6 Ways to Be a Great Friend & Build Meaningful Relationships in 2023

of January. It's a free workshop to encourage you to pre order, to give you a gift straight away as soon as you do. It's a really cool workshop. I break down the eight cliches about love and whether they're true or not. I think you'll really love it. And I wanted to shout this out that my tours happening and we've already sold out in La there's a second show there. We've sold out. In New York, there's a second show there. We've sold out. The Sydney Opera House.

There's a second show happening there. We've got tickets. I think we've sold out in Toronto, in Amsterdam, but please make sure you look out for tickets everywhere at j httytour dot com. I want to see you and this show is a special ninety minute performance. I think it's going to blow your mind. It's going to be something you've never experienced before. It's not just me reading from

the book or standing there. It's really an experience and a performance and an interactive exchange that me and my team are creating. I can't wait for you to see it. Let's get to this episode. Expanding your circle, inviting new people and who think differently can be a really healthy way to not put all the pressure on your partner or put all the pressure on yourself. And I find that a way to be a good friend or a good partner is make sure that your partner or your

friend has a great support system around them. And by the way, you know what happens when you help other people build support systems for themselves, you end up building support systems for yourself. Pay everyone, and welcome back to our Purpose, the number one health podcast in the world. Thanks to each and every one of you that come back every week to listen, learn and grow. I just want to say, I hope you had a great holiday.

I hope you had a great New Year's I know that the first month of the year can always be slightly unnerving. Everyone has goals, everyone already seems far ahead. You already feel behind. Maybe you're judging yourself or criticizing yourself for not having it all together. Maybe you're feeling it a little bit stark and lost, and it can be a really unsettling time. You've just come out of the holidays, maybe you were with family, maybe there's a

bit of missing them. There's so many emotions at this time of year, and at on purpose, you know that I want to make you feel like this is a safe space, this is a home for those feelings and emotion, and that when I'm recording these episodes, my intention is to really tune in and connect with you and help you through what you're going through. And my team and I were discussing different areas of challenge at the moment,

and one of them was today's topic. It was how to be a great friend in twenty twenty three and how to have a great relationship in twenty twenty three. Now, this advice I'm about to share, it applies to friends, it applies to romantic relationships. It applies to family because the ways to create intimacy and connection have a lot of similarities. And what I found really really interesting is that the pressure on being a good friend and the

pressure on having good friends has increased over time. If you think about how society has changed. We used to spend a lot of time living close to family, living in big families, living with most of our family. Right most people were raised by their aunts and uncles as much as their parents. And today we find us living in smaller places with smaller families which are just our immediate family. Sometimes we're living far far away. I mean, you know, Rady and I live a ten hour flight

away from our family. And what I find happens in that circumstance is that we rely a lot more on our friends. And I'm sure a lot of you can relate to that. Maybe you moved city for work, maybe you move state for your partner, Maybe you moved country for an amazing new opportunity, and you're starting to realize that it's different when you don't have a ready made support system. Right, when I moved to LA and first when we moved to New York, it's like I didn't

know who the best plumber was. I didn't know who is going to be around to be the electrician if something broke right. You just don't have access to the same things that you naturally had access to. When your family was around, you knew people to call upon, and now you're starting from scratch. And when that's happening on an emotional support level, when that's happening on a personal connection level, that can be hard. And I hear this from a lot of people that finding family or making

friends as we get older is harder. So the research shows that for both men and women, at age twenty five is when most of us start losing our friends. And usually it's because your values change. Maybe you change country or state or city, maybe a situation changes, maybe you had a kid, maybe someone moved for a relationship. Right, a lot more changes and bigger changes start to happen in our lives at twenty five. And also, if you think about it, back in the day, you were a

lot closer to your neighbor. You were closer to the people that you live next to, and that's changed over time as we've become more and more insular. This episode is all about making sure you have healthy friendships and family relationships and partnerships for twenty twenty three. Because I find that we keep doing the same thing. How many of you have a chat group, or maybe you're at dinner this week and be like, we have to have dinner every week together, or like we have to travel

together this year. Like we said all these like really big, amazing intentions, and it feels really exciting. And by the way, I'm a culprit of this too, right, Like, I do this too where I get really excited and I'm like, guys, we have to do this this year. We have to

do this. And then I'm busy and doing so many other things, and I start to realize that in the desire to do these really huge, big things, which are beautiful, by the way, if you can, we lose out on the small moments of connection and intimacy, which is what we're actually looking for. Right. I was at at dinner the other day and I was surrounded by so many people, and I didn't feel like I really had a connection.

