Making Friends - Step Three

Okay, so now you're walking around, smiling and greeting everyone you know by name. Right? So do you have a bunch of new friends now?

Well, probably not friends, but if you've been smiling and calling people by name others will see you as someone likeable.

But, these are only the first steps. These are called icebreakers, ways to break the barriers that people put between themselves and people they don't know.

Icebreakers are easy, because they don't cost you much. Smiling at someone and calling them by name doesn't make them your friend, but it will leave them with a good impression of you. The next steps are harder, because they will require that you give something of yourself with no guarantee that you'll get anything in return.

Before someone will be your friend, they have to know that you are want to know them better. You have to have a real interest in other people.

Most kids your age have a favorite conversation topic: themselves. Kids love to talk about themselves and the things they've been doing. This results in a lot of conversations which really aren't. Instead, they are a bunch of people waiting for one person to stop talking about her/himself so that another person can start talking about her/himself.

Typical conversation between 3 kids who want to share their spring break experiences:

Kid 1: "I went to Disneyland!"

Kid 2: "I went to Costa Rica!"

Kid 3: "I played a lot of baseball."

Kid 1: "After Disneyland, we went to Magic Mountain!"

Kid 2: "It rained every day, but it was still warm."

Kid 3: "I hit two home runs. "

See? Three people, three separate topics

Now here's how a conversation between two kids who are taking an interest in each other sounds:

Kid 1: "What did you do over spring break?"

Kid 2: "I went to Disneyland."

Kid 1: Oh, that sounds like fun!

Kid 2: "It was. One day we were there from from the time it opened to the time it closed. What did you do?"

Kid 1: "I went to Washington, D.C."

Kid 2: "Wow, that's cool. What was it like?"

In the second conversation, each kid is asking questions or making comments which encourage the other to talk more. When each is finished they give the other a chance to speak.

A good way to make new friends is to encourage others to talk about themselves and show genuine interest in what they're talking about.

Kid 1 (smiling): Hi _______ (remember to use the other's name), I heard you talking about your track meet. When is it?

Kid 2: "It's on Saturday."

Kid 1: "How many events are you in?"

Kid 2: "Four. I'm in the 100, the 400, the long jump and the 4x100 relay."

Kid 1: "Wow! You must be fast!"

Kid 2: "I hope so, but I'm not sure because this is our first meet."

Kid 1: "Don't worry, I'll bet you'll do well."

Kid 2: "Wanna come watch?"

By showing an interest in another person, kid 1 turned a casual conversation into an invitation. This could be the start of a friendship.

Step three: Take a genuine interest in other people.

Making Friends - Step Two

Now, obviously, just walking around with a smile on your face isn't going to make you a lot of friends by itself. After all, there are lots of different smiles. There's the cheesy, posing for a picture smile, the secretive I know something you don't smile and the sheepish I just got caught doing something I shouldn't smile, just to name a few.

The kind of smile I'm talking about is a warm, open, inviting smile. Such a smile will make you seem open and approachable.

Okay, so how do you go about making friends with a particular person?

A few years ago, when I was the varsity basketball coach at a local high school, I noticed that a player from the freshman team was especially hard working and enthusiastic. I found out that her name was Brianna. The next time I saw her, I said: "Hi Brianna, nice game last week."

A few days later, I was approached by her mom. She told me that Brianna had been floating on air all week because "the varsity coach knows my name!"

This year, I noticed that one of my new third grade students was always standing at the back of the class and never said anything to anyone. She didn't smile much either and didn't seem very happy. So, I started to say greet her every morning and every time I saw her in the hallway.

"Hi Maddy," is all I'd say.

Now, Maddy runs out to greet me every morning in P.E. and again at lunch.

Addressing a person you don't know is a simple way of breaking the natural barrier people put up between themselves and strangers. By addressing a stranger by name, you are telling them that you're interested in getting to know them.

So, the easiest way to show another person that you're interested in them is to greet them by name.

