Wednesday, January 22, 2020

Interview With An Expert Author on Friendship



New Book  Shows The Importance Of Friendships  & How To Make Friends –    Leading To A Better Job,  Life & Community!

                                    The Friendship Key to Lasting Peace, United Communities,Strong Relationships, Equality, and a Better Job by [Sedhoff, Winfried]
Does the path to having a better job, stronger relationships, and even world peace come down to one thing that we each have control of ?  The answer according to Dr. Winfried Sedhoff’s new book, The Friendship Key, is yes. We simply  need to have more friends, deeper friendships, and to embrace our communities.

“Friendship empowers us to achieve meaning and purpose in our lives, and by connecting with others we can ultimately change the world around us,” says Dr. Sedhoff, who for the past two decades has given therapeutic advice to the patients he has treated as a family physician and therapist in Australia.

“We all yearn for a deeply satisfying life filled with meaning, purpose, joy, and inner peace,” he says.  “Unfortunately, many no longer prioritize and value friendships and the role they can play in our lives.”

From bullying and poverty to environmental destruction and terrorism, Dr. Sedhoff firmly believes the cure is that we all need more and better friends.  He also knows the world can be complex and brutal and change won’t happen overnight.  But it has to begin somewhere, some day.  His book serves as a blueprint for how to make more friends, defines what it means to be a good friend, and shows how to engage others so that the role of human connection is elevated beyond social media interactions or cursory and fleeting moments.

“Friendship, seen and used in a different way, even without much effort, can positively empower us and help us fix more problems in our lives and the world than we might have imagined,” says the author.

His book, recently featured in the UK Daily Mail, is being promoted by the public relations firm that I work for. Here’s an interesting interview with him:


  1. Dr. Sedhoff, what inspired you to write The Friendship Key? I was completely wrong about friendship. I had no idea what it was about let alone its power, influence, around the world. Then I suffered depression. By using principles I discovered to get out of it I began to see friendship in a new way. Curious, I examined the role of friendship in history. I was shocked to learn a persistent decline in friendship has played – and continues to play – a massive role in horrible human and environmental atrocities. We just keep making the same tragic, unnecessary, mistakes over and over again – we have done for over five and a half thousand years. What if we could finally break that destructive cycle? I thought that worth sharing.

  1. Why do you believe your book is the key for people to developing stronger relationships, equality, and even a better job? At the core of every deep, stable, and satisfying relationship is a close friendship. This book outlines how to make that close friendship real and keep it close.  Friendship, by its nature, promotes equality. For example, at the core of friendship is be respected and valued - treated as a worthwhile equal. When friendship is our priority, as opposed to personal greed, gross inequality becomes near impossible.  Friendship also fosters more, higher quality, stable, jobs by promoting prosperous economies, internationally competitive businesses, and better treatment of all working staff in a more satisfying work environment. It also makes us more employable – more likely to get that promotion.  

  1. Why do we seem like a disconnected society even though we are connected to so many people online? There is a difference between being connected online and connecting physically. A good illustration of this is that loneliness levels among the 18 to 25-year-old age group remains high in spite of them being more technologically connected than any generation before them.  An added contributor to our social disconnect is many of us are more obsessed with getting ahead than creating wholesome personal friendships – we are all too busy. I met a father of a young family recently working over 90 hours per week just so they could afford another house to rent for the extra income. Connecting online cannot fill the hole our disconnection leaves behind, only real people, meeting in friendship can do that.

  1. How can we do a better job of making friends? The first step: make friendship our priority. Friendships only happen if we put in the time and effort. With so many of us focusing on other priorities the personal level of connection needed to be good friends gets neglected, or worse, ignored.   Secondly, we can look to everyone as a potential friend – as opposed to a potential enemy. Search for difference in each other and we see potential enemies. Look for commonality and we find lots of potential, and real, friends. Once we find our friend, we work to keep them satisfied as our friend by continuing to meet the 10 friendship desires – to fulfil the essence of friendship we all search for in everyone. 

