If you want to meet new people outside of your existing social circle, you aren't alone. While it's great to spend time with friends and family, many people find themselves in a perpetual routine consisting of work, gym, happy hour, groceries, and movies. This can be a problem if you are looking to make new friends, start dating, or increase your social circle.
A popular option for meeting members of the opposite sex is to go out to bars and clubs at night. The biggest issue here is that such environments can be loud, dark, and are only suitable for those attracted to drinking, smoking and late nights.
There's a much better way to meet people. And this, ironically, is when you are focused on your life, not other people. Meeting people, instead of being the end in itself, becomes a natural consequence of whatever you are doing as you work on improving your life. When you focus on growing and becoming a more interesting person, you naturally meet people who are attracted to your determination and admire your ever-expanding horizons.
It's also much easier to meet other like-minded people when you are working on yourself because you are having fun, relaxed, and are at home in your surroundings. Here are the three best ways to meet people:
1. Develop Your Interests
Do you have a hobby that you can't stop thinking about night and day? Maybe it's that golf swing you're trying to master, or that fancy dance move you work on in the elevator when nobody is watching. Perhaps you just love cooking and your shelves are filled with recipes that family oooh and ahhh over.
Whatever your passions are, commit to developing your skills and hobbies further. Push yourself to be as good as you can, out of the hobbyist/amateur status into professional amateur, where you are good enough to teach others. Join a meetup group to share tips and techniques with each other. Go to dance parties or practices in your city. Try out as many golf courses and driving ranges as you can.
If possible, try to spend at least 10 hours on your interests each week. Take as many group and private lessons as you can on your passions. Read every book and article you can get your hands on. You will make remarkable progress, and naturally make friends and meet lots of people when you interact with others that you see over and over again.
2. Do Something You Care About
If you don't have a hobby, you certainly have convictions and beliefs. What do you care about? Perhaps you cherish water as a natural resource, and want to educate the public on good water habits. Or, you want to save the earth, and recycle everything you can find. Maybe you are fascinated with how blood donations work.
Whatever it is you care about, get involved. Join others in your community to organize events and activities together. Volunteer at your local blood drives. Visit your schools and libraries with your group and show pictures, books and videos of the importance of recycling or saving water.
Read your newspapers or community boards regularly for possible venues to go to. Spend as much time as you can helping others while serving a greater purpose. You will feel good about yourself and the impact you are making, and meet many others who respect and admire your service in the process.
3. Work In Public Places
Work can be one of the best ways to meet people, especially if you are constantly meeting new and different people at various public places. Think about it. If you spend 8 hours a day working at new and different people out and about, you could easily meet 10-20 new people a day, or 50-100 people a week. That's a LOT of people. It isn't a stretch to meet 2,000-5,000 new people a YEAR, as I have done for many years.
It's said that a celebrity meets more people in a year than an average person meets in their entire lifetime. This can be very hard to imagine until you experience this for yourself. The more people you meet, the more likely it is that you'll meet people who share your interests, or others who are romantically attracted to you.
There's a great variety of jobs and public places where you could meet people. Some are less preferred, some are more desirable. The ideal job is one that allows you to meet people in a flexible way, without restricting you to work at the same place from day to day. Remember, your job should leverage your skills and talents so that your work is a natural expression of who you are. Otherwise you are getting a job just for meeting people, which isn't the best use of your time, as we've discussed. The internet is a great place to start looking for such jobs.
You may notice that the key to meeting people with ease boils down to doing what you love. When you do what you love, you feel good about yourself. When you feel good about yourself, you won't take anything too seriously, and other people will feel comfortable around you. When others are comfortable being with you, any potential friendships or romance will have a healthy foundation to bloom from.
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