Friendship 101

How to forge friendships like a pro

It takes 140 hours to make a friend.

At least that’s what Jeffrey Hall says.

According to his study, it takes 50 hours of ‘interaction’ for an acquaintance to become a casual friend and an additional 90 hours to evolve this casual friendship into a real friendship (recruiting your own personal BFF will take even longer I presume).

So 140 hours per friend?

That seems like a lot of work.

Especially if you’re starting from single digits, like I did.

My friendship history

“A diminishing circle of friends is the first terrible diagnostic of a life in deep trouble.” — David Whyte

I’ve always needed time to myself. I enjoy being alone. After spending time with others, I often long for time away from people to calm down my mind, process my thoughts, and come to my (own) senses. I guess this is what people call being an introvert.

But being alone is not the same as being lonely.

At a time in my life when I first acknowledged to myself that I was lonely (more alone than I wanted to be), it made me ask this question of ‘how to make friends’ for the first time.

I wasn’t doing well at the time and this was reflected in my level of isolation from others. I didn’t have anybody to talk to about my problems or my passions. I felt lonely, unseen and unsupported. I needed a comforting companion, a listening ear, and an outlet for all of the thoughts racing in my mind.

I wanted friends, but I didn’t know how to ‘make’ them.

I couldn’t exactly post an ad saying: ‘I’m looking for a best friend’. That tends to turn people off. And for good reason, it’s creepy.

Making friends seemed like a random game of chance to me. Sure, I had connected with people in the past, but there was never an intentional process behind it. I didn’t have a clue what I did to transform those connections into friendships later on.

But luckily, as I discovered later, making friends isn’t random or mysterious at all. I didn’t have to go post that creepy ad after all.

There’s a system to it. And it’s teachable.

The first turning point

“Friendship happens on the way to something else. If you ‘try to meet new people’ it feels weird and forced. The more you aim for friendship, the more it eludes you. But if you aim to learn or achieve something with others, friendship happens naturally during the shared pursuit.” — James Clear

Long before I ever questioned how to consciously make friends, the first serious friend group I ever had was in high school.

We were close. We did everything together. We effortlessly exceeded Jeffrey Hall’s ‘necessary hours’ by far. On top of that we were going through the same thing together, school. We could bond over which teacher we disliked amongst other adolescent and possibly slightly performative preoccupations.

In the years after high school, I didn’t continue to do much learning in groups. I had a broad variety of interests but was clueless about which profession to get into so those years were mostly spent searching, researching, and exploring various fields and fascinations.

Usually by myself, sitting behind my laptop.

By chance, I discovered the world of online webinars, workshops, and courses. I’m talking about the dynamic, interactive live sessions held on Zoom, where you actively participate and connect with other attendees in real time.

They not only expanded my knowledge and skills in areas I was passionate about but they introduced me to like-minded people from around the world and opened me up to opportunities for collaboration, networking, and you guessed it, friendships.

Working on something together or having a common goal, automatically infuses your life with plenty of chances to hop on calls, message people, follow up, and start creating meaningful relationships with others.

The second turning point

Years later, when high school was a distant memory, I enrolled into a coach-training program. I wanted to help people and become a professional coach. 

Surprisingly, learning to coach in my professional life supercharged my ability to make friends in my personal life.

Thinking about it now, it totally makes sense though.

Ask yourself, apart from common interests, what do you look for in a friend?

Someone who shows a genuine interest in your thoughts, feelings, and experiences? Someone who listens to understand, instead of to respond? Someone who is your biggest supporter?

I could go on but I’m guessing you get my point. These highly sought-after qualities in a friend are what coaches are literally trained in. Only in coaching, we call them skills.

When you’re a coach you need to build a good relationship with your client if you want them to benefit in any way. The basis for their growth is the strength of the relationship between the two of you. That’s how it works.

For this reason, as a side benefit, trained coaches make excellent friends. Which means they have their pick when it comes to who they’d like to be friends with.

Learning to coach unintentionally made me a friend-making machine, the perfect complement to my other ‘skill’ of meeting like-minded people online.

Without knowing it, I had built myself a system for making friends.

The system

Here are the two things you can start doing right now to significantly increase your chances of making friends in the near future.

1. Learning together online. 

It’s rare that your best friend lives next door.

Luckily, through the power of the internet, you don’t have to live anywhere near your best friend nowadays. You will likely find them in an entirely different country.

The world of online learning is tailored to you. 

Honing in on what interests you, will automatically preselect people with similar interests and goals. And this is exactly what you want. Instead of thinking about what you will learn, the intention here is to think about who you will meet.

So skip the self-paced, on-demand courses like Udemy, Skillshare, and Khan academy. You’ll never finish them anyway (if you even start), they’ll just sit there on your hard drive. No, you are here for the people.

Go for live, in person, cohort-based courses. Specifically search for programs that take a couple of weeks, have a lively community, and have an ‘attend live’ approach.

Be sure to show up from the start with an attitude primed for connection though. This is where step two comes in.

2. Becoming ‘friend material’.

In every encounter you will ever have, you have the opportunity to increase your chances of making them into a friend somewhere down the line.

As Jeffrey Hall suggests, getting to the friendship stage might take some time and since you’ll never know beforehand which of the people you meet will end up being your friends, making sure you have your end covered is vital.

So how do you make sure you’re ‘friend material’ from now on?

Well, think about what would you need in a friend? Someone who takes you seriously, is interested in you, who listens and responds to the things you’ll so vulnerably tell them?

You want to convey genuine interest, understanding, and support as best you can.

How do you embody, but maybe even more importantly, show all of these?

They’re all cultivated by practicing one single skill.

Listening.

Becoming a better listener is the number one coaching skill and the number one skill that will make you better friend material. You will create trust, make people feel heard, and foster authentic connection like a pro.

To get started right away, check out this article for a step-by-step guide to listening, so you can begin drastically improving your conversations immediately.

At this point, I’m fortunate to have more than enough friends (meaning I wouldn’t have much room for more…).

And this two-step system helped me get there.

If it takes the average person 140 hours to make a friend, I bet, using this system, you could do the same in half the time.