  1. You break down our human needs or desires into 10 parts.  Tell us what some of them are and how they play a role in our friendships. Three examples of the 10 desires include our desires to feel respected, valued, and heard.  No matter who we are we all seek respect, to be treated as an equal, not ordered around as someone’s servant or slave, but as a compatriot of equal social standing.  We also seek to be valued, to know we are important and worthwhile, to have others make the time to be with us and be on time.  And we all want to tell our story and know that others get where we are coming from, to emotionally connect with our experience of life – to really listen.  Wouldn’t you call someone a friend if they truly valued, respected and listened to you?

  1. Has society underestimated the role of friendship in our lives? Completely. We barely know what friendship is anymore, let alone what it is capable of. How many of us barely give friendship a second thought, as I once did; nice if you have it but not that important? There was a time in history when we needed friends to survive. Now we rely more on wealth and influence instead; friendship barely gets a look in. The result, we have neglected its essential, positive, qualities. We have forgotten, or failed to see, that friendship fills a deep hole inside our hearts, it unites us, promotes respect, caring, goodwill, tolerance, and compassion - it changes how we treat ourselves, each other, and the world.

  1. Is our disconnected world tearing us apart socially and personally? Most definitely. A competitive world where we are encouraged to go it alone – to make our own fortune to survive – promotes the fear others will take what we have worked so hard for. This disconnect and inherent lack of trust encourages us to treat each other as a potential threat – an enemy as opposed to a friend. Soon we have a whole society filled with potential or real enemies, scared, frustrated, angry, worried for their safety and fighting for a better life – tearing itself apart. Amid the turmoil we begin to believe there must be something wrong with me for others not to care and want to know me – we doubt and begin to dislike ourselves. As society fractures so do we.

  1. What role could friendship play in improving worker satisfaction, productivity, communication, and innovation? It can improve them all.  To work in a business that promotes the 10 components of friendship is to work among colleagues who value, respect, care for, support, and listen to us. It is to be treated as a feeling human being rather than a slave, robot, or someone’s property to use and exploit. Friendship applied to business, by its nature, improves communication and worker satisfaction.  A friendship-friendly business also ensures we all reap the rewards in an appreciative environment helping motivate us to increase productivity. Friendship in business also promotes flatter hierarchies – greater connection between staff on every level. This allows for a freer sharing of ideas leading to increased flexibility and innovation, continuing to make the business more competitive and successful.

  1. How can one acquire more friends? First, we have to want them.  If friendship isn’t important to us others will pick up on it and not want to waste their time with us either – friendship must be our priority from the start.  Then we need to start looking for places to find good friends, such as by finding groups of people we have something in common with, like at work, in our church, book club, gym, hiking or cycling group. Better still through friends we already share.  To help entice others to want to be and remain our friend we simply work on meeting their 10 desires of friendship – regularly.

About The Author
In his early 20s, Dr. Winfried Sedhoff suffered from depression.  Over a 12-month internal quest he discovered not only answers to his crisis but uncovered a sense of genuine self.  More than 25 years later, having continuously refined his approaches via his work as a family physician specializing in mental health, he shares his insights with patients, colleagues., medical trainees, and the general public via his books, A Balance of Self, A New Approach to Self -Understanding, Lasting Happiness and Self-Truth (Vivid, 2011), The Fall and Rise of Women, How Women Can Change the World (Ingram, 2016), and now The Friendship Key to Lasting Peace, United Communities, Stronger Relationships, Equality, and a Better Job! (Senraan Publishing).  He was recently featured in the UK Daily Mail (https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3803406/Brisbane-doctor-believes-men-women-shoud-not-close-friends.html). Winfried lives in Brisbane, Australia.  For more information, please consult:  www.winfriedsedhoff.com. 


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Brian Feinblum’s insightful views, provocative opinions, and interesting ideas expressed in this terrific blog are his alone and not that of his employer or anyone else. You can – and should -- follow him on Twitter @theprexpert and email him at brianfeinblum@gmail.com. He feels much more important when discussed in the third-person. This is copyrighted by BookMarketingBuzzBlog ©2020. Born and raised in Brooklyn, he now resides in Westchester. His writings are often featured in The Writer and IBPA’s Independent.  This was named one of the best book marketing blogs by Book Baby http://blog.bookbaby.com/2013/09/the-best-book-marketing-blogs and recognized by Feedspot in 2018 as one of the top book marketing blogs. Also named by WinningWriters.com as a "best resource.” He recently hosted a panel on book publicity for Book Expo America.

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