How many times if you felt that, well, you're just surrounded by so many people, but you didn't have a connection. And then the other day I was invited to a launch event that was even bigger, And at that event, even though there were so many more people, I felt such a connection because there were people in the room that were present and really wanted me there, and there was just a feeling of mutual exchange. So it's just

really interesting to see the difference. Anyway, I'm going to dive right in, and he is one of the first ways to be a great friend or to have a great relationship in twenty twenty three. And it's called always carry a snack. And now you might be wondering what does that mean? Jay, So if anyone ever travels with Raddy my wife, or has the pleasure to travel with Radi,

Raddy always carries snacks. She's a great person to be around because I'll be that person who before we get on the plane or train or wherever we are in the car, I'll be like, no, I don't snack. I'm not a snacker. Right, I'm one of those people a snacker. Now, I just eat my meals. And Radi is a self confessed snacker. Right. Radi has as snack cupboard at home and a snack drawer at home, and she's really proud

of it. Right, It's beautifully arranged. You'll get a tour of it if you're ever at home, and it's a big part of something that she loves, and so she'll be prepared and I won't, and inevitably, to my greatest pain point, at some point in the journey, I'll be like, I'll be sneaking. I won't even ask. I'm one of those people I won't even ask. I will just sneak my ad there and grab a bit of this snack, and she she'll obviously notice and give me a sidewards glance,

like one of those you know, cutting side eyes. Why am I talking about this being a good friend or a great friend? And what do I mean by always carry a snack when you're seeing your friends, When you're around people you love, always carry the thing that you know they might need. Right, It's like that's a sign of love. It's a really small thing. But you may have one of those friends that's always struggling with a

headache and you're carrying your essential oil. Or you have a friend who always ends up wanting tea at a time when it's hard to get tea and you have a tea bag in your bag, right, and it sounds like a really small thing, But it's these moments that transform our connection. Why because you feel thought about most of us. If you think about why we feel lonely. We don't feel lonely because we don't have people in our life. We don't feel lonely because people don't show

up to our birthday. We feel lonely because we think no one thinks of us. We think we're not thought of, and it's hard to be thought of all the time with just a text message thing, how are you doing, how are you doing? How are you today? Right? Like,

people aren't going to do that all the time. But if you want to make your friends, your partner, your family feel thought about, if you're seeing them that day, if you are moving around with them, that we grab something that you know that they're always missing and just place it there. It could be as simplest one of these things, and it makes a huge difference. That person that you care about and you love is now going to feel like you think about them in such a deep, personal,

intimate way, and it creates a connection like no other. Now, the second principle that I want to share with you today and I want to hear what yours are, make sure you tag me on Instagram and Twitter and let me know what was yours, because I love knowing what the different people in your life want. Okay, the second one is called invite more people to the table, right,

invite more people to the table? What I mean by this and I've been wrong with this for a long time sometimes in my relationships where you kind of get ownership over a relationship, and what I mean by that is you obsess over the one to one connection you have with someone and you're scared of inviting other people into the friends because you don't want to lose your friendship. Now, the first thing I'll say is, if you're scared of losing your friendship with someone, it's time that you invest

more in that friendship. Right If you think that inviting someone else into a group of friends is going to make you lose your connection with someone you think you have a close connection with, it's not as close as you think, so you want to start working on that

if that's on your mind right now. Now. If you are confident that you have a good relationship with someone, but you realize that actually they're going to need different help at different times, you're not going to be able to solve all their problems, and therefore, expanding your circle, inviting new people and who think differently can be a really healthy way to not put all the pressure on

your partner or put all the pressure on yourself. And I find that a way to be a good friend or a good partner is make sure that your partner or your friend has a great support system around them. And by the way, you know what happens when you help other people build support systems for themselves, you end

up building support systems for yourself. I've seen this in my own life when I have clients who need specific therapists, or they need specific health coaches, or they need specific people in their life, and I'm doing the research, I'm trying to figure it out for them, and then I realize that those people become a part of my life. They become a part of my network. It's not wasted.

