Stop Being the Only One Who Calls Your Mates #693

Are you always the one reaching out to your mates? Always the one organising the catch-up, making the call, keeping the friendship alive?

In this episode, I break down why male friendships quietly fade as we get older, why it's not about your mates not caring, and the exact system to build relationships that actually last, even with a packed career, a family, and a busy life.

You'll learn:
- Why men become lonelier as they get older (and what the data says)
- How to stop being the only one who initiates contact
- The "relational bank account" — why daily deposits matter more than big gestures
- How to fix the "no time to catch up" excuse for good
- Why surface-level friendships stay surface-level (and how to go deeper)
- The exact question that takes a friendship from small talk to real connection
- How to build a cadence for your mateships, just like you would in business

I also share my own experience of being "that guy" who always reaches out first, what I do to hold the standard in my own friendships, and why removing the mask is the fastest way to build mates who stick around for life.

Start this Free Life Performance Scorecard (under 4 minutes) → https://scorecard.lachlanstuart.com.au/

Transcript

Why Mateship Gets Harder With Age

Lachlan Stuart 0:00

Build relationships that actually matter without starting from scratch or sacrificing things that you've already created. This is such a common thing. And I know that there are many of you out there who go, man, I'm always the one making the effort to check in with my mates. There's no time to catch up, or it never goes deep. I'm sick of superficial relationships. If you're like me, the older you get, the more you want to have real connection, you want to have meaningful experiences, and you want to have mates who genuinely make the effort to check in on you as well. So it's this reciprocal thing. In this video, I'm going to run you through why they are common things, how you can overcome them, and how you can create those meaningful friendships. Because what I'm worried about, if I'm being completely honest, is that as men get older, myself included, we're going to end up lonely. The data already points to that. But we have the opportunity, if we want to take control and develop these skills and do what I'm about to share, to build meaningful relationships that stand the test of time. Because think about it like this, just quickly. If you've got five mates, right? Five good mates, and as you get older, you know, men die, we die. Attrition, that sounds very gloomy, but that's true. You might move away, you might grow apart, things happen in life that separate friend groups. And let's say you go from three to two and you're one of the last men standing. What happens when that mate disappears? You'll have no one around you. And connection is one of the most important things in life, especially when you're a successful business owner. You need to be able to have mates to create experiences with, right? You've got the fucking money. Go do fun stuff. You've want to have people that you can lean on and that you can talk to as well. And you just want to feel valued and cared for. So this is what we're going to dive

