Your professional life has probably turned you into someone who knows how to network. And that’s a good thing. As a society, we’ve never been more adept at adding someone to our list of ‘people we may know’, yet still feel like very few people actually know us.
This is because somewhere along the line, the act of networking got confused with making friends as an adult – and honestly, who can blame us? Not so long ago, we lived through an actual pandemic where for many of us, work became our primary connection to others, and often the only social element to our days…
And then it stuck.
In the years of remote hustle culture that followed, our jobs blended so seamlessly into our day to day lives, that we now post personal stories on platforms previously reserved for work updates and treat socializing as the goal itself, rather than the beginning of something meaningful.
Put simply: we’ve lost touch with the art of the follow-through, which is exactly where friendship lives.
Think about dating. We give romantic interests the grace of a second date, a third... We understand instinctively that you can't know someone from a single meeting. But with friendship? We treat the first meetup as a performance metric to hit in one go. Connection asks something different from us – lose the performance, and embrace the messy, human bit (that might scare us a little).
Something we’re *not* scared of, however, are KPIs, in fact, we welcome them. So what if friendship had a set of its own? Key Connection Indicators (KCIs), if you will. Less about performance, more about showing up – over and over again.
Here's what that looks like in practice.
KCI #1 – Name the plan
Imagine there was a metric for how many well-meaning plans the words ‘let's do something soon’ have silently killed? When it comes to making plans that actually happen, specifics are everything. Vague intentions fail because our busy brains struggle to hold onto them amongst everything else competing for our attention.
Simply adding a time and a place – ‘free for dinner Wednesday at 7?’ – transforms an intention into something real, giving both people something to say yes to (bonus points for scheduling friend plans in your work calendar too).
KCI #2 – Welcome reschedules
The second of the Four Agreements by Don Miguel Ruiz is ‘don't take anything personally’, and it might be the first-most underrated rule in adult friendship. We're all humans navigating the same demanding schedules, the same competing commitments, the same days where life just gets in the way.
A last-minute plan cancellation isn't a sign that someone doesn't care, it's just another day in the modern age. The friendships that make it through are the ones who reschedule instead of retreat. So when plans change, be the one who says ‘no worries, how's next week same time?’ and watch how it lightens the load.
KCI #3 – Master the sit-through
There are days when things with friends can feel awkward or conversations run dry, and that's okay (see the ‘we’re all humans’ point from KCI #2 above). When this happens and the instinct to reach for your phone hits, resist. Will with all your might to sit through the silence and simply be with the discomfort. This is how trust forms, and mutual respect too.
The same applies for when they're going through something hard, which they inevitably will – show up, not with advice, but with a simple ‘I'm here’. It might not be easy on days like these, but it’s the hard times that build the kind of friendships that last.
KCI #4 – Say the inconvenient yes
When we say ‘everyone wants a village, but nobody wants to be a villager’, we have to reckon with the fact that convenience (and hustle) culture are literally built on hyperindividualism. When you land at the airport on a work night, you call an Uber instead of calling a friend because you don’t want to inconvenience them. Sure, you’ve saved them a trip – but you’ve lost half an hour with them in the car.
We’re meant to inconvenience each other, because that’s what it means to be in community, to be a villager, to be a friend. Get comfortable with saying the inconvenient yes, and see how much richer your life will be for it.
Starting a new… friendship
In reference to the keyhole graphic glittering our LinkedIn feeds, what if we started treating every new connection like the beginning of something too? The start of its very own hero’s journey, one filled with ups and downs, twists and turns, awkward silences and cancelled plans and moments where you can't yet tell where it's going… until one day, you look up and realise you've got a friend.
As the late, great Joseph Campbell would say, ‘the cave you fear to enter holds the treasure you seek’, so consider this your invitation to step through.
Ready to start putting this all into practice? Show up for a friend this week, then again the next week, and the next.