If your friend was looking for some particular help at home and you helped out, you now have access to that network too, So it's not all selfless and it's not all lost. It's like you're actually building a beautiful

community around you. When you're building community for others right, Remember that when you're building community for others, you're also building an incredible community around yourself, and you don't want to underestimate that because often we'll go out our way to research for other people more than we do for ourselves, and so when we take that role, we actually end up finding incredible people. So invite more people to the table.

Recognize that you can't take care of every need of your friend, and often we put that pressure on ourselves. We're like, I'm going to be everything for them, I'm going to be there for them all the time. I'm going to do everything for them, and that exhausts us, it ties us out, and we often end up feeling like they don't do enough for us. We end up feeling like they don't care enough. And it's really just because we've been overgiving. How many of you are overgivers?

And then overexpectors raise your hands, I'm raising mind right now, right, we're overgivers, but we're overexpectors, and I think that comes because we don't realize, actually, you know what real support means, helping someone build their support system. Okay, point number three, this is a huge one, and it's one that I really want you to take note of. So I read about this study led by researchers from MIT, and they analyzed friendship ties in people age between twenty three to

thirty eight as part of a management class. Now, the subjects were asked to rank how close they were with each person in the class on a scale of zero to five. Now, zero men, I have no idea who this person is. Three means friend, and five means a really close friend. The research has found that ninety four percent of people expected their feelings like their rankings to be reciprocated, but only fifty three percent of them actually were.

That's huge, right, So ninety four percent of people felt, yeah, people are going to say the same thing as me that I said about them, but only half were right now, this is something called the perception gap. So what I find fascinating it about this is that it seems like we sometimes feel closer to people than we actually are. And that could be for a number of reasons. Maybe they're upset about something we said or did. Maybe they

have a different definition of friendship or closeness. Maybe they're feeling distant lately because we haven't seen them. But the biggest thing I find and that's why this is point number three is don't forget to keep investing when you're making deposits in your friendship. I think it's very easy to reach out and have requests, but it's very rare

that people actually invest, right. It's very very rare that we reach out to someone to give without wanting to receive, or just to support when they need it, without calculating what it means for us. Or some people are so oblivious that they will just reach out and keep having requests without any investment, right. And that happens so often where we're so oblivious, we're so unaware that we just

keep reaching out to people making deposits. And so I want you to ask yourself about your five closest friends right now, and I would recommend that you pluck in a couple of people from work as well and your family and your partner, and go, wait, when was the last time I made an investment? What was the last

investment I made in that friendship? You may find that the last investment you made in that friendship was literally, like gosh, like five ten years ago, especially if it's a long term friend and you're thinking to yourself, wow, I've been making deposits for a long term. I asked them to help me move. I ask them to help me do that. Or maybe you're feeling that way about your friends have been doing that to you, and we

all know we don't like feeling that way. And if you don't like feeling that way, it's so important a that you said an example in your own life. But reflecting on this helps you realize, Okay, I don't want to keep investing in that relationship if someone keeps making deposits from me either, and you may speak to them about it. And I think that's what this study really shows is that often people are just not sharing how

they're feeling and we just keep going on. And what I find uncomfortable about that is that it's almost like mole developing in a house. I hate to compare it to that, but it is kind of like that, where something that is deteriorating and disintegrating is happening. It's happening in a way that you can't see it, but it has a long term impact on your emotional stability and

their emotional stability or actually instability. I should say that it creates and it always ends up coming out, and when you discover it, it's so much worse than if you talked about it. And I just feel like putting things under the carpet or sweeping things under the rug and hoping that they'll just go away, or we like to complain about them. It gives us a bit of familiar pain to connect to that being removed changes everything. Step number four. My thing here is it doesn't matter

if you can't paint. Actually it's better if you can't paint. What do I mean by this? We need to do more things with our partners, our friends, and our family when no one knows what they're doing. Try a new food that you've never tried before. Try a pain class, go and try a pottery class. Like literally, there are so many things to do. I'm about to read a list that I sent to a client the other day, and I said, an animal sanctuary, assault course in the trees,

a local getaway. There may be a bike path you've never taken, a dance class, as a class, a food making class, right, whatever it may be. Like, go and do something with your friends. I think often we get together in ways that don't create intimacy. Right. Often we'll go to a restaurant or we'll go to a movie.

