Royane Real
The Need For Friendship And Community
By: Jane Straus
Introductory comments
By Royane Real
Author of “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends”
We are living in a world where loneliness is on the increase. Not only are people having fewer friends, but many of us are also having fewer meaningful human interactions. It’s getting harder to make and keep close friendships.
No wonder that stress and anxiety is rising.
The following article by life coach Jane Straus talks about something I have long felt to be a growing problem in the modern world. She talks about how we seem to be losing the ability to make emotional and social connections with each other.
The worst part is that many of us don’t even seem to notice our increasing loneliness and disconnection with other people. We don’t necessarily notice that we’re lonely, until someone makes the point of asking us if we actually have any close friends. For an increasing number of people, when asked if they have close friends, the answer is “No”.
Jane Straus also talks about how the communications devices that are supposed to help us connect with each other can actually have the effect of locking us into our own little world.
Not only are people today too busy to get together often, but they are actually losing important social skills. Children spend long hours in front of various television and computer screens, using time that previous generations spent actively playing and interacting with each other.
Last year I read an article by a woman about her family’s trip across America. She remembered with great fondness the trip she took across the country with her family when she was a child. For many hours as they traveled thousands of miles, the family members spoke, played, quarreled, sang and had an unforgettable good time.
When it came to be her turn as an adult and a parent to organize a similar cross country trip, she dreamed about the closeness this trip would bring to her family. But what happened instead shocked and saddened her. The car trip was almost silent. Instead of talking to each other, each of the children spent the trip locked into their own video game. During the entire trip, the members of the family barely talked to each other.
As a person who thinks a lot about where society is heading, and as a writer who specializes in writing about how to improve friendship, these current trends worry me.
I worry that we are producing a new generation that excels at interacting with electronic gadgets, but not with other human beings.
One thing that has always fascinated me is reading the stories of what happens to people when the electrical power goes out in big cities, especially in the summer. Quite often, people who have been trapped in stifling dark, hot rooms with no television and no video games make the extraordinary step of leaving their apartments to go seek out other people to talk to.
Very often they are so amazed at how much fun it can be to simply relax and talk with other, to eat, to drink and to laugh together. They discover a new form of entertainment: talking to other people!
But when the power outage is over, they go back to leading the isolated lives they had before the blackout, and neighbor no longer talks to neighbor.
What can we do to change this?
There are such big social forces at work here that we can’t really do a lot to change the rest of society. We can’t really stop the big trends that cause many of us to spend increased time working, or stop the progress of video games, TV channels, ipods and blackberries.
After all, these things are all very useful. But we can start to notice when they are taking over our lives and increasing our stress and decreasing our chance to really connect emotionally and socially with other people.
We can’t change the world, but we can make some little changes in our own lives.
We can try to shut off the TV and the video games and make sure we talk to each other. We can try to stop leading such fragmented lives and make a point of trying to reconnect with other human beings.
Maybe it’s not too late.
The introductory comments which appear above are by Royane Real, who is the author of the popular book “Your Guide to Finding Friends, Making Friends and Keeping Friends” To improve your social life, download it today at http://www.lulu.com/real )
Feature article:
The Need For Friendship And Community
By: Jane Straus
As a life coach for over 20 years, I have noticed that my clients are looking for more than insights or pearls of wisdom; they want a guarantee that they can trust that they will not have to vie for someone's attention, that they will be heard and cared about, and that they will be listened well to, without interruption and without feeling rushed.
Most of us don't consider ourselves isolated or friendless. Yet, almost 25% of Americans say they don't have even one close friend they confide in.
What this tells me is that we may no longer expect friends to take the time to listen or to have the skills to help us reflect on our circumstances. In other words, intimacy, while valued highly as suggested by the price people are willing to pay for it professionally, is no longer a criterion we gauge our friendships by.
This puts more pressure on mates, who are as ill prepared and time crunched as everyone else. Many of my clients fight with their significant others more about communication or lack of it than about sex, money, or children. They have a hard time resolving day-to-day issues because they can't find the time to talk to each other, or they don't feel listened to, resulting in escalating arguments rather than solutions.
