Having close connections is vital to our wellbeing and even linked to physical health. At the same time, there are many people who lack the skills required to build meaningful friendships. Watch Susan McPherson, author of The Lost Art of Connecting, for a discussion on how to build meaningful connections by going back to the basics. Learn how to tap into your humanity to be more intentional about finding and keeping new contacts. You’ll also learn how to effectively gather people together and become a better listener.
Main Takeaways on Making Connections:
- There’s enough vitriol in the world. Putting a little bit of act of kindness out there never hurt anyone. My company has reached so many benefits from leading with, “how can I be helpful?” so I’m sharing this from grounded reality.
- An obvious question right now is, “how are you doing during this pandemic?” and “Are there some ways I, in the world that I live in, could be supportive, or helpful?” to, “when this pandemic is over, where in the world do you want to fly to or drive to or get on a train to, and why?”
Those are two examples of ways to have a more meaningful conversation rather than, you know, asking them what they had for lunch that day. - Create commonalities among the uncommon hours, and you as the host should know at least a certain subset of the people attending, and go out of your way to help people feel safe. So if you’re a business leader, if you’re running an organization, if you’re hosting a Meetup, you’re going to have many more returns, if you make it a priority to connect and help them feel comfortable and be vulnerable yourself.
Top Q&A Questions / Resources:
- If I’m too good a listener and my problem comes from this, that people are always telling me their needs and they ignore that I have my own needs, or stories to tell people, what should I do?
- Well, my advice there is you don’t have to get it all within that first interaction. My late father was a professor and he always said leave people wanting more. These relationships are not just that first five minutes, I mean, they can be if you don’t want to pursue it. But if you’re engaging with somebody and they’re only talking about themselves, you have, you know, a couple of options. You can listen to them obviously, you can interject and say, “Oh, very interesting. Did you know that I…” in other words bridge the gap, and then make a comment, or you could graciously extricate yourself and move on to somebody who may be more engaging and may be into that reciprocity that I think is vitally important for connection making.
- I struggled with social anxiety. What can I do to overcome the fear?
- Really focus on one or two people that you want to meet, as opposed to, you know, thinking of it as like 25 people in a room. And then, have a few questions in your back pocket so that you can ask, and then just listen, so you don’t have to do all the talking. I mean that’s why, in some ways, this gather as you approach can be very comforting to people who don’t want to be doing all the talking. Because if you’re asking the questions, guess what, you get to listen twice as much as you’re speaking
- RESOURCES:
Last modified on September 23, 2021