And it doesn't build a sense of intimacy, it doesn't build a sense of learning, It doesn't build a sense of like, I'm doing something new with you and I'm learning something new about you, and we're just being fascinated by each other right now, right, Oh, we're doing the thing we always do and we're both on our phones. And the nights ended, and at least we planned to date night, or at least we planned a friends night. And so finding active things to do together actively builds

your relationship. When you do things that are passive together, guess what, Your relationship becomes more passive. When you do active things together, your relationship becomes more alive and active. And I find that most of our times with our closest friends, closest partners, closest families are truly just passive.

Right when you see people who are constant on their phones at dinner, or you see people on their phones even at the movies or at a game, or you know, you see people in the car and they're not talking to each other, and we're like, yeah, okay, sure, we can't talk all the time about everything, Like we don't have to have something to talk about. But when you find that that's a recurring pattern, it can be really really challenging. I've got two more for you. This one

is called go visit your school together. And what I mean by this is go and take a trip down memory lane. Take a friend that you really value, your partner, and go on a trip down memory lane. I don't often encourage this. I often talk about making new memories, but sometimes to re strengthen, we have to go and relive an old memory. That was really special. I caught up with a couple of my former team the other

day and it was one of the nicest things. It was so nice to go back, sit down and reflect and hear what they remember from working together, what I remember from working together. And it was just such a beautiful thing to do. We haven't worked together in like three years, and to sit together over some lunch and just talk about the fun we had, the different things we did like it was just amazing and I was thinking to myself, I want to do that more often.

I was just back in Christmas for the holidays with my friends, and I was going to all the places we used to go to, and there was a nostalgia there, which again I'm not usually a promoter of nostalgia because it can kind of keep as stuck in the past. But I think it's a beautiful way to strengthen relationships this year that are important to you. And so if you've had a relationship that you haven't strengthened for a long time that you need to pull from a place

of closeness, do that, right, Do that. That's the way to do it. Take a trip down memory lane, but actually go there. Don't just sit there and talk about it. Go to that physical place, Go to your school, go to that night coup that you have crazy memories around. I'm not saying go inside, go outside, whatever works like, go there and do that. Now. Point number six is don't make it about you when they're stressed. Now, I have this study to share with you that really made

me highlight this point. So, according to the Stress Management Society, when we are experiencing extreme stress, our ability to communicate diminishes massively. We experience lack of clarity, confusion, brain fog, and rabbit in the headlights, all of which make it very difficult to communicate effectively during times of stress. On average, they write when we're under low levels of stress, we

can process about seven different messages at a time. When our stress level increases, that can drop to just three messages at a time, meaning we're more likely to misinformation that someone's trying to share with us. Now, think about it. How often when your partner's stressed and they walk through the door do you share important information with them and expect them to be alert? How often in our friends groups, when they're going through pain, do we make it about

us in our pain? Recognize that when your friends are going through stress, they're actually more likely to be less clear, harder to deal with, more difficult, more challenging. Now, of course, if you're friends that are always going through stress, you may be like Jay, well, I'm always dealing with my friends going through stress and they're never able to be present.

I think that's a really important conversation to have with someone. Say, Hey, look, I'm really happy to be there for you when you're struggling and when you're experiencing stress, but I just don't feel comfortable that I don't ever feel heard. And it's really interesting when you say something like that. Before you say it, you're going to have to reflect on whether

that's really true. I've found that I feel that way about people sometimes, But when I sit and think about it, I'm like, wait a minute, I wasn't there for them them for that. I didn't do that. Okay, you know it's pretty equal and so before. That's why starting a difficult conversation is so important, because so often you will

answer the question before you start the difficult conversation. But if you don't choose to have the difficult conversation and you're always complaining about someone, it's really hard to figure out that actually you may not be as right as you think you are. So I hope that these principles help you be a great friend and build great relationships in twenty twenty three. Remember, relationships are at the core

of everything we do. One of the biggest investments I made when I moved to La I mean, and rather talk about this all the time, is I made a very conscious effort to say that I'm not only here to build my work and my purpose. I'm going to simultaneously build relationships. And people often say that LA can be a lonely place, but I'm really proud of my friends here, my community here, the people that I'm surrounded by and it all comes because it was a separate initiative.

It was a separate pursuit, and I see it that way. I see building relationships as its own pursuit in life. And I wish you all the best in twenty twenty three with your relationships. I'm here for you to help support you, and I am so grateful for the incredible on purpose community that we have right now. Thank you so much for listening, and thank you for all your reviews, and I'll see you on the next episode.