How to Win Friends & Influence People

“Keep away from those who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you believe that you too can become great.”

-Mark Twain

One of my good friends bought me this book for my birthday, and while I have yet to read it, I think it will provide me with some much needed tips on professional and personal interactions. Perhaps, it will be my next selection as I just finished Octavia Butler's Earthseed series. I read horoscopes for fun, but astrology may be on to something. Cancers are tough on the outside, and soft on the inside. Which is completely me. And by tough, I don't mean going around beating people up, or being verbally abrasive, but by having a guard up, and being willing to write people off for small things.

On the flip side of being a cancer, you are a nice person, so people will take advantage of that. That is something I have struggled with my whole life, both in my romantic relationships and in my friendships. At the ripe ol' age of 27, I have finally learned that you have to balance the soft and the hard parts of yourself. On New Year's Eve, I did some cleansing. I deleted people from my facebook account that I finally needed to let go. The deletion was not from a place of bitterness, or dislike, because who knows what will happen in the future? It was a recognition that the season for our interaction has ended.

The older you get, the smaller your circle. And at this stage in my life, I want surround myself with good energy, and with people who have my best interests at heart. I also realize that while I need to be more careful with who I let in, I also need have to be a good friend as well. My first agenda in being a good friend is forgiveness, and openness. Back in college, I had resentment toward a friend because I felt they weren't a good friend to me, and in honesty, we weren't that good of friends. I assumed we were because of how long we had known each other. So, after years of feeling like this person only wanted to be friends with me when she had no one else, I told her how I felt. Of course, it didn't go well, but I felt relieved because I had been honest. Later, when I thought about it, I was just as much to blame, because I recognized what was happening and didn't address my feelings at the time. Something similar happened with one of my closest friends this past year. I was upset at something that had occurred and rather than address it in the moment, I waited months to say how I felt. I was justified in feeling the way I did, but wrong for waiting so long. Friendship, like love, is a gift and it has to be cultivated and appreciated. This life is too short to spend time doing things, or being with people that you don't have to.