This post is all about why it’s important to diversify your friendships and how to go about making these diverse friendships.

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Have a think about your friend group. What kinds of friends do you surround yourself with? Are they quite similar to you, or are you all quite different?

Don’t be ashamed if your friends are all quite similar to you, it’s understandable. There’s a comfort and a familiarity in making friends that are similar to you. These friendships can help reinforce shared opinions, interests and even personality traits.

However, having a lot of similar friends can have it’s draw backs. Rather than go through all the negatives of having similar friends, we’re going to focus on why you should diversify your friendships. This is because it’s important to have a mix of friends- some that are similar to you and some that aren’t. In doing this, you get to experience the full benefits from having a range of friends.

Read below to find out how diversifying your friendships can benefit you and learn five ways in which you can diversify your friendships!

Why Is It Important to Diversify Your Friendships?

1. They Offer Broader Perspectives

Friends from diverse backgrounds bring different perspectives and worldviews. Each person carries with them a unique wisdom built from their personal life experiences. When you have friends from different backgrounds, cultures, religions and lifestyles you are able to access a greater wealth of knowledge and advice that you can use to guide you. These friends might be able to share stories and personal insights and provide strategies that can help you cope with changes or challenges that you may be facing. Additionally, each person might look at your problem from a slightly different angle to you and may therefore be able to offer solutions you may not have ever been able to think of. This diversity of thought can lead to more creative and effective problem-solving.

In it’s essence, this range of perspectives within a diverse group of friends becomes a well-rounded toolkit that you can harness. This friendship toolkit can help you enrich your understanding of your experiences and enhance your problem-solving abilities in a way that a singular viewpoint might not achieve.

2. You Get Continuous Opportunities for Learning and Education

If you’re open to it, you can learn so much from your friends- especially if you have friends from different backgrounds or countries. They can teach you all about their culture, customs, religions, histories and traditions that you may otherwise not encountered. Plus if they are equally willing to learn and explore,  you might get the chance to teach them things about your life and culture in return.

You can also learn to see the world through their eyes. If you’re open minded and willing enough, you can even have debates about controversial topics and try understand each other’s view points. This is a fantastic way to have your thoughts, values and opinions challenged (which either strengthen your view point or offers you an alternative way of thinking that you might not have be exposed to before). It also helps you learn to navigate different opinions. More specifically, it helps you learn how to respectfully listen to and acknowledge another person’s opinion with an open mind and without judgement.

They can enhance your Global Understanding

When there are worldwide events (like a pandemic) or events happening overseas, having friends in different parts of of the globe can help you stay connected and gain a worldwide viewpoint of what is going on. They can give you insights to events from their perspective and help you understand the effect that global issues have on their part of the world. This can give you a broader understanding of what is going on across the globe and allow you to see how being in different countries and environments can lead to very different experiences and outcomes.

They Can Help Build Your Cultural Awareness

Interacting with friends from different cultures helps you become more culturally aware and sensitive. When you learn about traditions, customs, traditional celebrations and religion from a friend, it makes your interaction with that culture much more intimate and meaningful. Your experience with that culture become that much more impactful and you gain a deeper motivation to understand that culture because it gives you a better understanding of your friend.

Once you’ve had this experience of getting to personally know and understand a culture, it can start to open your mind and build a curiosity for exploring other cultures. This can help you to develop a deeper appreciation for the diversity that exists in our multicultural world and it may give you a greater ability to navigate it.

3. They Can Open You up to New Opportunities

Being friends with a range of different people can really expand your horizons and potentially offer you a number of new opportunities. They might introduce you to passions and hobbies that you may not have heard of before or have been to nervous to try. They might also allow you to experience things that are out of your own ordinary. Having diverse friends invites experiences into your life that people with non diverse friend groups might not get to experience. This could be things like attending traditional ceremonies or celebrations unique to the culture of your friend or getting to travel to your friends country and truly get to experience what the country is like (rather than being a complete tourist).

Having a range of friends can also provide career and networking opportunities for you. Through their social networks you may be able to make new connections… and who knows where those might lead.

4. They Can Help You Achieve Personal Growth

Interacting with different people can push you out of your comfort zone, encouraging personal growth and development. Though having different friends, you may discover new interests, passions, hobbies, or aspects of yourself that you hadn’t explored before. This can help you explore different parts of yourself, challenge your thoughts about yourself and might help you grow for the better.

They can help you learn to celebrate differences

This exploration of differences between you and your friends allows you to become more comfortable embracing the differences that exist between people. Rather than fearing or rejecting differences between yourself and others, having diverse friendships can help you adopt a more positive and inclusive mindset. As you get to know more about you You can start to recognise these differences as strengths and understand how people that challenge you and make you consider things other than your norm can offer you the most potential growth. They can help you become more accepting and welcoming of others and may start to positively effect your behaviour.

They can help you increase your Empathy

Alongside being more inclusive, diverse friendships with people who have varied life experiences can help you develop empathy. This because it can expose you to the struggles and and the hardships that other people experience in their lives. If your friend chooses to be vulnerable with you and open up about struggles or adversity it can really deepen your connection and give you a chance to practice empathetic skills. It gives you the chance to try navigate more emotionally sensitive territories. This means you’ll need to harness empathetic skills like validating the other persons emotions, offering them the appropriate supports, listening to them without judgement and demonstrating an understanding of their perspective.

