Last week, I wrote about the importance of building your village. TL;DR, be a good villager, and you’ll get your village. Like the wise man said, if you build it, they will come.
After publishing the piece, I had two follow-up conversations with friends which percolated in the back of my mind all week.
The first was relatively simple. Someone asked for clearer tactics on how to forge connections with people with whom they’d like to build up their village. I told them that I thought my post contained a lot of tactics and what it felt like they were actually missing was a framework for approaching relationship building. I promised to think about it and get back to them. Framework, by the by, is the sort of word ex-consultants like me drop when we don’t know how to use actual human speak.
Luckily, I didn’t have to think too hard, or confront the impact corporate America had on my vocabulary, because the second conversation provided me with said framework.
See, my second chat was with a friend of mine who is the consummate villager, connector, glad-hander, and social butterfly. He travels widely, both for his work and for his personal life, in part because he has a massive social network (read: village). And the network is always growing. Wherever he goes, he seems to find himself making new friends or at least meeting interesting people and forming deep connections in the time spent together. But he wasn’t always this way. For him, building strong relationships was a learnable skill he improved at over time.
He offered, unsolicited, his view as to why he thinks he’s so good at building relationships with people, in the form of a three-step framework. Like a lot of moments of profound realization in life, I knew instinctively what he told me was true, but had up until that moment lacked the vocabulary to describe said truth. He thinks building relationships is as simple as:
Asking questions
Listening attentively
Sharing openly
Now, like a lot of things in life, these steps are simple but not easy, so I’m going to say a little more about each of them. And look—I’m also a touch allergic to the Internet’s fascination with self-improvement listicles, like “9 Ways To Impress Your Father-in-Law” or “12 Signs Your Boss Might Be The Ghost of a Victorian Child,” but the truth is sometimes a quick list really is best for framing information.
I) Ask questions
Curiosity doesn’t get nearly enough credit as a moral virtue. How much have we accomplished as a species because someone asked themselves “why does this work the way it does” or “what could we possibly do” when confronting a problem or limitation? But just ask any girl trying to date in NYC these days—it seems like many of us have lost the art of asking others questions.
But we aren’t stuck this way. Curiosity is a learnable skill. Maybe some of us are inherently more inquisitive, but you don’t need to be Terry Gross in order to ask great questions of others. And when it comes to relationship building, the fact is we like the feeling of others taking an interest in us, and the easiest way to elicit that feeling in others is to ask them about themselves. To have a relationship, you have to know a person, and to know them you have to try to get to know them, and the way to do that is to ask lots of questions.
As for what to ask, well your fourth grade teacher had a point with who, what, when, where, and why. I’d throw in how and leave you to fill in the rest. The universe is 14 billion years old and in all that time there has never been another you, much less another version of the person you’re talking to, so find something interesting to ask the other sentient clump of star dust about. Find out what makes them tick by asking what they look forward to each day, what they’re afraid of, what they regret, or what they’re proudest of and you’ll have made a great start.
II) Listen attentively
Maybe you think this is implicit in “ask questions.” It isn’t. A lot of our time spent “listening” is really just planning the next thing that we’re going to say, or distracted by the commotion going on over our conversation partner’s shoulder. Real listening means staying in the moment and giving your full attention to what the other person is sharing with you, so that you can truly understand what they’re saying. It’s okay to take a beat and consider too, you don’t need to blurt out the first thing that comes to mind when they stop talking. Great conversations have pauses for absorption and reflection.
Plus, we can tell when people aren’t really listening to us, even sometimes just subconsciously. Usually we forgive it, after all who isn’t a little distracted these days? But that feeling of being ignored makes building strong relationships much harder. People respond when they feel attended to. Bill Clinton was famous for making people feel like they were the only person in the world when he talked to them and, in part, won a presidency off of that skill.1
Also, asking a question isn’t some binary task where, once complete, you’re off the hook. You ask the question to get the answer, and then respond to it or ask a thoughtful follow-up question. That’s what good conversation is.
III) Share openly
Asking questions and listening attentively might get you a great interview on their own, but they won’t help you build a deep relationship. To do that, you need to give as much as you take. Plenty of people are great at asking questions but clam up when it’s time to share anything about themselves. We’re all status-concerned creatures, worried about how others might judge us for our wrinkles and rough edges. Well, all those blemishes are the imperfections that give life its texture, and more often than not they provide the cement for the foundation of relationships. I’m not telling you to trauma dump to the guy one barstool over, but hey—don’t be afraid to tell him a little bit about who you are and how you got here.
And what if they don’t like what you’re selling? Well that’s okay. You can’t be everything for everyone, and you’ll fail to be anything for anyone if you try to be.
Now go on and build your village
That’s it. Easy, right?
Look, I’m not saying this will solve all of your problems. My friend’s approach is just one model for building better relationships with people, but I think it’s simple enough to be memorable and correct enough to be useful. A lot of my growth in life has come from listening to what my friends (or the authors of the books I read) have already figured out.
I should also note here that building relationships sometimes gets a bad rap, especially when it’s called networking. Well, I’m not asking you to get a college internship, and only you can decide how you use the skills. For my part, I think there’s moral value to improving your capacity to build relationships. Our best selves are typically encountered in service to others, and to truly be of service it’s often necessary to have built the types of deep relationships that ask that service of us first.
My friend—the one who has legions of villagers all over the world—didn’t start off any better than you or me. He was a shy kid who didn’t fit in well with the world around him. But instead of letting that get him down, he put himself out there again and again and again. He’s still doing it today.
The world would be a lot better of a place if more of us were like him.
Thanks for tuning in. I’ll see you Friday for the Weekend Read.
He’s famous for other stuff too, but I’ll let you Google that.
As Mr. Quinn points out, curiosity is tragically underrated. Life is boring; get curious.