Step two: Address people by name (and smile when you do it).

Making Friends - Step One

“I know that Lucy Higgins loves me 'cause she hit me with her lunch pail when I kicked her on the knee.”
From the song Go Tell Roger

Ever wonder why some people seem to have lots of friends while others have few? How some people can get along with anyone while others always seem to be left out? How you just like some people even though they aren’t really close?

I recently had a meeting with a parent who was concerned about her child’s lack of friends. As we talked, I thought about what I’d seen of her child on the playground and realized why s/he didn’t have any friends. It’s because this kid doesn’t know how to make them.

Making friends takes skills. Social skills. Social skills that can be learned, but, unlike math skills or science skills, must come from the heart, not the head.

Making friends can be, for some, a puzzling topic. Many books have been written on the subject. One, “How to Talk to Girls” was written by a 9 year old boy.


Another, “How to Win Friends and Influence People” has been in print for over 70 years.


I once was required to read “How to Win Friends and Influence People” for a job I had. It has a lot of good stuff in it, but none of it is magic. Rather, it provides a lot of common sense advice on how to make and keep friends. Anyone can learn and practice the skills in the book. The book was written for adults in business, but as I think about it and thumb through it now, I realize that kids can really use the advice written in it. Practice the principles in the book and you will, indeed, win friends.

So how does one go about making friends? I'll be posting a series of posts on the subject. This is the first.

The first thing one should do when trying to make friends is to be, well, friendly and approachable. The easiest way to do that is to smile.

I can remember the first time I met, when she was in 3rd grade, a girl who is now in 5th. She never said much because she hung out with her 5th grade sister. But she always had this dazzling smile on her face. This made her seem approachable. I know that her smile made me want to get to know her.

When I was in elementary school, my brother had more friends than me. That's because while I was trying to be "cool", my brother had a smile for everyone. In fact, his nickname was "Smiley".

So, step one: Smile!

"The shortest distance between two people is a smile." ~Author Unknown

"The world is like a mirror, you see? Smile, and your friends smile back." –Japanese Zen saying

The Curious Case of Sidd Finch

He's a pitcher, part yogi and part recluse. Impressively liberated from our opulent life-style, Sidd's deciding about yoga -- and his future in baseball

By George Plimpton

The secret cannot be kept much longer. Questions are being asked, and sooner rather than later the New York Mets management will have to produce a statement. It may have started unraveling in St. Petersburg, Fla. two weeks ago, on March 14, to be exact, when Mel Stottlemyre, the Met pitching coach, walked over to the 40-odd Met players doing their morning calisthenics at the Payson Field Complex not far from the Gulf of Mexico, a solitary figure among the pulsation of jumping jacks, and motioned three Mets to step out of the exercise. The three, all good prospects, were John Christensen, a 24-year-old outfielder; Dave Cochrane, a spare but muscular switch-hitting third baseman; and Lenny Dykstra, a swift centerfielder who may be the Mets' lead-off man of the future.

Ordering the three to collect their bats and batting helmets, Stottlemyre led the players to the north end of the complex where a large canvas enclosure had been constructed two weeks before. The rumor was that some irrigation machinery was being installed in an underground pit.

Standing outside the enclosure, Stottlemyre explained what he wanted. "First of all," the coach said, "the club's got kind of a delicate situation here, and it would help if you kept reasonably quiet about it. O.K.?" The three nodded. Stottlemyre said, "We've got a young pitcher we're looking at. We want to see what he'll do with a batter standing in the box. We'll do this alphabetically. John, go on in there, stand at the plate and give the pitcher a target. That's all you have to do."

"Do you want me to take a cut?" Christensen asked.

Stottlemyre produced a dry chuckle. "You can do anything you want."

Christensen pulled aside a canvas flap and found himself inside a rectangular area about 90 feet long and 30 feet wide, open to the sky, with a home plate set in the ground just in front of him, and down at the far end a pitcher's mound, with a small group of Met front-office personnel standing behind it, facing home plate. Christensen recognized Nelson Doubleday, the owner of the Mets, and Frank Cashen, wearing a long-billed fishing cap. He had never seen Doubleday at the training facility before.

