to find out what waits for us in the city of the rails. Listen to City of the Rails on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. Or, cityoftherails.com.