A Book for Building Better Friendships

My chat with author Anna Goldfarb

What is your part in making something happen?

This is one of my favorite questions to ask, but one I often overlook when it comes to my friendships.

In our culture of busyness, where not replying to a text or canceling plans at the last minute are increasingly tolerated, it’s all too easy to get focused on how other people operate in a friendship. Or to shift into mind-reading, convincing yourself people don’t like you with little to no evidence.

This is why it was a delight for me to get to chat with Anna Goldfarb, author of the new book Modern Friendship: How to Nurture Our Most Valued Connections. Though she never uses the word differentiation, I think it’s a central idea in the book—how we become more responsible for how we show up in friendships and manage the anxiety it takes to build them. And how we even begin to have a little bit of fun with the process.

Check out our conversation, where we both talk about our books and how they’re related. (If you’re tired of hearing me talk about my book, True to You, you can skip to 13:00 to hear us talk about Anna’s book.)

And then check out Modern Friendship, as well as Anna’s newsletter, Friendship Explained.

After reading the book, here are few questions I have for myself that I hope are useful for you:

• When have I been more focused on what a friend is doing than on how I want to represent myself in the friendship?

• How can I tolerate and embrace the anxiety that accompanies the process of making new friends?

• When do I catch myself making inaccurate assumptions about what friends think of me, when real contact probably would have dispelled them?

• Where do I want to put my energy when it comes to building and strengthening friendships?

I’ll be back soon with some thoughts about politics and anxiety. Until then, I hope to see some folks this Thursday at the Center for Family Systems Theory’s conference in Buffalo, where I’ll be talking about the value of asking questions in our quick-fix culture.

News from Kathleen

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