Find Your People: Building Deep Community in a Lonely World by Jennie Allen Page B

you go first, ask the other person or people what feels hard in life right now.
Resist the temptation to solve. In a conversational manner, consistently repeat to your friend what you hear her saying. But do not interrupt. Wait until there is a clear pause before you repeat back what you’re hearing, offer your perspective, or ask another question. To build deep friendships will require a lot of intentional, active listening. If you have a perspective to offer, ask for permission to share it.
Affirm your friend following your conversation, and express how much the back-and-forth meant to you.
Plan a follow-up gathering.
    One other piece of advice for practicing transparency: tell people exactly what you need from them. Most people are not accustomed to these conversations, but don’t let their first reaction cause you to withdraw. If you want them to listen, thenask them to listen. If you want them to help you solve the problem, then ask them to help you solve the problem. Tell people how to show up for you. And let them express how you can show up for them.
    Throwing Open the Doors
     
    After that conversation with my friend Jessica, who told me during the podcast interview that to be a better friend I needed to need her more, I realized I’d had enough. I was sick of being careful. Censored. Safe. I knew that I wanted to change. I was a relational toddler in this area who wanted to grow and mature. The question was how.
    What worked for toddlers was going to have to work for me: stumble and fall and stumble and fall and get back up again. This was year one in Dallas, and the two people I spent the most time with were my sister-in-law Ashley and my call-me-midcry, stop-by-rather-than-text friend Lindsey. They unknowingly became my relationship trainers. I studied the kinds of questions they asked, the kinds of liberties they took, the way they shared everything they were going through and processing without so much as batting an eye.
    I realize how awkward it all sounds. Maybe I should have titled this book How to Win Friends by Being Awkward. But I am letting you into my internal crazy because I don’t think I’m the only person who has recognized herself as stunted relationally to some extent. Granted, you and I may be stunted in different ways. Maybe your battle is that you are too needy, exhaustingly so, and don’t know how to give. Or maybe youare too careless with the stories of others, using someone else’s struggle to try to make yourself look better. Or maybe you wall off because you don’t want to deal with the pressure of having others need you.
    Or maybe your friend group that used to be a safe place for transparency has become just a space to grumble and complain with no healthy goal or end. In the next chapter we’ll talk about this in a deeper way, but let me say now that thoughtless transparency isn’t the goal, lest we make an idol out of our struggle and sin. No, we live known so that we can change and grow together. There is a purpose to the candor, and that purpose is for our good.
    So, really, what’s right to share?
    Before a lunch with some new friends I sat down with my journal and my phone; I reviewed the previous week’s obligations, activities, and events; and I scribbled down on a sticky note a few things I could vulnerably open up about. (I know. I am such a dork. But I was trying!) These were intimate things, honest things I’d be prepared to share.
    We got to the restaurant and ordered, and then came that fifteen-minute lull when normal, relationally high-functioning people speak candidly about what’s going on in their lives—not their Instagram lives, but their real lives. This is where I generally stick to asking questions—sparkly eyes, shoulders curled forward, attentive, the whole bit—but today, I was committed to engaging in a different way.
    Now, I admit that as I divulged what I’d prepared to share, the handful of things that weren’t exactly going well thatweek, I