When You Always Initiate Contact

Lachlan Stuart 1:44

into. Now, the first thing we need to address is why are you always the one who makes the effort reaching out? Well, what we actually want is we want mates who check in on us as well to pick up the phone and get a phone call from your buddy who goes, Hey Lockie, been been a minute, like how you going? I just wanted to see what's going on. Tell me about life for you. How's the family? How's your running going? How's business? Talk to me. I love it when I have some mates pick up the phone and do that. But quite often I find myself being the guy who is reaching out to my buddies. You know, I've got them saved in my favorites list, as I'm sure you do. And I try to call them every one to two weeks for that exact reason because I look at it as daily deposits, right? There's going to be times where you need to withdraw. Something will go wrong, and you maybe need to pull some money out of the bank, so so to speak, some relational money out of the bank. And if you aren't depositing in it, you might not have that there when you need it. And how do we flip that on its head, right? How do we make sure that your mates checking in on you? Some simple things of this is create a cadence around how frequently you want to check in with your mates. As I said, mine on the favorites. So whenever I open my phone, pretty much, the favorites are there. And I try to call them whenever I can. And if I go, hey, hold up, I'm checking in every one to two weeks, but it's been a minute since Johnny's called me. I start going to myself, well, is that going to annoy me? And if it is, you might build resentment, or maybe you feel like you're the only one holding up the friendship. But the truth is, as us blokes, we know that life just gets busy and sometimes we have our head in the sand, or sometimes we're putting out fires or dealing with other things that we just forget. Life gets so busy and what may turn into three months may only feel like a freaking week. But this is where we have to hold the standard within our mateships. So if it's important to you to be checking in and you're doing your cadence, you're hitting your every one to two weeks, and it's been a while since your buddy's checked in, you might just say to them, hey, well, we got a fire alarm going on right now. Oh, we're good. So, sorry guys, this is the benefit of doing it outside. I wanted to do a potty outside or a YouTube outside just because I was sick of sitting in my office. But with our mates, you could definitely just say to them, hey Johnny, mate, you know how much I value our friendship. And I love checking in and I love hearing how your family is going, the things that you're working on, the adventures that you're creating. But I just wanted to flag something that I've noticed over the last couple of months, I've been the one initiating all the contact. Are you busy or is there anything going on in your life that I can help with, or is there any reason why maybe you haven't, you know, made some contact for me? Start thinking about the language of it, but raise it because I know it's happened to me before and it wasn't intentional. It was just that I hadn't been made aware of it and I was like, okay, well, that makes sense. But then if we go, okay, well, we've got cadence for step one. Step two is the conversation. So if you need to have the conversation, the final point is reminder. So if you're on the other side of the fence where a mate calls you out because your frequency of checking in isn't there, or maybe feels like you don't value the relationship, just set a reminder on your phone. You can put it in the reminder app on an iPhone and just say, hey, set it for every two weeks or every month. Check in on Johnny. Give Johnny a call. If you don't do that, but if you start doing that frequently enough, you're just gonna do it anyway. I always get on the phone while I'm driving and just check in with my buddies and before I put on music or before I put on a podcast. So that is what I would do. If you want your friends to check in on you, you've got to make sure firstly you're doing the same because you can't uh ask for what you don't give. But if you are, then just have to have the conversation because to me, it is setting and holding a standard of what mateship means to you and how it works. So think about the frequency or the cadence, how often you're doing it, if you need to have a conversation to bring it, you know, bring the conversation up and set that standard, do it. But then finally set some reminders. Like once you've gone, oh yeah, maybe I do need to check in more. Don't rely on yourself in the beginning. I treat myself like an idiot because work's busy, life's busy, parenting's busy. I want my phone to tell me, then I'll call my buddies. Got that? If you have any questions, let me know. Comment below if you have any different insights. But I do believe that that's a really important thing to build great relationships without starting from scratch and making them

Cadence Standards And Phone Reminders

Lachlan Stuart 6:11

meaningful. The second

No Time To Catch Up Fix It

Lachlan Stuart 6:12

one, no bloody time to catch up. How often does that happen? You say to your mates, oh, let's do something. It's like, oh mate, I've got this work event on or school sports or whatever it is. There's just always a reason why there's no time to catch up. But that's bullshit because all of us know that when you're hanging out with your buddies and you create new experiences, like it gives you so much energy and it gives you new things to talk about and you start to understand your mates on a different level. Because speaking to a buddy on a phone is very different to going on a fishing trip with your mates, right? Me and my buddies are going up to Midge Point in July, August, whatever it is, for a fishing trip. And I know we're gonna have a lot more fucking great memories, but a lot better conversation when we're up there because we're out of our normal environment, we're a bit more relaxed, and you know, you're face to face, so catching up is much better. So the idea there is like all of us want new memories, and that whole thing of no time to catch up needs to be pushed. So, what do we do there? Like, how do we start changing that? The first thing is you just got to make time, so schedule it. The first thing, open your phone now, unless you're listening to me or watching me on the phone, keep watching, get your piece of paper and just schedule some dates. For me personally, I have a 12-month calendar in my office and I use different stickers for different things from work events to holidays to speaking gigs, etc. But the green stickers are personal time. And I put it in at the start of the year. How many weekends away do I want to have? How many long weekends, how many holidays? And I don't always necessarily plan that, but I know that I've allocated a certain amount of time to live life, right? Not just be so focused on business and everything else that happens day to day. And I think that's a really important thing from a friendship standpoint. You then want to go, okay, well, what's the cadence? Once again, if you build systems in your business that have made you successful there, do the same thing with your friendships and your relationships. But you think about the cadence. I might do a catch-up with my mates every quarter, like a good catch-up, or it might be every biannually or annually, whatever it is for you. But the key is to schedule it, right? When you put it in there, the time is done. The next thing is lock in what it is. What are the things that you want to experience? So I've got a fishing trip with my buddies then, and then in November, I've got I'm going up to Townsville to the world PBR bull riding, world champs, or finale or whatever it is with some other mates. So we've locked that one in and I've made time for the fishing trip. So we've got two trips locked in. And the key is once you've locked one in and you're finishing another one, book the next one because it's so much easier to keep the momentum than to create the momentum. So that is what I would do there if you want to get over the hump or the speed bump of saying we don't have enough time. Sometimes you need to do full big experiences, and I call a bucket list where it costs a little bit of money and you remove yourself from your normal day-to-day environment. But then if your mates live around the corner, you might do what we call mini bucket lists, cost little to no money, and not too much time where you might go for coffee, you might go for a training session together, whatever it may be. So consider those two things there. Does it need to be a big trip for the boys or you know, something a little bit a little bit easier? So that will help you overcome that fucking ridiculous excuse of no time to catch up. Now

