By changing the quality and direction of your thoughts, you can change the quality and direction of your life. If you maintain a mindset that you attract and make new friends easily, guess what, at least a friend or two more will start to show up in your life.Sometimes you discover someone who’s been in your life all along, but for whatever reason, hasn’t crossed the friendship threshold.

Being With Your Friends Often

What’s the point of having a good friend if you don’t see them often enough to keep the friendship going? It’s far too easy today to take a friend for granted.

If many of your friends are scattered across the United States, whenever you’re traveling for work, see if it’s possible to create circular routes so that perhaps on your way back you can stop off and see a good friend. I’ve done this with Paul in Cleveland, on my way back from Chicago; Bob in Nashville, on my way back from Dallas; Jeff in Marina del Ray anytime I’m headed towards Los Angeles; and Peter in Boston anytime I’m headed toward the northeast.

Because I lived in the Washington, DC, area for many years and still have many friends there, I see each of them on a rotating basis on subsequent trips back to DC.

Likewise, in your own life, how can you easily keep up with your friends, i.e., ensure that they’re in your path?

• Look for events where you can include your friends even though you normally wouldn’t think of doing this.
• Plan vacations at the same time and destination.
• Be a member of the same local group, cause, or activity.
• Have a designated encounter each month, such as the last Friday, the first Saturday, or what have you.
• Introduce your spouses so that they will get to know each other better, which will increase the probability of your seeing your friend more often.

Choosing to Easily Broaden Your Friendship

How sweet it is when someone who is your friend on one level for so many years moves up to the next level, and vice versa. Has this ever happened to you? Often, it’s prompted by some change in life. One or the other of you move closer to each other geographically. Perhaps your children share some activity. Perhaps you both are stricken with the same illness around the same time.

Independent of the initiating event, having a friendship deepen and broaden, and hence move to a higher level, is one of the great mysteries and beautiful aspects of life.

Friendship Upgrades

Right now, think about the people with whom you are friends, and which of those relationships could be enhanced. There’s probably at least one, if not several. As it often works out in the cosmos, that friend may be thinking of you in the same terms at the same moment.

Those old Bell Telephone commercials that urge you to “reach out and touch someone” contain more wisdom than the advertising agency that crafted the term ever envisioned. For the price of a phone call, you can get together with someone in ways that reward or empower both of you. Perhaps you don’t even know who that special friend is going to be. In that case, why not call all of your friends?

Telephoning Night

Michael O’Hara made millions as the owner of Tramps Discotheque in the early to late 1970’s. Then he made multi-millions for developing the concept for the Champion Sports Bar in the Georgetown section of Washington, DC, which has since been franchised all across America. O’Hara once told me that one of his secrets to success is getting on the phone.

Some evenings, he’ll sit by the phone with his list of phone buy phentermine online yahoo numbers and call everyone he knows–everyone who happens to be home at the time he calls, and just talks. He has no particular agenda. He’s not trying to sell them something, or even arrange to get together. He just wants to stay in touch.

O’Hara says that as a result of this lifelong ritual, he has deepened many friendships, not- so-accidentally stumbled into a variety of lucrative business deals, and feels that he is a richer person for doing so.

A Date with the Boob Tube

Contrast what O’Hara does with how most people typically spend their evenings. To be blunt, most people sit in front of the television and feed their faces. The typical person in America today spends nearly eight solid years of his or her life watching how other people supposedly live (on television) while not getting to know the flesh and blood person down the block. By the way, those eight solid years of watching TV represent twenty-four hour days and 365 day years with a presumed life span of age seventy-two.

If one-ninth of your day, on average, roughly equal to two hours and forty minutes, is spent in front of the television, you’re consuming one-ninth of your life, or eight years. However, for some people, it’s far more than eight years. These are the same people who then decry the lack of opportunities in their neighborhood or town and end up concluding that the world is a cold or limiting place.

As a goal, spend one evening a month, say from seven to ten p.m., on the phone, calling everyone you know. If you only get so far on your list, next month continue where you left off. If the notion particularly appeals to you, perhaps you’ll make this a more frequent activity.

What will happen as a result of such calls? You’ll feel closer to some people, learn about issues and events, be invited to activities, and heck, maybe even enjoy yourself. You’ll rediscover elements of yourself and of your friends that you may have forgotten.

Choosing to Be a More Supportive Friend

Long-term and rewarding friendships require maintenance and nurturing. Whether it’s calling, writing, visiting, or engaging in activities together, if you’re interested in an active friendship, you need to be active.

Everyone has friendships where they talk to somebody every so many years, and because they were a good friend at the outset, and there are feelings within both themselves and their friend that keep the relationship going even in the absence of regular contact, it’s easy to catch up in a matter of moments.

Still, it would be so much nicer to maintain an active and ongoing friendship as opposed to an intermittent and inactive one.

If you catch up with a good friend only every five or eight years, and you’re in your thirties or forties right now, that means you have at best six or seven more twenty-minute phone conversations with them before one of you dies or is too feeble to dial.

On the Front Burner

In addition to the suggestions already presented, here are some additional ideas for you, if one of your goals is to keep your good friendships on the front burner of your life:

• Call them, call them, call them.
• Remember their birthdays and send a gift.
• Remember their spouses’ or children’s birthdays.
• Be on the lookout for items of interest to them, and alert them when you uncover them.
• As you consider leisure time activities for yourself and/or your family, think of ways to tie your friends into the loop.
• Meet for lunch.
• Exchange photos.

Finally, engage in whatever the phrase, “Being a good friend,” prompts within you.