Improving our connection with others – especially when things like social distancing and the world getting more and more physically disconnected – can be an issue.
We’re herd creatures – we’ve evolved in large groups, with different parts of the group looking after other parts.
That’s a major plus point but it’s also a problem when circumstances force us into isolation,
Whether that’s a government edict or just a by-product of our increasingly hectic modern lives where we’ve got thousands of “friends” but have rarely met any of them offline.
Improving our connection with others has two parts:
The physical connection
Our social and emotional connection
And those are inextricably linked.
Historically, they would have been very closely linked.
Venturing outside our village wasn’t unheard of but was definitely not the norm. So we’d have connections with people who we’d known all our life. We’d have learned their foibles, their strengths and weaknesses over years, maybe even decades.
Now, we expect to be able to work those kind of things out on the strength of a profile (or even just a photo with some apps) or what people publicly say online.
And we all know that public personas often have little resemblance to real life. We’ve learned to read the code inside dating apps to keep most of the extreme weirdos away from us – it’s a kind-of sixth sense.
But with other connections, things get fuzzier.
The traditional way is to make eye contact with the other person. That works really well for connections that are face to face. But is a lot less easy when the connection is just difficult. We miss the interactions and the nuances and oftentimes we really don’t connect properly with a person we’ve only ever met online.
You can get over this to an extent with a call – ideally a video call on something like Skype or Whatsapp. That at least means both of you are focusing on each other. You probably can’t see the total body language of the other person and the angle of their head might be odd if they’re (like me) not used to this type of communication. But it’s better than nothing.
Then it’s time to explore the things you’ve got in common so both of you can relate to each other more. If you grew up in a certain era, that could be radio or TV shows or major movies. If you’re a millennial that could be more difficult to do as the commonalities are a lot less with the spread of digital media. The days of most of the country watching the same shows and listening to (mostly) similar music are long gone. You might watch Game of Thrones, they might watch Stranger Things, your Spotify choices will likely be very different from theirs.
Which makes the old-style common bond form of getting to know each other more difficult.
Not impossible – you can swap play lists and watch lists and agree to catch up with each others tastes but, even with binge watching, it takes time. And there’s only so many times you can say you haven’t got round to it yet.
Work colleagues are even more difficult. You’ve got less time to get to know them, especially as working from home makes the chance of meeting them (even if they’re in the same country as you) more difficult.
You might be able to hook into similar diets or workout regimes or even just similar bits of work. You’ll need to adjust the questions you ask – without seeming like the Inquisition – so that both of you stand a chance of connecting more.
Another part of the problem is that so much of how we connect with people is on a subconscious level. That goes back partly to meeting people in real life so we can form at least a first impression about them.
Your digital first impression can be very different – hopefully not interrupting a digital debate and getting everyone else upset that you’re either a latecomer or you just don’t agree with them.
Holding back works a bit but there comes a time when you have to interact if you’re not going to be totally ignored.
If you’re open to the idea of using hypnosis (I’m biased but I think you should be!) then you can also play yourself a downloaded MP3 that will help your mind to come to terms with what it needs to do to connect better with other people.
It’s another string to your bow and you can get that hypnosis MP3 here.
Improving our connection with others has two parts:
