Stepping Out of My Comfort Zone: Embracing New Connections

Today was a different kind of experience. I decided to not stay home but go out and talk to people and, most importantly, work on my people skills. I have noticed that recently my introverted part of me has been clouding the side on which I am extroverted. I have been spending quite a lot of time in my private space and talking to a limited number of people, that is, my neighbours or the people I talk to at church. After that, it is the end.

I have not been much open of late to talk to people, make new friends, or relate as much to even people I already know. And then, an opportunity came by for a brief moment, and I thought, I am going to take it. I decided to do something out of my norm, and this time walk around talking to people and having nice conversations with them.

This was possible because of a church program. My church had an outreach, or more like a catch them young program which involved telling the freshmen who are just resuming to school about the church and inviting them to attend our service. I was aware of this activity at first, but I was not totally sure when they planned on doing it, nor did I even bother myself about it.

While I was busy trying to think of how I can solve the issue of water in my hostel as there has not been electricity for a while to pump water, and aside from that, there seems to be an issue my hostel is facing with the tank as the water we pump quickly finishes in less than a day after being pumped full.

In the midst of all these issues, thinking of how I can solve them, I saw a notification on WhatsApp, which I decided to check out. This notification led me to my church WhatsApp group, and that is how I saw the information about the outreach.

For a brief moment, I thought, should I go or should I not go? If I should go, then I would only have to take a few drops of water and use it magically to clean up to look fresh, or should I stay and think of possible solutions to all these issues I am facing? Then I thought, It had been a while since I have actually gone out to speak with people or to make friends, and this would be a great opportunity for me to. So I decided to go out for the outreach, as it benefits me in my people skills; you can all use my communication skills, and it also takes the whole issue of water out of my mind to worry about something that would excite me.

I found the whole outreach—talking to people and trying to convince them to come to our service—interesting. The only little difficult, more of like a challenge that I faced was trying to differentiate or determine who is fresher (freshmen) in the school from their faces before approaching and asking them if they were. It later got to the point that I didn't even want to care if they were a fresher or not; all I wanted was to have a nice chat with the person and also get to invite them to come around the church, ask for their numbers, and then save it for later.

The only issue now is that I have their numbers saved but knowing the kind of person I am to be, I doubt if I would be able to text any of them. It is not the first time I have gone for outreach, talked to people, and collected their numbers. But at the end, I don't end up sending a single message. What I do is just to drop the names and the numbers down with the church and leave the rest for them. Making new friends has not been something I am ready for. I like my chat to be straight to the point except I am in love with you or have had some sort of relationship in the past.

Anyways, I will see how to make it a little different this time. I will send a short message to each of them tonight before going to bed to greet them. We don't know what these new connections of people may lead to.