It’s book club week, and we’re talking about Belonging and Connection. I thought I’d give you a teaser here, because a couple of the books on this topic have taken up residence in my imagination.
Two of the titles we’ll be reviewing, by Jon Levy and Kasley Killam, both have “the art and science of connection” in their titles. Both are about the importance of “social fitness” as a powerful determinant of health, arguing we should pay it as much attention as we would to our physical and mental fitness. Levy writes, “The fundamental element that defines the quality of our lives is the people we surround ourselves with, and the conversations we have with them.”
Not earthshattering news perhaps if you’ve been paying attention to recent writing on the loneliness epidemic, but did you realize your effect extends three degrees out? This means that your social health is affected by the people that your friends’ friends’ hang out with, and you have an influence on them too?
Both books offer practical, evidence-based ideas for improving our social health by investing in both strong and weak ties, one-on-one and in groups.
I won’t dig deeper into their content here, but I will invite you to consider the following:
How might you plot your current connections in the following matrix, remembering that in this case, even “weak” ties contribute positively to social health? Be specific, by thinking about your family members, friends, colleagues, neighbours, groups and communities.
The idea is to develop a dense pattern of multiple connections across all four quadrants.
If your grid is looking a bit sparse, why don’t you join us on Friday to find out what to do about that? We’ll cover these titles and several others, it’s free, and you don’t have to read the books. Just come!