Couples sometimes schedule with me as a way of carving out uninterrupted time to talk or to have a mediator who will keep them from hurting each other's feelings. My work is about supporting a receptive environment where they can each listen better and can practice communicating sensitively. This takes practice-lots of practice-which we are increasingly deprived of in our culture.
It isn't just technology that is at cause; it is the dwindling social skills as a result of technology that hinder intimacy and friendships. It takes more than just time to be a good listener; it takes skill.
One has to learn to focus one's attention on someone else to discern and help with underlying feelings that might be too painful or embarrassing to reveal immediately.
This can't be done via text messaging or email. It is tricky enough to do on the phone when we can't see someone's face. Without practice or the expectation from one another that we provide this, we lose both the ability and the commitment to provide the glue that binds us as something more than acquaintances.
How does technology affect our friendships and even our ability to know how to be a good friend?
In the 1970's my husband was on the baseball team at Stanford and when the team traveled to another university for a game, the guys spent their time on the bus talking together. About what? He doesn't remember. But there was nothing else to do. Without ipods and laptops, these guys were forced to use each other to pass the time and build the camaraderie that cemented friendships he has to this day.
He went back for a Stanford reunion last year and saw something that alarmed him:
When the football team got off the bus, they weren't talking or laughing; they were all plugged into ipods. None of them seemed connected with each other. He imagined they spent the entire duration of the trip alone in their own world of music rather than goofing around, strategizing, learning more about each other, in other words, creating bonds that would last beyond their time as college athletes.
He felt saddened for them. How would kids from the suburbs and those from blighted urban areas bridge the gap among themselves if they didn't find more common ground than what was underneath their feet during a game?
If what used to be a natural alignment such as teammates can be broken by a pocket-sized white rectangle that isolates us in a bubble, how are we to reach out or be reached out to?
Even taking the bus to work used to involve seeing the same people every day, affording us an opportunity to reach out to our neighbors and develop connections.
Today, on a typical bus ride during commute hours, more than likely we will be on our cell phone or plunking at our laptop keyboard, using the bus as our mobile office. We're working longer and harder and the price we pay is increased isolation.
With online chat rooms and dating services, text messaging, and email, we can “exclude the wrong people" and avoid “wasting time."
But how many of us who are happy in a relationship would have picked our mates out of a line up? Did we really end up using the criteria we had in our minds or on paper? Does our partner really look or always behave like our wish list? Who are we overlooking by not taking the time to have a cup of coffee but instead choosing to not “wink" back at?
What can we do about this trend? And do we want to do it? Is it simply more efficient to pay for therapy or coaching?
The problem with relying solely on “professional friendship" is who is going to pick up your child from school because your boss wants you to stay late or the car breaks down? And unfortunately, you might be afraid to bother even those you consider friends if you haven't taken the time to nurture these relationships. Needing something in an emergency becomes an embarrassment instead of part of the pact of friendship.
But even beyond emergencies, we owe it to ourselves to have at least one or two people who are available to us without having to whip out our appointment calendars. It takes conscious effort these days. We live in suburbs where we may not be in walking distance to that special friend. We have jobs and chores and families that demand so much of our time and focus. But we need friendship perhaps today more than ever.
Friendship, community, and intimacy require changing our routine, unplugging from the TV and computer, picking up the phone instead of emailing, having meals together regularly, even doing errands together. Most of all, we need to slow down long enough to listen. We will make these efforts when we remember that a true friend is both an investment and a treasure.
Jane Straus is a trusted life coach, dynamic keynote speaker, and the author of “Enough Is Enough!: Stop Enduring and Start Living Your Extraordinary Life”.
With humor and grace, Jane offers her clients and seminar participants insights and exercises to ensure that the next chapter of their lives is about thriving as the unique individuals they have always been and the extraordinary ones they are still becoming. She serves clients worldwide.
Please visit her at http://www.stopenduring.com . She is also the author of The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation, http://www.grammarbook.com , an award-winning online resource and workbook with easy-to-understand rules, examples, and exercises.
Self-Improvement Article Source: http://www.eArticlesOnline.com
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