Bringing Out the Best in Your Friends

A Lesson From Seneca and Shrek

“Regard a friend as loyal, and you will make him loyal.”

Seneca

Seneca

Everyone wants loyal friends. Loyalty is a form of deep trust. It means that you trust someone to work in your best interests, even when you’re not around. It is a hard thing, to trust people. Surely, we’ve all been burned by misplaced trust in the past, and those experiences can send us retreating into our shells for protection. This is a defence mechanism, but, unfortunately, it isn’t a particularly healthy response.

If we were to never have the courage to make a new friend after previously being burned, then human connection would cease to exist. In fact, if you think really hard, you may find that you’ve previously acted as a “bad friend”.

People Are Not Stagnant

What is interesting is that we often view others as stagnant. When we see an angry person, we think that they are simply an angry person (not that they are a person currently angry). We see them as they are now, and fail to have a wider perspective on their entire being.

Even if they are what we may call an “angry person”, perhaps they haven’t always been. Perhaps they were the kindest kid you could have met. And even more so, perhaps they will not be an angry person forever.

Bringing Out the Best in Each Other