How to Be a Better Friend: Tap Into Emotional Data

This Valentine's Day, although romantic relationships get most of the attention, I thought I'd shine the spotlight on another important type of relationship: Friendship.

Do you ever feel like a bad friend?

Perhaps you've acted flaky by canceling plans too often. Or maybe you're jealous of your bestie's success, or you feel annoyed because your friend is so obsessed and distracted by their phone that you can hardly stand to be around them. We've all been there, and luckily, there is a constructive way to strengthen these friendships that are teetering on the edge of breakup.

Deep down, you want to keep the friendship, but your negative emotions get in the way.

Radical emotional acceptance (REA) offers tools to help strengthen friendships. With REA, we can gather emotional data, learn from emotional wisdom, and act in an emotionally informed way so that our friendships remain strong. Here's how to do it.

Gather emotional data.

"Emotional data" is the pure sensory information that our emotional antennas pick up. Analyzing our emotional data allows us to accept the reality of the current situation with our relationships and make the best decisions guided by our emotional wisdom.

Emotions or concerns can be understood like colors—neither good nor bad. As sure as bright blue greets us when we open our eyes on a sunny day, while we live, breathe, dream, and have relationships, emotions will happen. We have no more say in perceiving sadness than we do in seeing a red rose as yellow.

Learn from emotional wisdom.

You have a wealth of ever-changing emotional data, and so does your friend. If we can find a way to utilize it, we can make better, emotionally woke decisions.

REA asks us to name our emotions and their intensity. Then when we analyze our emotional data, we learn from it in order to make an emotionally informed decision about what to do (or not do) next. Finding out your friend's emotional data will be your superpower to better understand how to communicate with them.

Act in an emotionally informed way.

Does the scenario below feel familiar?

"Do you want to grab a drink after work?" Sarah asked her work BFF, Riley, as she walked by her desk.

Riley shrugged her shoulders glumly. "Yeah, I guess." She seemed distant.

"Cool, I'll see you at six," Sarah said, widening her eyes. Walking back to her desk, she thought, "What the f was that?"

In this example, both of the friends walked away with a ton of questions, assumptions, and concerns raging in their heads. Everything from "What the hell is wrong with her?" to "Does anybody care about me?" to "Did I do something wrong?"

We often erroneously believe that making someone aware of our feelings means getting into long explanations, asking for help, or becoming a burden. In reality, we become burdensome to our friends when we withhold emotional data from them.

Without giving an explanation, we can make our friends aware of our emotions in just a few seconds. With a bit of practice, we can even get better at finding out theirs.

What if Sarah did this instead?

"Do you want to grab a drink after work? I've been kind of lonely," Sarah said.

"You know, I've been feeling down, too," Riley replied. "I'd like that. Thanks for letting me know I'm not the only one who gets disconnected."

Sharing our top emotions with others can connect us deeply in less than 10 seconds.

To strengthen your friendships, make your friends aware of your emotions and find out theirs. You will be coming from a place of deep connection and empathy.