Strong Friendships Not Love

Your colleagues are human beings. They have hearts and feelings. They need friends, just like you and me. We all need friends. So, building respectful friendships is not something forbidden at work. It is something that we need to keep strengthening, and how to win friends is what we have to learn. It does not have to be that fast and to take place in the first week of the training. It takes time. Dale Carnegie wrote a wonderful book on this. It is entitled How to Win Friends and Influence People, and I would recommend every trainee to read it.

“Walking with a friend in the dark is better than walking alone in the light. ”Do you remember this famous sentence by Helen Keller? It summarizes the entire chapter. You are actually in a dark period, and by “dark” I mean that you lack information and work tips. Every piece of information is a bulb. The more bulbs you collect, the better you can see the universe.

Since a big sum of information comes from people, it is good to have strong friendships with colleagues, especially the more knowledgeable ones. They are your lights, so are the information you will be learning from them.

The articles in this website will help you stand on solid ground, so that you adopt the habit of learning through asking questions and having people coming to you to give you the most valuable information you need in the training and in the rest of your professional life.

You need to be as knowledge-thirsty as you can. We understand that you might be “spontaneous” at your home with your family. You might act the way you have been accepted among your family members, but this does not give anybody the right to be spontaneous in a more ‘serious’ environment like the workplace.

Some people act violently and stop talking to others, whenever someone criticizes them. This might be accepted by a tender mother and a nice father. Yet, this looks childish at work. You will never build friendships acting this way, whenever a fight happens.

If you look around you, you will find that friends are the ones who are usually with you. They are the people who accept you the way you are, because you accept them the way they are and get used to one another. The question I would like to ask you here is: how long has it taken you to arrive at that level of friendship with them? Did not it take years? During the training period, you do not have to force the process of creating friendships to develop and try to reach that desired level in the first week. You will be considered “pushy”.

Sometimes we work with very friendly colleagues. Other times we work with ones who are just against friendship at work. They act rudely sometimes and seem to be impolite. As long as they respect the reason they are there, which is WORK, there is no single room of criticizing them. To put it differently, if people are friendly enough to make the distance shorter, take advantage and continue strengthening friendship. Otherwise, you need to respect their choice.

Sometimes people find the lady/man they have been dreaming of at work. This can make them act romantically towards them. They start bringing gifts, and sometimes expensive ones. They even go beyond that to leave love notes on their desks. The degree of politeness exceeds the norms, when they are talking to those people.

They really try to get their interest in a very pushy manner. A lot of people are in love with others who work with them. It works a lot of times, but when the person is a new trainee looking for love at work, things exceed his capacity and become beyond control. As a life coach, I would like to ask new trainees to focus on work only.

Emotional relationships are not always a source of happiness. When love is being looked for at work during the first weeks or months of the training, the whole concept of ‘job’ might be shaken in the soul of the trainee, especially if he is young. If this relationship does not work, or there is a betrayal from with someone else working in the same place, etc.