What is True Friendship

True Friendship - Recognition

How can we find true friendship in this often phony, temporary world? Friendship involves recognition or familiarity with another's personality. Friends often share likes and dislikes, interests, pursuits, and passion. How can we recognize potential friendship? Signs include a mutual desire for companionship and perhaps a common bond of some kind. Beyond that, genuine friendship involves a shared sense of caring and concern, a desire to see one another grow and develop, and a hope for each other to succeed in all aspects of life. True friendship involves action: doing something for someone else while expecting nothing in return; sharing thoughts and feelings without fear of judgment or negative criticism.

True Friendship - Relationship, Trust, Accountability

True friendship involves relationship. Those mutual attributes we mentioned above become the foundation in which recognition transpires into relationship. Many people say, "Oh, he's a good friend of mine," yet they never take time to spend time with that "good friend." Friendship takes time: time to get to know each other, time to build shared memories, time to invest in each other's growth. Trust is essential to true friendship. We all need someone with whom we can share our lives, thoughts, feelings, and frustrations. We need to be able to share our deepest secrets with someone, without worrying that those secrets will end up on the Internet the next day! Failing to be trustworthy with those intimate secrets can destroy a friendship in a hurry. Faithfulness and loyalty are key to true friendship. Without them, we often feel betrayed, left out, and lonely. In true friendship, there is no backbiting, no negative thoughts, no turning away. True friendship requires certain accountability factors. Real friends encourage one another and forgive one another where there has been an offense. Genuine friendship supports during times of struggle. Friends are dependable. In true friendship, unconditional love develops. We love our friends no matter what and we always want the best for our friends.

Ways to Enhance Your Creativity

We're born creative. However, this characteristic becomes buried as we get older. Our logical left brain usually takes the driver's seat. Here are ways to help you unearth your creative self.

1. Surprise Your Mind.
List laughable, ridiculous, outrageous and bizarre ideas. Don't limit yourself to ideas that other people consider "sane," "reasonable" or "logical." The best and most creative ideas stem from silly ones. When you're in a creative mode, you're suspending judgment on ideas you generate. You simply list them all down and never worry whether they make sense or not. Allow yourself the freedom to think outside the box.

2. Aim for Quantity.
Generate loads of ideas for you to go through later. It's normal that your first few ideas wont really be fresh. The gems will come out later so its important to keep going. With a large list of ideas, you'll have more to choose from, adapt or combine. Creativity is not coming up with something new from nothing; creativity is the ability to create something novel from ideas/things that already exist by combining, improving or refining them.

3. Be Playful.
A relaxed and playful attitude fosters creativity. Those creative juices flow best when you're not restrained by your logical, left brain. Toy with ideas and forget about being too careful. Be a child again and play.

4. Believe that Everything has a Solution.
An optimistic outlook always leads to solutions, no matter how impossible a problem or task may be. Often when a solution can't be found, all that's needed is for the problem to be redefined. Or when you think you're stumped, surprise your mind with silly solutions then work backwards, leading to the original problem. Cultivate an attitude of continuing search for solutions.

5. Let Go of Your Fear of Failure.
Don't expect to do something perfectly for the first time. Fear of failure is one of the major factors that can hinder your creativity.
Instead of looking at failed attempts negatively, look at your failures as learning opportunities. Failing isn't fun, but neither is doing nothing.