5 Tips For Quality Conversations & Lasting Friendships
By Life Coach Kelly Rudolph. Posted on .
Have you ever looked forward to a chick-chat with a friend or been excited to open an email from a gal pal you look forward to hearing from only to get dumped on as if you are a garbage can for their troubles and complaints? A good friend conversation whether face-to-face, phone or email should leave you feeling positive, happy and supported as opposed to many that leave us feeling that with friends like that, who needs enemies.
When I chat with my girlfriends, I immediately look forward to the next time so I want to share what we've done to ensure a strong foundation since a gal pal relationship can be one of the most powerful in your life when built correctly.
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As we talked about in Got Girlfriends? How To Make Quality Gal Pals, it’s important to become the type of person you want to attract to a friendship. However, without guidelines for your communication, we can often default into sharing negative things with our friends because we feel so comfortable with them.
Of course it’s okay to share less-than-positive stories, concerns and challenges so we want to establish some boundaries we can all agree on to ensure each conversation leaves us feeling upbeat rather than beat up.
Creating a lasting friendship takes some effort and is completely worth every speck of time and thought you put into it.
5 Tips For Creating Quality Conversations And Friendships:
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1. Enter into friendship with a clear intention to invest in making it positive. We’ve all had friendships we ultimately wanted to run from instead of toward when we needed a friend. These are toxic and even the most positive women can stumble into a disempowering conversation on occasion. Just like a dating situation, we must be ready and willing to build a strong foundation for our friendship or it will fall, like a skyscraper built on sand.
2. Establish and enforce relationship boundaries. The key is to have already established a gentle way of bringing it to the friend’s awareness (establishing relationship boundary) and embarking on a more positive path (enforcing boundary) by saying something like, “Let’s take this is a more empowering (or positive) direction. What did this trigger in you and how can you learn from it?” If you have quality gal pals, chances are you attracted them into your life by being one yourself. You’ve done the personal growth where you recognize everything that happens to us is a direct reflection of something we need to work on within ourselves.
