A person's social circle is one of the main factors that shapes a person's attitude to the world. I do not claim that this factor is decisive, but its importance is extremely great.
How does social circle affect our personality? First, a person adopts the people around him, their beliefs and attitude to life. Secondly, a person's social circle is always associated with some activity that forms a person's habits and other behavioral factors.
Each team has a measure of what is good and what is bad. What is worthy of imitation and what is despicable. A person who wants to fit into the team, is forced to accept these settings. Accordingly, over time, he begins to be guided by these attitudes at other times, when he is not in the team.
How does the group's belief-making process work?
Suppose that some excellent student moves with his parents to another city and goes there to a new school. It is natural for anyone to want to join a strong group of leaders. It may happen that in the new school leaders are losers and bullies.
If before he was one of leaders, then certainly him wanted be leader and in a new group. The student is faced with the question of what to do next: either join a group of leaders-bullies, or openly challenge them, or take a lower step in the adolescent hierarchy(visible alternatives).
So, let's say he decided to be friends with bullies for some reason of his own. What could he face? First of all with the discrepancy between his beliefs and the beliefs of the group. For example, the belief “You need to study well” versus “only nerds study Well.” This discrepancy will always raise a bunch of questions to him from other members of the group. Most likely, over time, he will be forced to give in to this pressure.
Of course, it can happen in another way. He may impose his beliefs on other members of the group, but that is unlikely. What cannot be is the status quo. The options are few: either change, or change, or be rejected by the group.
Such a choice is typical when joining almost any group. Moreover, the more cohesive the group, the more stringent requirements it has for its members.
In addition to beliefs, there is also the activity of the group. A group cannot exist without doing something. For example, friends-hooligans will have the appropriate social activity, in which our student simply can not participate, because it is social activity that makes us part of the team. As a result, sooner or later a person fully assimilates other people's habits and attitudes.
This effect is well known to the organizers of sects, who are trying to recruit by any means to pull a person out of the usual society. For example, it may be some three-day lecture somewhere in the country, or some “summer intensive” somewhere in the other end of the country. As a result, a person leaves with only one belief, and three days later comes back a little changed. Over time, a person is convinced that he must refuse to communicate with loved ones to monopolize the channel of influence on his psyche.
Resist this extremely difficult. Even people who deliberately infiltrate the sect to get information about it, eventually begin to doubt themselves and they have sympathy for the ideals of the sect.
A friend of mine once went to the “summer intensive”, which was held by a very famous sect. He went there because of his wife, who is already well hooked on the hook. He wanted to control everything and protect her from the evil cultists. Two weeks later he was a “believer”himself.
The truth is that the circle of communication affects all people without exception, regardless of their original attitude to the group. It's like rust that can't be stopped if a piece of iron is placed in a wet environment. As would steel not was hard, against rust she has no protection.
How to choose a social circle?
People intuitively understand that the circle of communication is very influenced by them. And it would be nice to choose it somehow. However, in life it is not always possible. Why? The fact that the circle of human communication is formed under the following conditions:
The medium of communication
Communication skills
Services provided by participants to each other
Let's look at them in detail.
The medium of communication
Usually, we communicate with those with whom we have brought circumstances. At school age classmates and neighbors, then classmates, then colleagues and family. Do we usually choose our social circle? Yes, probably, but in a very narrow framework.
No matter how much we talk about eternal friendship, the truth is that we are friends with those around us. If we intersect with a person's business and interests, then we are friends, and if not, then gradually friendship comes to naught. People begin to meet less and less, until the meetings do not stop at all.
Why is the circle of communication chosen randomly? The fact is that any communication is tied to some purpose. If a person does not have a goal, then we do not choose in our circle, but us.
Here's the point. If a person has no purpose, for example, to engage in parachuting, it is very unlikely that he will have friends-skydivers. It can be, but only if the person crosses with them accidentally for some other interests. If a person is not interested in business, then he is unlikely to have friends-businessmen. Again, only by accident if they overlap on other interests.
Hence the conclusion that it is necessary to choose not so much a circle of communication, how many activities. And the more extensive the human activity, the wider and more diverse his circle of communication.
Communication skills
However, in order to find new friends, it is not enough to engage in certain activities. You also need to have communication skills. In fact, it's just a series of techniques that a person needs to learn.
These skills include the skill to get acquainted, the ability to speak “one language", the ability not to impose and much more.
In fact, this knowledge of unspoken rules, knowledge of the algorithm by which it is customary to communicate.
Amenities
People who are part of the team, constantly provide each other services. Help in something, advise, organize and so on. If communication skills are a kind of business card that tells the group that you are "your", then services are something more serious. That's what makes a relationship.
For example, each of us has a bunch of friends with whom we can exchange a few words, but we do not feel them close. Why? Because we have no business or services in common with them.
Thus, if we want to choose a circle of communication, we need to do three things: choose the appropriate activity, then skillfully communicate and participate in the provision of services. When a person gets into the right circle of communication, he begins to adopt personal qualities that are characteristic of the team in which the person is.