They can help you challenge your unconscious biases

Whether you like to admit it or not, you have unconscious biases. It’s okay, we all do. They’re a result of our upbringing and our experience of the world and it’s informs the way we make impressions about others. The problem with unconscious biases is that they can create prejudices – which are basically pre-judgements of people that are not based on actual interaction with those people. If left unchecked, your unconscious biases can be very harmful and add to the prejudices that exist in society.

However, if you start to make connections people from different backgrounds and cultures to your own, you can start to challenge the biases you hold. These friendships you create can help you break down any stereotypes and eliminate misconceptions you have about certain groups of people. This can really go a long way for improving how you feel about other people and may go so far as to change the way you act with people that are different to you.

5. Having Diverse Friendships Contributes to a Sense of Social Harmony

As humans we have a natural tendency to form groups – it’s been a evolutionary advantage for us. Once we have formed our groups, we develop preferences for interacting with and helping others within our groups rather than people outside of our group. The result of this is that we form an us vs them mentality – we start highlighting differences, ostracizing and isolating people that are different to us so that we feel more a part of our respective groups.

However, when we start to have more diverse friendships it helps you start to dismantle the us vs them tendencies that you’ve unconsciously developed and really start to challenge those unconscious biases we were talking about in our previous paragraph. In doing this, you contribute to building a greater sense of social harmony by helping to break down stereotypes and foster a sense of unity among people from different backgrounds.

Here Are 5 Ways You Can Diversify Your Friendships

1. Go Traveling

Traveling is a fantastic way to diversify your friendships! Going on overseas adventures puts you in completely new situations and exposes you to so many new things. You get to be exposed to different cultures, food, people, religions and different ways of life. Whether you are traveling with friends, or flying solo, traveling is the absolute perfect time to create new friendships and expand your social circle.

Here are some ways that you can encounter likeminded travelers from across the globe or make friends with the locals:

• Stay at a backpackers/hostel
• Go on a large organised tour like Contiki or Topdeck
• Join a small locally run tour or partake in a walking tour of the city you’re in
• Participate in activities run by locals (e.g. traditional cooking classes)
• Do a homestay experience
• Do a workaway
• Start a conversation with a local while you’re out and about (if you’re feeling brave)

2. Attend Cultural or Other Social Events

Cultural and social events tend to attract a wide range of different people, so they’re a perfect place to start to diversify your friendships. Plus the atmosphere around cultural events is generally more inclusive and welcoming of different people. Therefore, people attending these events may be more willing and open to forming new connections with you. This openness might make it easier for you to strike up a conversation with them and establish a connection.

Here are some different events that might help diversify your friendships:

• Cultural festivals/performances
• Art exhibitions
• Small scale music performances
• Parades
• Theatre shows
• Community events

3. Join an Online Community

A great way to form connections from all over the world is to join an online community. Joining an online forum or a social media group that’s relevant to your passions and interests can help you make connections with many different people who also share that interest. Having something in common from the get go can be a great way to break the ice and form a connection that could lead to a diverse online friendship. It’s time to let technology really connect you to the rest of the world. You could make friends with someone on the complete opposite side of the globe, living a completely different life to your own!

Note: If there isn’t a community that doesn’t fully capture your interests, why not make your own? Be brave, start a your own club, make your own socials and actively try create your own community- you never know where it might take you and who you might meet along the way.

4. Download a Friendship App

Another way to find new friends is to consider using friendship apps designed to connect people based on interests and personalities. Whether you’ve just moved to somewhere new, are currently travelling, or simply just want to find a new BFF, these apps can be a great way to go about it.

friendship apps that can help you diversify your friendships:

• Meetup – It’s time to let your hobbies connect you to other people in your local area.
• Bumble for friends – Create your friendship profile and start swiping until you find your ultimate BFF match.
• Hey! VINA – This app is all about enabling women to create an empowering female community. Therefore, it’s the perfect platform to make your new girl bestie. Swipe your way through potential friends until you find your ultimate match. Then let Hey!VINA suggest the perfect meet up spot for the two of you.
• Friender – Another interest based way to find friends! Friender starts you off by doing a lil intro survey to get a sense of your interests. It’ll then use your answers to start suggesting people to you that share those interests.

5. Capitalise on Your Workplace Connections

Work can be a fantastic way to start broadening your connections. For most of us, we are stuck at work for a significant part of our days, which means we actually spend a lot of time with the people in our workplaces. It’s time to start engaging in those work connections and turn them into outside of work friendships. If you’re in a place that has a lot of staff, like a hospital or a large law firm as an example, you’ve got plenty of choice. It’s just a matter of having the courage to go up to a colleague that you might not interact with often and putting in some effort to start building a connection.

If you’re in a smaller workplace don’t fret, you can still diversify your friend groups by build relationships with people from different departments or teams. Or alternatively go to work place events and social activities -if your company offers these things. Once you start to create these connections your social network has the potential to start expanding rapidly- especially once you both start introducing each other to your respective friend groups.

Final Note

Remember to be proactive, be open minded and reflect often. Take the initiative to invite people to socialize. Organize gatherings or outings to bring together friends with different interests. Also be sure to understand that sometimes your friends opinions, perspectives and ideas might challenge you. So might the way they choose to live your life. Be open minded towards learning more about why they do what they do and understand where they are coming from. You don’t have to agree with them, but be willing to listen with a curious and open mind.

If you’re looking for other tips that’ll help you on your quest to diversify your friendships, check out this post about attracting friends.