Meet her by developing your social circles
If you're looking to grow and improve your dating life, it's important to know that online dating or meeting someone in a bar isn't the only option. You can go about meeting someone by developing your social circles. This is often one of the most powerful things you can do to come across high-quality dates. I want to give you eight tips on how you can grow and develop your social circles.
If you left school or your last job in or during the pandemic, (that was helpful) you might feel like your social circles have shrunk. Hopefully using these tips is going to help you to grow your social circles. You may think that a girlfriend will be all the social life you need, but the truth is a high quality girlfriend (who loves her BFFs) will expect you to have some friends of your own. Your own social circle also provides a great way to meet non-flakey days and moral support for when your dates don't work out.
Why social circles?
First of all, if you have a social network, you have support. When you have support and stuff going on, you become way less reliant on finding one relationship. You start to enjoy your life more.
Secondly, anyone you meet through your social circles is more likely to have things in common with you than someone you met at random. Dates that you get through your social circles will be less flaky. It is a lot harder to cancel last minute on somebody who's a friend of a friend.
So if you're not feeling aspects of your dating life right now, swapping your focus to developing your social circles could be a smart way to reengage with your dating life.
1. Piggyback on an existing community
My first hack for growing your social circles is to piggyback on an existing community. Some hobbies and interests have very strong communities that already exist around them.
Whether that's bouldering, social dance or tech music, there are some things that people do where there will be lots of informal meet ups around them.
That level of social connection will go beyond and outside a meeting or a class. There'll be an active community of people who are socialising and hanging out outside of it. A well chosen hobby can populate your social circle quickly.
So if you want a quick shortcut to growing your social circles, think about what communities you can piggyback on. Which communities will help you to already plug into an existing network of people? People who know one another and who are organising a lot of different activities?
2. Become a member of a club
My second hack is to join something that has a membership, whether it's a cool member's club or a rowing club.
Anything that has a membership almost acts like a verification step. So if you pass that verification step, the people who have already been verified, who are part of that group, are going to be more open and more receptive to speaking to you.
3. Befriend a social butterfly
My third hack is for you to ask yourself, can you think of anybody in your existing network who's a bit of a social butterfly? Maybe it was somebody you knew back in college? An old work colleague, who you know is extroverted, social, always arranging to do things?
These are great people, especially for the introverts of the world out there, to connect with. You may find hard to fill your diary with social commitments and to organise lots of different friends that you're meeting. But some people love doing that. And if you can form a good friendship with one of those people and show you're someone who turns up, who adds value, who's cool to hang out with, then that can be a great way to supercharge your social network.
4. Say yes!
My fourth hack related to this is you've got to be kind of a yes person.
If you get an invite somewhere, particularly when you're starting to develop your social circles say yes. You may get slightly less sleep, and be grumpy at work the next day. But if it fits in with your higher goal of developing social circles, get into the habit of saying yes. Don't worry too much if the activity isn't 100% aligned with what you normally do.
Embrace the fact that you're doing new things, and you're having the opportunity to cross paths with loads of different new people.
5. Create your tribe
My fifth hack is if those of you who are more introverted. If you consider yourself a cool loner or someone who has been struggling to find their tribe, the best workaround for this is to start your tribe.
If there's something you're passionate about that you can spend time giving towards, you will have a magnetic pull of like-minded people towards you. This approach does take some time. You might want to run a successful social media account, get a book published, or you want to start running a successful Meetup group, or you want to cultivate a cool social media account. This isn't something that you're going to be able to transform overnight. In the long run, if you're consistent and work at it could be a great platform for you to attract people towards you.
6. Follow a plan
My sixth hack is to always have a cool plan you're following. A lot of people go week to week being spontaneous. They make up their plans as they go. And they wait to see if someone makes them a good offer of something to do. If you can be the person who has a plan, you will automatically have a lot of momentum in social interactions.
So say you're at that member's bar or you're at the golf club, and you start talking to some people. If you mentioned that you're doing something cool that weekend, it will give you a great reason to suggest exchanging contact details. It will make people gravitate towards you because you're the kind of person who's always got something cool and interesting going on. Whatever your plan is, if you can speak about it with enthusiasm and it's something different to what people would do normally, they will show interest.
Quite often when you're interacting with people, you'll see their ears perk up, and they'll want to be invited because your plan sounds better than the unformed plan that they have for their weekend.
7. Keep up the momentum
My seventh hack is if you do swap contact details with the person, drop them a message that day. Be responsive on text, and then also suggest meeting up within a week have met them.
Otherwise, what will happen is people will forget about how great it was interacting with you. And you'll drift into being followers on each other's social media accounts for a few months until someone unfollows.
If you want to turn those contact details into people that you are hanging out with. Catch up with them soon after you've seen them.
This is about you understanding that in your social life, just like your dating life, you need momentum to help you go out there and meet people.
8. Adjust your lifestyle
So what's my final hack for reinvigorating your social life? It's looking at the habits that are currently holding you back from being able to have a fuller richer and more enjoyable social life. Is it that you've overcommitted to an existing project? Are you pulling in some long hours? Are you dedicated to going to the gym five nights a week?
As great as it is to be committed to something, if developing your social and dating life is one of your goals, something is going to have to give. Perhaps instead of going to the gym, you can go to a group fitness class or somewhere where there's an ability to meet people. If it's your work, you need to get more consistent about going to bed early during the week. This way by the time the weekend comes around, you'll have the energy to get up off the sofa and keep your commitments.
Finaly, look at how your existing lifestyle is holding you back from going after what you want and start to prioritise your social life.
