Building Your Social Network
By Greg
Building my social network was something I struggled with a lot, especially when I first moved to San Francisco from the East Coast. I have three bits of advice that I feel helped me:
1) Be the first to initiate the friendship. I’ve found that guys can be weird about becoming friends with other guys and often won’t take the initiative to hang out. When you meet a guy who you think is worth hanging out with, exchange numbers and tell him you’d like to hang out. Then (and this is something I struggled with), call him up soon and invite him out. It could be to meet girls at a club, or to grab breakfast, whatever. The most important thing, though, is take the first step to make the friendship, because often other people won’t.
I learned this from a friend who was just amazing at meeting people and making friends. His trick? He would invite people out for breakfast on the weekends, or invite them to go out to the bar with him at night. He was persistent about it too. Don’t give up on someone just because they can’t come out the first time.
2) Always say yes. I don’t know about you, but I like being by myself. Despite Charisma Arts and lots of time socializing I’m still an introvert at heart. Because of that, it’s easy for me to say “no” when people invite me to do things. Maybe I’d rather play music, or hang out with some girl that I want to sleep with. At a certain point I became frustrated and told myself, “I’m going to say yes to everything, no matter how I feel at the time!” If it was 11 at night and I had to work early and someone invited me to a bar I would go out anyway, even if I just stayed for an hour. By doing this I found that I started to make lots of new friends because I was always up to hang out and do whatever came up.
3) Throw parties. It doesn’t have to be a huge thing – just invite some people over for drinks. Take all the people you’ve met within the past couple of weeks and invite them over. If you can’t have the party at your house, invite them all to the same bar.
Those are the things that have helped me out in the past. I hope they’re of some use to you. I’ve found that after a short amount of time I stopped needing to worry about it because I had developed a social circle and it just grew organically.
If you want to see how Charisma Arts can help you build your social network especially when it comes to the girls you’re interested in feel free to contact my friend Dan Tena at dan@charismaarts.com
I can understand the concern that initiating friendship with a guy would come off as…well..a come on. In fact, I think that’s why a lot of guys don’t end up creating friendships. This is pretty easily defused by, as Andy suggested, making it clear that I like girls. If I invite a guy out for a drink, for example, I may say something like, “Hey, I’m going down to the dive bar on the corner to see if I meet some cougars. It’d be cool if you came out for a drink!”.
Sometimes I also just just state my intentions with something like, “Hey, I just moved down here and haven’t met that many guy friends yet. I’m inviting some people over to watch the game, it’d be cool to have you over.”
Gay Shield down.
Continue bromance!
That is killer.
Great post!
I think getting past the weird gay things is easy. When initiating convo, I say something like — “how hot are the chicks here” or “Check out her Winnebagos”.
Gay shield down.
Continue bromance
thanx for the advices man
I find it a little gay to ask a guy out(lol)
But yeah, building a community of friends is important. Just like how I wouldn’t invite a girl to “go hang out”, I wouldnt ask a guy out unless it’s for an activity.
Good activities that most guys like are: gym,soccer,computer games,football and martial arts
D, that sounds awesome! Invite me!
One thing I’ve been planning to try but haven’t quite worked up the nerve yet is to… introduce myself to my neighbors! I’ve lived in the same townhouse for 6 years and hardly know any of them.
My plan is to actually throw a kind of block party. I actually even printed a form for people to put their names, email & phone on, and even pick the date that’s best for them. I used this to approach a couple girls in the park behind my house and it went great. I’ve just been lame about actually going out and knocking on doors.