Hey friends, guess what, there’s a holiday coming up that is all about celebrating your friendships!

This year has highlighted the importance of friendships. We’ve had to navigate transitioning friendships to virtual this past year and learn new ways to feel a sense of connection. However, with vaccines gaining steam, and summer in full swing, it’s the perfect time to really look at your friendships and use this holiday as an excuse to brush the dust off.

One of the leading models of wellbeing in the positive psychology world is the PERMA model, by Martin Seligman. The PERMA model proposes five key areas for wellbeing: positive emotions, engagement, relationships, meaning and accomplishment. Relationships often amplify experiences through greater joy, a sense of belonging, pride and laughter. Both receiving love and support from others, and doing acts of kindness for others, contribute to a greater sense of well-being.

While we often center partners and familial relationships as primary relationships, this pandemic has highlighted the importance of friends outside the house-hold. We aren’t meant to get all of our support and relationship needs met by those in our families, and yet social distancing and care for others outside our houses has created obstacles to our normal ways of connecting across house-holds.

Throughout the past year, many of my clients have brought up friendships as a topic for coaching sessions. We explore questions like what is a good friend, how can I be a good friend in a pandemic, what’s the importance of my friends in my life, what does it mean when I can’t see my friends for the foreseeable future.

Honoring friendships might look different right now, and yet many of my clients have found that this has allowed them to reevaluate what kind of friend they want to be.

That brings us to this upcoming holiday – International Friendship Day, celebrated on July 30th. The holiday has roots throughout the 1900s in various attempts to mark the day, and was officially designated by the United Nations in April 2011.

How can we celebrate friendships? I invite you to consider what this could mean for you.

Long Distance Friendships

Gratitude letter

Write a letter to a friend describing how important they are to you. Consider mailing it. Here’s a longer description of the Gratitude Letter intervention.

Mail surprise gifts

Put together a box to mail to surprise a friend. A client of mine did this and mailed boxes to a few long distance friends, and she found that it was a great way to make them feel loved and celebrate their friendship from afar.

Hang photos of friends in your house

Visual cues are a great way to remind yourself of the important people in your life. When’s the last time you printed photos? Take a look around your house and consider if it’s time to freshen up your photos. Frame photos of your friendships and display them where you’ll see them often in your house.

Give them a call out of the blue

Skip the scheduling texts back and forth to find a good time to connect. Call them out of the blue! If they don’t answer, leave a voicemail saying hi and share how your day is going.

Message a fun memory

Text a friend a fun “remember when”. Reminisce and share a favorite or funny memory with a friend.

In-Person Friendships

Laughter

Enjoy laughter with your friends. Get silly. Find levity.

Form new memories (versus re-capping old ones)

It can be easy with older friends to spend a lot of time together reminiscing on past memories. That’s a powerful part of longer friendships! However, it can also turn into a crutch or a pattern your friendship falls into. You might consider which friendships need new energy, and how to form new memories together. Perhaps plan a new activity locally to explore together, or go somewhere you’ve both never been, to add to your friendships narrative.

Building New Friendships

Workout class

If you are new to an area or looking for new friends, workout classes are great places to meet new people.

Connect with people you see daily

Meet the people you run into daily at the coffee shop or grocery store. Take the time to learn their names, and enjoy saying hi each time you run into each other. Casual friendships and loose bonds count as friends too.

Tell someone you want to hang out or that you want to be friends

This is one of my favorite ways of making new friends. If I meet someone that I feel in my gut would be a good fit as a friend for me, I tell them! It’s as simple as “hey, let’s be friends!”

I just moved to Charleston and this International Friendship Day holiday is feeling particularly timely! The more people I connect with here the more it’s feeling like a true home.

Here’s to friendships near and far!