Are you a person who can be counted on? Is your answer, yes, no or sometimes? It’s a really important quality to be reliable, to be able to be counted on. It means that if your friends are asked what kind of person you are, they’ll be able to say something positive. Write down a description of yourself. Here are some opposites you might wrestle with: honest or dishonest, responsible or irresponsible, supportive or selfish, reliable or unreliable. I hope the first words describe you more than the second. You will always have many true friends if you say what you mean and honor your word. Can you always do that? No, of course not, but you should always strive to. It’s often easier to give a person the answer she wants to hear rather than being honest up front. For example, you might tell your teacher that you’ll come in for extra help after school, making her happy for the moment, and then you just don’t show up. Or, you may make a commitment to do something but then you decide you’ve gotten a better offer and you don’t bother living up to your word. The problem is that people start to think about you in a negative way, just because you didn’t do what you said you were going to do. It doesn’t take too long to shift people’s perceptions from the positives to the negatives: dishonest, irresponsible, selfish and unreliable. Then, you have to work really hard to win your friends back and to become a good friend to yourself again.