How To Go Beyond Small Talk

Lachlan Stuart 9:26

the third one, it never goes deep. You're catching up with the same people, it's always superficial chat, talking about the footy, brushing over the challenges of life, but you're sitting there knowing that you're dealing with some shit and you want to talk to your buddies about it, but it never gets there. Don't know if you're there or not, but I've been there a lot of the time. It's easy to talk about work problems, but what about life problems? Who are you beyond the business? So the goal there, the milestone that we all want is our friends who really know you, not the mask, not the, you know, we want to know the man behind the mask. So some things to do there, and it almost brings back to the different memories. When you go away and get out of the environment, you're a lot more likely to have different conversations because you break routine, you have this pattern interrupt. The second thing is doing hard things together. I can tell you, I've met people for the first time when they've come to do something hard with me. And I learn more about them and they share more with me, and vice versa, than they've probably shared to any of their mates in their life. Because for whatever reason, when we're hurting, when we're in the hurt locker, we talk about every other problem. It seems easy in comparison to what we're doing. And so, if you want a friend to really know you, you've got to allow them to know you, which means you've got to remove the mask. So, who are you behind that? And that's where we start looking at once again, you need to start working on yourself. That's self-development, can be helpful, but you've got to lead through vulnerability. Be the bloke to say, Hey Johnny, I'm gonna keep using Johnny's made-up name. Johnny might say, Hey, Lockie, how are you going? And I can turn to Johnny and I could say the normal, yeah, I'm going well, mate, work's going well, yep. Or I could go, it's an interesting question. I'm I'm glad you asked me. This is going well, you know, work's going well, but at home I'm really struggling. I've just had a new kid and it's changed the dynamics of my life up. My training schedules out, my my relationship with my wife looks a little bit different. And I'm just trying to navigate that. So if you have any tips, I know you've been through a similar thing. If you've got any tips for me, I'd love to hear that. And we actually use that question to deliver a constructive response or open it up for a constructive bit of feedback or or just allow them to understand what we're going through because it will change the whole dynamic. But then your mates will really start to know you. They'll go, Lockie wears his heart on his sleeve and he tells me what's going on, it makes me feel comfortable, and it's created this environment where I can now share the things with him. And that's where you get those mateships that stand the test of the time, right? Because we can all shoot the shit, we can all talk about footy, we can all have a beer together. But do you know what your mates are going through on the most challenging of times? Because if you've gone to war, and obviously not literally, but if you've shared some moments together where your mate's been at rock bottom and you've walked side by side with him, he's gonna be in your corner for the rest of your life, and vice versa. You've got mates who want to do that, and that's where it literally has to start at this whole thing. We have mates that check in with us, that's important. We want to have the memory so we're creating new experiences, but we also want our mates to know us. That's gonna help you build real quality relationships, friends that you can lean on for the test of time. And you know, I think a great thing just going back to point two is when you're doing these new catch-ups or adventures, occasionally bring some new mates, say, Hey, invite a mate along who I haven't met before. It'd be cool to continue meeting like-minded people and see who else you're hanging out with in your life because I think you're a great person. You would only have and surround yourself with good people. So that's what I would recommend there. Now,

Invite New People And Close

Lachlan Stuart 12:54

if you got value from that, you know what to do. Drop some comments, share your insights, hit subscribe. That's all I'm asking for from this video. And nothing else. If you're also here, you know, I've been working with men for over a decade. Literally, that blows my mind. It's really starting to make me feel old. But the cool thing is, is I've worked with men who have been at rock bottom, and as I've gotten older and really started to understand my life and what I've wanted, I'm now working with men who are more successful in their career, but wanting to really amplify their marriage, their adventures, and their time with their buddies. Because as a business owner, and when you're married, you know how much your marriage and investing in your family and your business can take away from you. You don't want to let the best years of your life be totally consumed by that. So make sure you hit subscribe, drop in a weekly video. I look forward to chatting to you guys soon. Cheers.