• making friends

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Presenting: You

One of the best pieces of advice I have ever received came from a Sunday school teacher in seventh grade. We were planning creative ways to invite friends who don't go to church to come visit for a Sunday. Someone mentioned that their best friend said they came once and people at church weren't very friend.
    "In order to have friends, one must appear friendly."
    That struck me. I was aware of situations I had gone into where I did not present myself as a friendly person. It's a two way street, this friendship deal. When you go into a new setting are you bright eyed and smiling? Do you look up at your server in a restaurant and greet them in a friendly manner or bury your face in your menu, magazine, or  stare blankly waiting to decide if you are treated well. The ladder tactic is the method too many people use.    
    "I'll just wait and see if I am treated right before I jump in and waste my time being nice." If that is our attitude, we deserve little of no friendliness.
    In any new retail, restaurant, or other setting, I make a game of trying to be more friendly than those serving me.
    There's a lot to friendliness, making friends, and being a friend--even to ourselves. Too many of us (I include myself here) have spent too much time not being our own friend. This is not the self-love of egotism, but love that supports and affirms self with our inner self-talk and sense of confidence.
    During a break in one of my creativity workshops I was handed a note. We had been talking about what I call "listening to the right voices" - - the people in you life (present and past) who have supported and encouraged you. We are too often drawn, inexplicably, to those who give us negative and spirit-killing criticism.
    The note said, "There are a lot of people who love you. Make sure you're one of them."
    Being your own best friend is a key part of a remarkable new book on friendship that I am reading--and loving.
    Fabulous Friendship Festival is the latest creation from author/artist/ creativity maven, SARK. This my friend Susan's twelfth book and, I believe, one of her most important and most person books. The subtitle says a lot, "Loving Wildly, Learning Deeply, Living Fully with Our Friends."
    Between the bright yellow covers you will discover eleven very full chapters on every area of friendship from self-friendship, to the joys, difficulties, pleasures and kinds of friendship. Created in her own unique hand-printed style, every page (more than 250 of them) is filled with color and packed with SARK's deligthful and inspiring art and illustrations.
    If you have not yet read your first SARK book, this is a great entry point to PLANET SARK (also the name of her hugely engaging website.)  While at Planet Sark check out the link to her recent TV interview here in the San Francsico Bay area (link in upper right corner of Planet SARK.) If you go to one of SARK's events you are in for far more than a standard issue book signing. Nothing with SARK is standard.   SARK will be traveling throughout the west in the coming days as this big hug of a book is launched. If you live in Colorado, Arizona, California, check out her the schedule of her book signing and interactive event tour. (When you go to a SARK event, tell her "McNair sent me." You'll get an extra giggle and smile.) We have been very close friends for more than a decade now. (You may see my name a "few" times here and there (and again over there) in this book. I show up a good bit: top of page 43, 89-91, middle of 254 . . . and few tiny print places, "hanging out in the "blue drapes" of the Friendship tent. You'll see.
     This a rich, full, remarkable work. SARK covers so many bases here you will be delighted. There is even a big section of questions to ask your friends, games to play with friends, and even...READ IT, you'll see.
    Get a small fist-full of colorful pens to scribble and doodle your thoughts in your copy of the "FFF" book as you listen to SARK speak. (Buy a copy before the event starts!) Know too, that all of her events fill up quickly, even though they are free. Check with the bookstore nearest you (see tour schedule) for tickets or reservations.
    Fabulous Friendship Festival is a book to read cover-to-cover right away and then keep it bedside for a nightly (or morningly) boost as often as you need encouragement. Keep those colorful pens at hand to doodle and inscribe your thoughts as you read.
     I really DO want you to get FFF and read it. Don't just think oh that's McNair's friend, he doing her a favor. Not so. My list of books for our creative soul (at left) are written mostly by people I have never met. They are great books. If you read one-a-month for the next year, you'd have a terrific and transformative year.
     For now, go see SARK. Start a Fabulous Friendship Festival in your community of friends. Beware: it's contagious!
    Meanwhile, get thee to thy local 24 hour coffee shop and be a friend to the staff--all of them.

McNair

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Comments

[Marney]

McNair ~ Have had a wonderful time strolling through your blog just now. Great tribute to B.C., and the invitation to not act our age (heaven forbid!), and so much other golded, gilded stuff. All feels sweeter now. Thanks for being a friend to my day.

[Colette]

Bonjour!
How nice to find you.
It's true about how you present yourself....so often, when I get into an elevator, there will be a person already in it with such a ferociously unfriendly look that I recoil. So I make sure that if I'm the first person in said elevator I keep my expression pleasant. Mirrors, you know.

Cheers, Colette