If you’re an introvert, then you know that your natural instincts don’t motivate you to go and socialize with people. However, you still love to spend some time with others when it’s appropriate — and love to have great friends in your circle.
Introverts don’t like to socialize too much, but that doesn’t mean they hate to spend time with people. Read on to discover three strategies that will help you be more social as an introvert.
1. Be Aware of Friendship Preferences
Different people make friends in different ways. Some people are only interested in very close friendships, while others like having both close friends and casual friends. There is also the type of person who doesn’t like to have close friends at all, they only have fun friends and contacts, and confide in their family members.
It will take you more time to form close friendships than casual ones. Knowing this, you need to pay attention to other people, and ask yourself if they have the time and are ready for the commitment of being a close friend of yours. That said, you may meet great people, but you couldn’t make friends with them unless your friendship preferences are compatible.
2. Set Social Rituals Wisely
Because your instincts do not influence you to go socialize, you need to be proactive about it and set a couple of conditions that will help you be more social without thinking about it too much.
A great way to do this is to set social rituals: a weekly ritual that reminds you to take an hour and follow up with people you know, and a monthly one that allows you to meet new people.
With your weekly ritual, which is nothing more than a reminder in your calendar, you take one hour to call, text, or email people with whom you have an active friendship, or people you just met and want to see again. This helps you do it all at one point, and enjoy the rest of your week knowing that you’re not ignoring people. This also helps you catch up with new people in your life.
Your monthly ritual is some kind of subscription to a club or interest group that holds monthly events, where you can meet new people. You won’t be choosing a new club every month, you just find a good one and stick with it. To make it work even better, try and join the organizing team, this will almost force you to attend every time.
With these two rituals, you’ll always stay in touch with the important friends and potential friends, and really take control of the pace of your social life.
3. Make Your Social Life Work By Itself
There is a shift in how you think about friendship that can radically reduce the effort it takes you to build a social circle. The shift is to go from focusing on individual friends to focusing on groups of friends.
As you’re making new friends, quickly introduce them to each other, and start forming groups. It’s much easier than having to keep up with dozens of people who don’t know each other.
It seems like a small shift, but it completely boosts your social life when you try it. When you have friends that know each other, your social circle expands much faster. The people you know start to make plans with everyone in the group. They keep in touch with everyone else, so you don’t have to call everyone and manage everything.
If you have one group of two or three friends, you can keep it and concentrate on meeting new people and building other social circles. Whereas, if you have a dozen contacts who don’t know each other, you’ll have to keep reaching out and calling everyone to keep up.
To simplify your life, follow the two-step formula:
Explore New Friendships + Connect Them with the Existing Ones
