Today, our world holds a deep need for social transformation.
Many of us are leading or innovating broad cultural shifts for this transformation.
Our work is to build trust in our understanding and to create confidence in our listener’s knowledge so that they will align and take right action.
When we focus on ideas and emotions to inspire and to be responsive to people’s lived concerns, we begin to appeal to others by understanding their values. What specifically is important for them and how does it support what they care about? This is crucial for the relationship.
Let’s build a framework of trust to support these relationships.
Today, we are being inundated with distractions from an over-preponderance of technology in the form of devices, social media, virtual platforms, etc. What are we missing if we only rely on this for contact?
We are animals. We are a species. We are wired for connection. I don’t believe we can afford to lose this connection. Many have confessed that they are inexperienced or unskilled in human-to-human connection due to living in the virtual world almost exclusively.
With the work on Presence, we understand that the body is more critical to deliver our earnest messages. Here we begin once again to attune to our instincts and intuition. It’s here we know how to deliver the truth and to gain trust.
It is possible to step out and into a space where you increase your awareness of how we build the bonds of relationship with another person. This connection brings us into agreement because our physicality entrains with one another. It’s our deepest nature.
Most days, I ride my bicycle out to the river and sit along its banks. I watch as people pass. It hurts to witness a parent/caretaker pushing the baby stroller and talking on their phone or texting with the baby waiting and watching. What does this teach the baby? Is it that they are less important and secondary to the device? How will they learn what trustworthy is?
Or, as my friend in the UK recounted about their holiday gathering around the dinner table – that her grandson who is not even two years old fussed for about a second and immediately he was handed a tablet to soothe him.* I ask you what does this teach him? Will the future hold connection only to a device?
I hope not. Our humanness demands that we are in connection with each other and unafraid of this. The future of the planet is at stake. Keep the physical connection with each other. In our livelihoods, pay particular attention to the in-person, face-to-face interactions.
Be Present.
*You will be glad to know that my friend announced at that dinner table that there were to be no devices there ever. She’s reported to me that both her grandbabies are in their high chairs at a recent family gathering and her grandson was actually leading the conversation. And her granddaughter, pre-verbal, was speaking her own language to call attention to herself. It doesn’t get better than that. Thanks, Julie!
