The introvert's guide to making friends
- Elle Beecher Hogan
- Jun 16
- 6 min read
Every article about making friends gives you the same advice.
Put yourself out there. Go to more events. Say yes to the party. Strike up a conversation with a stranger.
And if you're an introvert, you read that and feel your soul quietly leave your body.
Because you have tried that. You went to the mixer. You stood near the cheese plate making conversation about parking and the weather and what everybody does for work, and you came home wrung out like a dishrag, having connected with precisely no one, swearing "never again."
So you've drawn the obvious conclusion: maybe you're just bad at this.
Maybe friendship is for other people. The easy talkers, the room-workers, the ones who light up in a crowd while you quietly count the exits.
Let me offer a different theory: you're not bad at making friends. You've just been told to make them in the worst possible way for how you're built.
Here's the truth, up front:
Making friends as an introvert isn't hard because you're antisocial. It's hard because the standard venues (loud parties, networking mixers, marathon small talk) are designed for a temperament that isn't yours.
You're not bad at connection. You're bad at performing, and most social formats are mostly performance. The fix isn't to force yourself to "put yourself out there" more.
It's to find the rare format that fits how you actually connect: small, low-key, one real conversation at a time, with an easy way out.
Introverts don't need more events. They need the right one.
Let me explain.
You're not antisocial. You're anti-small-talk.
There's a distinction that changes everything, and almost nobody names it.
Introversion isn't shyness, and it isn't social anxiety. It's a preference for lower-key settings, for depth over breadth, for one good conversation over a room full of half ones.
Susan Cain spent a whole book (Quiet) making this case: somewhere between a third and a half of us are wired this way, and the world mostly forgot to build for us.
The party, the open-plan office, the networking night? Those are extrovert formats.
They reward the people who get energized by a crowd, and quietly punish the people who get drained by one.
Which means your problem was never a lack of social skill. It's that you were handed extrovert tools and told the failure was yours.
And here's the part most people miss: introverts often want deep friendship more than anyone. You're not avoiding connection. You're avoiding the shallow, performed, exhausting version of it. Holding out, sometimes without even knowing it, for the real thing.
The people who think they're "bad with strangers" are usually the best.
After hosting hundreds of weekly walks around the world, here's a pattern we watch play out every single week:
The person who shows up insisting they're "not good at talking to strangers" turns out to be one of the best conversationalists on the trail.
Because when they say "I'm bad at this," what they actually mean is: I'm bad at small talk. I'm bad at performing. I'm bad at conversations that are designed to go nowhere.
Give that same person a real question, five miles, and absolutely nowhere they need to be... and they're unstoppable.
The thing they'd been calling a flaw was a format mismatch the entire time.
It's not a connection problem. It's an environment problem.
You don't need to become more extroverted.
You don't need to fake an energy that isn't yours, or grind through one more happy hour praying this one feels different.
You need a different environment: one built for depth instead of volume, for substance instead of mingling.
Get the format right, and the introvert who "isn't good at this" becomes the person having the best conversation in the room.
(By the way, this isn't a "you" thing. It's the same reason adult friendship gets hard for everyone.)
What actually works for introverts
Stop going to more events. Go to the right one, again and again. Your move was never quantity. One good format you return to every week will out-friend 50 mixers you white-knuckle through once.
Choose side-by-side over face-to-face. This is the introvert cheat code. Sitting across a table staring at each other puts you on a stage. Doing something next to someone (like walking, cooking, building, volunteering) takes the spotlight off and lets the talk come easy. People genuinely report their bodies unclenching when they're moving side by side instead of locked in eye contact.
Pick formats with built-in structure. Half the dread of socializing is the blank page: having to generate the conversation out of thin air. Find settings that hand you a topic or a task, so you never have to manufacture small talk from nothing. (We're so sure of this that we make everyone bring a question at our weekly walks. The blank page disappears.)
Demand an easy exit. You'll be ten times braver in any conversation if you know you can leave it gracefully. Choose places where wandering off is normal, not rude. Knowing you can go is exactly what lets you stay and go deep.
Lead with depth. It's your superpower, not your liability. Skip "how was your weekend?" Ask the question you actually want the answer to. You were never good at the shallow end, so stop swimming there. (Here are fifty questions that skip straight past small talk.)
Let repetition do what charisma can't. Same place, same people, a few times over. By the third or fourth visit, there's no performing left to do. You're just a regular among regulars. Familiar is an introvert's best friend.
And recharge afterward, guilt-free. Needing quiet after connecting isn't a sign it went badly. It's just how your battery works. Refuel, and come back.
You don't need the liquid courage.
One of our walkers told us she'd always believed she couldn't really connect with people without a drink in her hand to take the edge off.
Socializing sober, in daylight, felt impossible.
Then she found the walk. It's on Saturday at 8 AM here in Austin, Texas. Completely sober. Fully awake. And to her surprise, the connections weren't harder without the alcohol... they were realer.
No bar noise to shout over. No buzz to mistake for closeness. Just people, walking, actually talking. She said she finally felt energized by socializing instead of drained by it. Connected, and more like her true self.
That's what the right format does for an introvert.
It doesn't ask you to become someone louder.
It just removes everything that was making it hard, and lets the version of you that's always been good at real conversation finally show up.
Wait, what's a walk?
If you've never heard of us:
The Board Walks is a free, 5-mile walk every Saturday morning in cities all over. No phones, no pitching, no agenda — just a long walk and a real conversation with people who showed up for the same reason you did.
It might be the most introvert-friendly way to make friends ever designed.
You walk side by side instead of facing off across a table. Everyone brings a topic, so there's no small talk to manufacture. You float freely between conversations, so you're never trapped. It's quiet, sober, early, and completely free of mixer energy. No working the room. No performing. Just depth, on foot.
It started with eight people in Austin in 2022.
It's now more than 20,000 across over 16 cities... a startling number of whom showed up convinced they were "bad at this," and found out they'd simply never been handed the right format.
The Board Walks in Austin, Texas. Established in July 2022 by Elle Beecher Hogan.
Come make friends the introvert way
Bring one real question and a decent pair of shoes.
No mingling required. Walk slow, talk real, float when you need to, and come back next week. That's the whole thing.
Find your city and RSVP for this Saturday → here
If you're looking for something even more intimate, there's a quieter door inside this one called The Board. You'll find it when the time is right.
See you on the trail.
Elle Beecher Hogan is the founder of The Board Walks — a free, phone-free, 5-mile Saturday morning walk happening in 16+ cities around the world. Her mission is to make real connection a weekly habit again.