Christensen bats righthanded. As he stepped around the plate he nodded to Ronn Reynolds, the stocky reserve catcher who has been with the Met organization since 1980. Reynolds whispered up to him from his crouch, "Kid, you won't believe what you're about to see."

A second flap down by the pitcher's end was drawn open, and a tall, gawky player walked in and stepped up onto the pitcher's mound. He was wearing a small, black fielder's glove on his left hand and was holding a baseball in his right. Christensen had never seen him before. He had blue eyes, Christensen remembers, and a pale, youthful face, with facial muscles that were motionless, like a mask. "You notice it," Christensen explained later, "when a pitcher's jaw isn't working on a chaw or a piece of gum." Then to Christensen's astonishment he saw that the pitcher, pawing at the dirt of the mound to get it smoothed out properly and to his liking, was wearing a heavy hiking boot on his right foot.

Christensen has since been persuaded to describe that first confrontation:

"I'm standing in there to give this guy a target, just waving the bat once or twice out over the plate. He starts his windup. He sways way back, like Juan Marichal, this hiking boot comes clomping over -- I thought maybe he was wearing it for balance or something -- and he suddenly rears upright like a catapult. The ball is launched from an arm completely straight up and stiff. Before you can blink, the ball is in the catcher's mitt. You hear it crack, and then there's this little bleat from Reynolds."

Christensen said the motion reminded him of the extraordinary contortions that he remembered of Goofy's pitching in one of Walt Disney's cartoon classics.

"I never dreamed a baseball could be thrown that fast. The wrist must have a lot to do with it, and all that leverage. You can hardly see the blur of it as it goes by. As for hitting the thing, frankly, I just don't think it's humanly possible. You could send a blind man up there, and maybe he'd do better hitting at the sound of the thing."

Christensen's opinion was echoed by both Cochrane and Dykstra, who followed him into the enclosure. When each had done his stint, he emerged startled and awestruck.

Especially Dykstra. Offering a comparison for SI, he reported that out of curiosity he had once turned up the dials that control the motors of the pitching machine to maximum velocity, thus producing a pitch that went approximately 106 miles per hour. "What I looked at in there," he said, motioning toward the enclosure, "was whistling by another third as fast, I swear."

The phenomenon the three young batters faced, and about whom only Reynolds, Stottlemyre and a few members of the Mets' front office know, is a 28-year-old, somewhat eccentric mystic named Hayden (Sidd) Finch. He may well change the course of baseball history. On St. Patrick's Day, to make sure they were not all victims of a crazy hallucination, the Mets brought in a radar gun to measure the speed of Finch's fastball. The model used was a JUGS Supergun II. It looks like a black space gun with a big snout, weighs about five pounds and is usually pointed at the pitcher from behind the catcher. A glass plate in the back of the gun shows the pitch's velocity -- accurate, so the manufacturer claims, to within plus or minus 1 mph. The figure at the top of the gauge is 200 mph. The fastest projectile ever measured by the JUGS (which is named after the oldtimer's descriptive -- the "jug-handled" curveball) was a Roscoe Tanner serve that registered 153 mph. The highest number that the JUGS had ever turned for a baseball was 103 mph, which it did, curiously, twice on one day, July 11, at the 1978 All-Star game when both Goose Gossage and Nolan Ryan threw the ball at that speed. On March 17, the gun was handled by Stottlemyre. He heard the pop of the ball in Reynolds's mitt and the little squeak of pain from the catcher. Then the astonishing figure 168 appeared on the glass plate. Stottlemyre remembers whistling in amazement, and then he heard Reynolds say, "Don't tell me, Mel, I don't want to know. . . "

This article was originally published in 1985. To figure out what this is really about, write down the first letter or each word in the subtitle. It is one of the most famous pranks of all time...