How to Build Friendships

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Building strong relationships with others will make your life more positive and fulfilling. These 10 steps will help you find and keep lifelong friends.

1. If you genuinely like people, enjoy being with them, talking with them, and being helpful to them, you will find that people generally will like you.

2. Become interested in the other person's ideas and activities. Direct conversation to the other individual's interests, rather than talking about yourself.

3. Practice the old saying: "To have friends, be friendly."

4. Remember names. A person's name is important to him. Knowing it will help you get along with him.

5. Be an easy-going comfortable sort of person, so that there is no strain in being with you.

6. Be stimulating. If being with you makes people feel better and more alive, you will be sought after; people will want to be with you.

7. Do not rub people the wrong way. Be courteous and affable.

8. Avoid being sensitive, or easily hurt; for people instinctively shy off from the super-sensitive, fearing to arouse an unpleasant reaction.

9. Sincerely attempt to heal every misunderstanding that you have with others.

10. Love people and do things for them. Perform unselfish and outgoing acts of friendship. Such sincere self-giving inevitably leads to pleasant
personal relations. It is all summed up in a familiar Scripture admonition: "Do for others what you want them to do for you." (See Matthew 7:12; Luke 6:3 1.)


Excerpted from Help Yourself with God's Help by Dr. Norman Vincent Peale, 1976. Copyright © 2004 Guideposts